3 ms·

It took me a couple years to realize this too. For the past five years I abandoned all structure. I use a literal log file. Chronological from top to bottom, wi

It took me a couple years to realize this too. For the past five years I abandoned all structure. I use a literal log file. Chronological from top to bottom, with paragraph breaks for each workday. Higher than necessary verbosity, no points taken away for spelling or grammar mistakes.

thfuran 2y ago
It's hard to grep for misspelled words though.
- tomrod 2y ago
  Maybe something like fzf? https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder
james_marks 2y ago
I basically do this, too. One big text file. My twist that makes it work for me is a slightly modified text editor that I only use to edit this file. That way I’ve got a dedicated dock icon and context just for writing notes, but no other overhead. It’s important to me that it not feel like a product, and search works effortlessly (although subject to typo misses). My only tweak on the text editor is a shortcut to insert a timestamp and a chunk of new lines, which I do periodically so I can separate moments in time and see what I was working on when, how I fixed something, etc. I used obsidian for a while, but for my purposes it felt like work to organize and get “right”. I ended up writing a script to join all the files into one.
- eagleseye 2y ago
  What editor did you modify?
  - james_marks 2y ago
    https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto Looks like you can download from the App Store now, too. It’s dead simple and I’ve never found a bug in 6 years of daily use. It’s pretty awesome and shows a lot of restraint and skill on the author’s part.
linsomniac 2y ago
I've also been doing this for ~30 years. My current job's journal is 17,581 lines long. It's just a file I edit in screen (so I can attach to it from multiple machines) with a line with the date on it and then a sentence for every thing I've done that day. It is super helpful when we notice something strange has been going on since a specific date. I give my coworkers access to it and we will regularly refer back to it to try to figure out what was going on on a particular date. I also use it monthly to summarize for my 1:1 meeting with my boss. I also have a Kindle Scribe e-notebook that I use for my daily todo list. The writing experience with the Kindle is very good, in that it's very paper like, but the access and retrieval is pretty meh. I described it to my coworkers as: It's exactly like paper, only more expensive. I'm basically doing bullet journaling of my tasks, things I need to circle back with coworkers about, and stuff to chat about over lunch or shows people have recommended.
xypage 2y ago
I use something like this too, I will say it's helpful to have some simple command to append text to it so you can do it automatically, and then an extra little bit so if it's your first append of the day it adds the date. Sometimes I know something happened on a date and if you're just using paragraph breaks to separate it's harder to find but if you know it was related to this meeting on that date a few months ago you can go straight to it.

thfuran 2y ago

It's hard to grep for misspelled words though.

tomrod 2y ago
Maybe something like fzf? https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder

james_marks 2y ago

I basically do this, too. One big text file. My twist that makes it work for me is a slightly modified text editor that I only use to edit this file. That way I’ve got a dedicated dock icon and context just for writing notes, but no other overhead. It’s important to me that it not feel like a product, and search works effortlessly (although subject to typo misses). My only tweak on the text editor is a shortcut to insert a timestamp and a chunk of new lines, which I do periodically so I can separate moments in time and see what I was working on when, how I fixed something, etc. I used obsidian for a while, but for my purposes it felt like work to organize and get “right”. I ended up writing a script to join all the files into one.

eagleseye 2y ago
What editor did you modify?
- james_marks 2y ago
  https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto https://github.com/brunophilipe/Noto Looks like you can download from the App Store now, too. It’s dead simple and I’ve never found a bug in 6 years of daily use. It’s pretty awesome and shows a lot of restraint and skill on the author’s part.

linsomniac 2y ago

I've also been doing this for ~30 years. My current job's journal is 17,581 lines long. It's just a file I edit in screen (so I can attach to it from multiple machines) with a line with the date on it and then a sentence for every thing I've done that day. It is super helpful when we notice something strange has been going on since a specific date. I give my coworkers access to it and we will regularly refer back to it to try to figure out what was going on on a particular date. I also use it monthly to summarize for my 1:1 meeting with my boss. I also have a Kindle Scribe e-notebook that I use for my daily todo list. The writing experience with the Kindle is very good, in that it's very paper like, but the access and retrieval is pretty meh. I described it to my coworkers as: It's exactly like paper, only more expensive. I'm basically doing bullet journaling of my tasks, things I need to circle back with coworkers about, and stuff to chat about over lunch or shows people have recommended.

xypage 2y ago

I use something like this too, I will say it's helpful to have some simple command to append text to it so you can do it automatically, and then an extra little bit so if it's your first append of the day it adds the date. Sometimes I know something happened on a date and if you're just using paragraph breaks to separate it's harder to find but if you know it was related to this meeting on that date a few months ago you can go straight to it.