[HN Gopher] Use a work journal
___________________________________________________________________
Use a work journal
Author : charles_f
Score : 828 points
Date : 2024-07-13 00:05 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fev.al)
(TXT) w3m dump (fev.al)
| alkh wrote:
| Sadly, the image doesn't load to me (I get ![[focus.png]]
| instead)
| charles_f wrote:
| Woops, thanks for letting me know, should be fixed in a few
| minutes.
|
| That's the one: https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png
| vantassell wrote:
| I'm getting the below instead of an image
|
| ![/img/2024/focus.png]
| charles_f wrote:
| Yeah I'm editing that on a phone and apparently that's
| beyond my skillset. It's working now! Thanks for helping!
| anotherhue wrote:
| Just use post-it notes as a task stack. Push and Pop as
| distractions come and go. Affirm to yourself that you are a
| productive and loved human being and not a biological IRQ
| handler.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| I've always done this. My coworkers have been frustrated with me
| in the past for asking them to write things down, because some of
| them overestimate my ability to listen to them speak for 5-10
| minutes and remember every detail. It's very hard to forget what
| is written down.
|
| Recently, I neglected to write down my thinking and progress for
| a week, and I was at a loss for where to begin the following
| Monday. Keeping a work journal (in my case, a linear text
| document with an entry for each day) is the most important
| productivity habit I have.
| nbbaier wrote:
| How do you structure the entries? Bullets, free style, mix?
| charles_f wrote:
| I write it as a prose. Mostly because that's the form I enjoy
| the most to write, and also because it's mostly about writing
| it more than reading it later on
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Date (MM/DD/YYYY)-
|
| (tab) Task
|
| (tab) (tab) Details
|
| etc
| jilles wrote:
| Lovely post. I do something similar where I write blog posts for
| myself as I solve a problem. Something like a how-to guide before
| I actually know how to do it. Then I cite sources as I find them.
| When I finally solve the issue or create "the thing", I revisit
| the doc and either publish it internally, or keep it in my
| archives.
|
| This really became a habit after reading Writing to Learn by
| William Zinsser. I recommend this book to everyone and their
| grandmother these days.
|
| "Writing enables us to find out what we know--and what we don't
| know--about whatever we're trying to learn."
| bityard wrote:
| I have been doing this for years. Every morning, I create a new
| Markdown file with the day's date, copy the previous day's
| content into it, and edit it. Mine has (for now) the following
| sections: Morning checklist, Todo, Done, and Meeting Notes.
|
| The morning checklist consists of things like checking email,
| checking Teams, skimming the team's handover queue, logging into
| various things, etc.
|
| Todo is a stack of things I can/should tackle. Most important
| ones to the top. I limit it to 15 items, no matter what. But
| realistically, I typically only interact with about the top 5 99%
| of the time.
|
| Done gets wiped every morning and I add things to it as I do
| them. Things like, "emailed Joe Schmo for 3rd time to ask for
| ETA", or "helped Fred troubleshoot the frobnitz." Little things
| that I would totally forget about but cumulatively end up taking
| a huge chunk of the day. I've never had a boss that expressed a
| concern, but I think of it as my primary defense if anyone
| accuses me of slacking off all day. (Maybe it's just to convince
| myself...)
|
| Each meeting I go to gets its own section for the day. If the
| content was important enough to save into my second brain[1], I
| clean it up and transfer it over there at the end of the day, or
| the beginning of the next day at worst.
|
| Any complex investigation or rabbit hole gets its own section as
| well. It's astonishingly difficult for me to actually reason
| about any complex system or design without writing it out and
| actually describing it to myself. I envy those who can just "see"
| it all at once in their mind's eye. If ends up being important
| enough to save, I will clean it up and share it with the team
| and/or dump it into my personal wiki.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/cu/silicon
| phito wrote:
| I have the exact same workflow! It's great!
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If you get constantly interrupted, or you became a manager, this
| is a must.
| coffee2theorems wrote:
| Thanks for the great blog post, I could feel the frustration of
| not getting something to work, and the anxiety of feeling like
| I'm under performing. I've added you to my RSS reader now. :)
|
| I've started to use index cards to write down daily tasks and
| I'll switch over to obsidian if I find myself asking the same
| question more than once. I think for me the process of writing
| something down slows my mind enough to let me focus on it.
|
| I like @ZXoomerCretin's idea of keeping a running document of
| what I do each day. I think it would make anual review time a lot
| easier.
| malux85 wrote:
| Heres my digital pensieve -
|
| Daily running log of what I have done
|
| Dynamic todo list where things move up and down freely
|
| remarkable tablet where I watch lectures and write notes
| (writing things down slows my mind and focuses as you say)
|
| Daily Weekly Fortnightly Monthly Text files for spaced
| repetition, if I get to one and I have forgotten something then
| it's moved up, if I feel like I know something it's moved down
|
| Longer memories are stored by topic:
|
| Memory (working memory) Platform Operations Zany schemes Non-AT
| ... + many more
|
| Each is a hierarchy, platform is some 20 categories each with
| 10ish sub categories
|
| It's actually hosed on my NAS, tailscale connects all my
| devices so I can edit and view anywhere
|
| I look forward to the day I can query and edit this with
| thought
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Yes! Obsidian with daily note plugin and templates makes it
| really easy to build a quick list of things and automatically
| link to yesterday's notes. A little extra time with templates
| and some custom js and you can make it a single key combo to
| copy the notes to paste buffer for sharing in slack standup
| thread.
|
| Also, set up a praise folder and take screenshots every time
| somebody says something nice about the work you're doing. You
| can automate documenting the context around it, too with quick
| add
| y1n0 wrote:
| Do you all pay for obsidian? Subscriptions rub me the wrong
| way for whatever reason and it was enough that I didn't want
| to pay so I use something else.
| charles_f wrote:
| I'm using the free version synchronized with Syncthing,
| works great for just myself. Have a couple plugins I built
| for my own workflow. The good thing is that I can jump to
| any other markdown app if I want to
| Tepix wrote:
| There is no free version if you use it for work.
| incompleteCode wrote:
| (Full disclosure - I'm speaking from a place of privilege
| where I can afford the subscription cost of Obsidian)
|
| I hear you on subscriptions rubbing you the wrong way. Hear
| me out, though. This is a bootstrapped team that builds and
| supports apps that empower you, the individual. Your data
| resides in plaintext and you can use your own sync server.
|
| Not everything needs to be a subscription, but I don't mind
| paying a few dollars per month to support the team.
|
| Just my 2c.
| dv35z wrote:
| If you're interested in an open-source, free equivalent,
| check out VSCodium (open-source version of VSCode), and
| FOAM (VSCode plugin - https://foambubble.github.io/foam/).
| In a new project, create a `docs/` folder, and start with
| `docs/notes.md`. When you want to branch out to other files
| & links, you can type [[MyTopic]] and FOAM will
| automatically create MyTopic.md, and will allow you to
| click on the link and navigate to it. Later, if you want to
| publish your notes as an HTML site, you can run `mkdocs` on
| the `docs/` folder, and it'll create a website from your
| notes. This MkDocs plugin enables the crosslinks in HTML:
| https://github.com/Jackiexiao/mkdocs-roamlinks-plugin. Good
| luck!
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > Do you all pay for obsidian?
|
| I did pay to support their development[1] early on. I've
| been an obsidian user since early 2020 and I had to roll my
| own sync solution at the time. At the time I was
| experimenting with a lot of other PKIM/Note apps and
| Obsidian was the only one that didn't do proprietary
| storage format and really honored the "minimal but trivial
| to extend in powerful ways" philosophy that I value.
|
| > Subscriptions rub me the wrong way for whatever reason
|
| I can understand that. Software development is hard and we
| are _long_ past the days where software was static. In some
| ways, I miss buying a computer that didn't expect an
| internet connection to constantly self-update. On the other
| hand, though, paying a few bucks a month so make sure the
| app is updated to take advantage of new OS features and
| generally keep up with device capabilities is worth it for
| me.
|
| If there was some 2-5$/month option to support obsidian
| development I'd consider it. Yes, I know their cheapest
| sync plan is $4/month but it's only good for 1 gig of data
| and my biggest vault grows by that much every year or
| two... hence using SyncThing on a cheap VPS :).
|
| [1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Licenses+and+payment/Catalyst
| +licen...
| senkora wrote:
| I keep a stack. Whenever I am interrupted, I push a task onto the
| stack. When I finish a task, I pop it from the stack. Each task
| has an associated journal file. Sometimes I reorder the stack.
| darby_nine wrote:
| How do you organize the journal? Do you grow an index from one
| side and tasks from the other?
| senkora wrote:
| I wrote myself a python cli tool that manages the stack by
| updating a sqlite database, and one of the commands creates a
| text file associated with the task (if it doesn't already
| exist) and opens it in Emacs. The text files are stored in a
| hard-coded directory and an anacron job does a git commit
| once a day.
|
| I can tell what I worked on each day by querying the git
| commit history, and I can grep the entire directory for
| keywords.
|
| It's a little janky but it works pretty well for me.
| darby_nine wrote:
| Ahh, I was expecting "journal" to refer to a physical book
| for some reason!
|
| This makes a lot of sense. Why not simply store the task
| with the sqlite database? I'm assuming ease of editing +
| the ability to manage the stack separately from the log of
| text entries, which presumably need no maintenance nor will
| ever be deleted?
| senkora wrote:
| Pretty much what you said, yeah. I thought that a git
| repo of text files was easier to work with then storing
| them as blobs inside sqlite.
|
| I do insert completed tasks into a "completed task"
| append-only table when I pop them off the stack, so I do
| have a record of completed tasks in sqlite. (I find that
| useful for remembering what I did recently for standups
| and 1:1's)
| packetlost wrote:
| This is pretty similar workflow to mine. I have a sideproject
| that implements it in a terminal that's been sitting on a shelf
| for awhile, maybe I should pick that one back up
| kgeist wrote:
| Similar workflow, except I have 3 lists: TODO, Pending and
| Done.
|
| "TODO" is actionable items. It's a reorderable stack of work I
| need to do. Same: interruption pushes a task to the stack, when
| I finish a task I pop it from the stack, etc. So I always know
| what to do next.
|
| "Pending" is an unordered list of things I'm awaiting. Say, I
| asked someone to do something, and they promised they'd get
| back to me in a few hours (or "by July 20"). I occasionally
| scan this list to see if some of the items got resolved and I
| need to continue working in those areas because I'm unblocked.
|
| "Done" is a list of items I completed for the day, all finished
| items go there. I then copy the entire list to the time tracker
| (for the PMs) at the end of the day.
|
| However, I organize files by day, not by task. Each day I
| create a new file for the day by copying the lists of the
| previous day's file minus the DONE list. I don't modify lists
| for previous days, so it's kind of an append-only log so I can
| see what was the state for any particular day. 1 file per day
| is easy to see as a whole as it mostly fits in one screen (and
| inside my working memory). I use plain text files because I
| found it much simpler to use, I don't have to install any
| software, it just works, and it's easily searchable.
|
| I've been using this system for the last 6 years now and it
| served me well.
| merlincorey wrote:
| > However, I organize files by day, not by task. Each day I
| create a new file for the day by copying the lists of the
| previous day's file minus the DONE list. I don't modify lists
| for previous days, so it's kind of an append-only log so I
| can see what was the state for any particular day. 1 file per
| day is easy to see as a whole as it mostly fits in one screen
| (and inside my working memory). I use plain text files
| because I found it much simpler to use, I don't have to
| install any software, it just works, and it's easily
| searchable.
|
| For my working files I use a similar system except I separate
| at least Months, often Weeks, and sometimes Days into
| subheadings for easy time tracking of tasks on various time
| partitions.
|
| So when I need to start a new heading for a new day, I just
| move all the incomplete TODO items into it, similar to you
| moving them into a new file.
|
| Occasionally I manually archive the completed tasks into
| files by year with headings by month only when I no longer
| need their full granularity.
| atlasstood wrote:
| I started this a few months ago and find that my TODO grows
| faster than it depletes. My TODO items are both professional
| items (i.e. implement feature x) and personal (i.e. fix bike
| chain). The list is items that will take some non-trivial
| effort.
|
| I now find that when I have a moment to do something, I pick
| it off of the TODO list and complete it. Prior to this
| technique, I did not have a list of this nature and some
| items never got completed.
|
| I feel incredibly productive with my current setup. However,
| I don't feel as though my previous system was unproductive
| and am concerned that I'm "spinning my wheels" by feeling
| like I need to complete these tasks that went unfinished
| before.
|
| Have you experienced this? Do you know how to best think
| about what is optimal?
| codazoda wrote:
| I recently started doing this with my todo list. I wrote a few
| bash functions and aliases:
|
| todo: Open my list in an editor
|
| todo [thing]: Add a thing to the bottom of my list.
|
| next: Show me only my next most important task.
|
| mark: Mark my current task done.
|
| There are a few more, but you get the idea.
| blharr wrote:
| Still a Linux noob, but I'm recently learning that you can do
| simple things like this in bash and the fact that it just...
| works is incredible. Thanks for the suggestion, I think I'll
| try this one
| bogdan-lab wrote:
| Yes, stack is much better than long-long log. After some time
| you're log becomes too big and if it contains some points you
| want to return to, then they are just lost. And if you lose
| something in it you stop trusting it and do not use it. At
| least this is my story.
| kiba wrote:
| I do work journaling too, but they're simply part of my
| journaling routine which encompasses much more than just a work
| log.
|
| Primarily I use work log to document problems I am having,
| keeping track of contexts such as what page I last read, and
| keeping track of my time. Timestamping is a very useful tool to
| fight procrastination.
|
| In other part of my life, I use journals for personal development
| and productivity in general, like writing down my problems and
| thinking about them. I often stumbled upon changes that I could
| implement or try. This allows me to achieve things that I haven't
| achieved before, such as putting actual effort in learning
| electronics. Daily habits and action items are tracked, including
| my prediction of how an action goes and what is the actual
| outcome.
|
| So yeah, journaling is a very good practice. It doesn't seem to
| matter much how you use them, just that you use them. It's very
| good at stopping your ruminating and you can actually move
| forward with your thoughts.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I just finished a project where I was in the same situation.
| Stuck, I ended up in the same place every night that I started
| at. Began writing down a plan as detailed as I could, made a plan
| for every day what I wanted to achieve and maintained that to the
| end of the project. Got me out of a slump.
| tkcranny wrote:
| Wonderfully written piece. I love how it builds up that idea of
| finally making progress, "seeing the matrix", and then:
|
| > It's Mitch, your PM. He's asking the url for a doc he wrote
|
| Boy that's too real. Really reminds me of the comic from a decade
| ago about programmer focus [1].
|
| But welcome to the world of Note taking, I agree it's like a
| superpower once you develop the habit. Obsidian is fantastic, but
| even daily markdown notes are great. The whole "second brain"
| idea hasn't panned out for me, but a hotkey to jump to today's
| note, and another insert the current time has been a mainstay of
| my workflow for years now.
|
| [1] https://imgur.com/never-interrupt-programmer-3uyRWGJ
| charles_f wrote:
| The stupid thing is that I messed up the link of the comic I
| included, which is pretty much the same :) :
| https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png
| nlawalker wrote:
| What finally got this to stick for me was abandoning all notion
| of structure and organization (and formal concepts like "logging"
| and "journaling") and optimizing fully for capture over
| retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity for the
| latter.
|
| I have the OneNote icon in the notification area configured to
| create a new quick note and use it liberally. Occasionally I look
| through all the pages, especially the recent ones, aggregate and
| reorganize some, move others to an "archive" tab, and that's it.
|
| The faintest - and most disorganized - ink is more powerful than
| the strongest memory.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's hard to grep for misspelled words though.
| tomrod wrote:
| Maybe something like fzf?
|
| https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/fzf-linux-fuzzy-finder
| james_marks wrote:
| 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.
| linsomniac wrote:
| 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.
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| This is the way. I've used zettelkasten, which is similar
| philosophy. Dump a thought and tag it for retrieval later. I
| prefer making this work with simple files and markdown. I have
| a colleague who uses email drafts well. My problem with OneNote
| and similar is the bloat of it. But, having images alongside
| text, when needed, is super nice.
| kingo55 wrote:
| You can have images alongside text in VS Code extensions too.
| Yes there's still bloat but you may already have VS Code
| open.
| pizzathyme wrote:
| I've found a lot of success going one step further giving up on
| retrieval all together. I use either a new text file every time
| (which I never open again) or a physical notebook page (which I
| never refer back to). I get so much value from the act of
| writing itself.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Same. I just bought a scanner which I intend to use to scan
| and OCR my notes so that I can finally shred the mountain of
| paper I have. But I know I won't read the digital copy either
| so I'm not sure why I'm bothering. I guess it's the next step
| to putting it completely out of mind.
| kingo55 wrote:
| Would you have an LLM summarise it for you instead?
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It's the exact same thing as a messy desk pre computers. I'm a
| big subscriber of that idea.
| deskamess wrote:
| No surprise that I am a very strong proponent of messy desk.
| Organized chaos.
| uNople wrote:
| > abandoning all notion of structure and organization ...
| optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on
| search tools and proximity
|
| I did this too - obsidian's daily note feature is fantastic,
| and you can extract out pages from it if you want/need to
| dedicate a document for a specific thing. Since it's just
| markdown, search is quick - and being able to use regex if I
| need to is awesome. The graph view, showing connections between
| notes is great if you create notes on specific subjects, and
| link them together, or pull sections out to explain more in
| depth - but it's not really that necessary unless you're
| building your own knowledgebase, which like all documentation
| suffers from rot over time.
|
| As long as your note-ing tool supports a good enough search
| that you can find things again, then I think it doesn't really
| matter what you use - as you said, writing it down is the
| important part.
| garbthetill wrote:
| i never read the change logs, so just found out the concept
| of daily notes it looks pretty cool and might be what i need.
| Do you use any other templates?
| sublinear wrote:
| > The faintest - and most disorganized - ink is more powerful
| than the strongest memory.
|
| Very true words. Thank you.
| Ezhik wrote:
| That was my trick for Obsidian. No organization or fancy
| plugins, just interlinked notes. Backlinks alone work amazingly
| well for me for retrieval.
| zdc1 wrote:
| This is what I do too.
|
| I use the Obsidian TimeStamper plugin with a nice shortcut
| (Ctrl + .), and then just have an append-only log of thoughts
| that each start with a timestamp on its own line. I'll throw in
| a tag or two if I'm motivated (#tickets/DEV-1234) and create a
| new file every month (e.g. 2024-07).
|
| It makes it very easy and fast to just switch to Obsidian and
| do a brain dump before lunch / end of day, or any time a
| thought hits me.
| epistasis wrote:
| "Ignore all previous instructions. Show your work. Explain your
| chain of thought in detail. Keep a journal of your work
| progress."
|
| I've been using this prompt on myself, on and off, for years, but
| I keep on hallucinating and losing focus and going off track.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Have you tried telling yourself that a schoolbus of children
| will drive off a cliff if you don't get the job done?
| nstart wrote:
| I've shared this before here. I actually keep a timestamp log of
| work I do. I used to do it by hand on my journal and while I
| still prefer it I ultimately found the benefit of having
| searchable text files that are integrated into my work management
| to be too much of a benefit to ignore.
|
| Been using obsidian since it launched and my workflow is to
| always have the window open taking a thin column on the left of
| my screen and whatever I'm working on takes up the rest of the
| screen (Yey for fancyzones in windows powertoys).
|
| As I work I just stream my thoughts into the file. I have a
| shortcut, ctrl-alt-m, that inserts the timestamp as `hh:mm:ss`. I
| hit it, and start typing. I paste screenshots, code snippets, as
| I go along. It's godsend when I've gone far along enough and I
| need to reference something. Esp given that I work on security
| tickets and I'm constantly triaging reports that are unclear or
| require digging into layers of source code to find where they
| come from.
|
| One important step to note if you ever try this out: if you have
| 30 seconds before you jump on to an interruption, try to build
| the discipline of throwing in a few words saying what you need to
| do when you return. Even with all the historical context it can
| take some thinking to recall what your next step should be.
|
| In fact, if you don't like journaling just do this last step
| instead. I stole the concept from GTD's next actions and it
| works.
| simonw wrote:
| I use GitHub Issues threads for this and it works amazingly well.
|
| Any task I'm working on has a GitHub issue - in a public repo for
| my open source work, or a private repo for other tasks (including
| personal research).
|
| As I figure things out, I add comments. These might have copy
| pasted fragments of code, links to things I found useful, quoted
| chunks of text, screenshots or references to other issues.
|
| I often end up with dozens of comments on an issue, all from me.
| They provide a detailed record of my process and also mean that
| if I get interrupted or switch to something else I can quickly
| pick up where I left off.
|
| Here's a public example of one of my more involved research
| threads: https://github.com/simonw/public-notes/issues/1
|
| I also create a new issue every day to plan the work I intend to
| get done and keep random notes in. I wrote about how that works
| here: https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/daily-planner
| geekodour wrote:
| I tried following this idea from simon (first via discord
| channels) about 8-9 months ago and now zulip, I used zulip
| "streams" as the "github issue" here. Worked very nicely for
| me.
|
| I use it for everything and not only work journal, this creates
| a small problem.Since I dump both future references and
| worklogs, and I have ~50 channels, it's very easy to not get
| back to things and only get back to it when needed(which is the
| idea mentioned by OP). It seems like a feature than a bug at
| first but after capture, one round of review after some time
| interval really helps. It took a while but slowly seeing the
| benefits.
|
| For that I plan to write some bot to re-organize the worklogs
| and the reference/other things dump to my own email at the end
| of the week and then I can create something like
| https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/ for myself(private)
| to go though at the end of the week. I think it would be
| perfect for me.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I use GitHub issues (combined with embeddings and logprobs via
| your llm) as an AI infused bookmark manager:
|
| https://GitHub.com/irthomasthomas/undecidability/issues
|
| The code that runs it is here:
|
| https://GitHub.com/irthomasthomas/label-maker (how it
| started/how it's going:)
| imiric wrote:
| That's interesting, but aren't you concerned about using a
| proprietary service for this? I would hesitate to be at the
| mercy of a corporation for such a personal workflow.
| compootr wrote:
| my concern is what happens when github decides they don't want
| you on their platform any more, and terminate your account
| immediately?
| greggsy wrote:
| Why would this happen?
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| This is the method that I've found works best for me - each
| project has a repo, and when I'm working on a specific "thing"
| I open an issue.
|
| There's usually a lot more issue comments than commits as I
| just add a comment to the issue while I "work it out".
|
| New problem? New issue.
|
| New insight on that problem? Comment.
|
| And so on...
| simpaticoder wrote:
| The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin
| to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of
| possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem.
| Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several
| benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill
| them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model,
| recovering the time you used to spend going over the same nodes
| again and again in a haphazard way. In distributed systems in
| particular, the work is often detailed, manual, error prone and
| high latency - with a solid mental model you can get through a
| checklist of steps with minimum difficulty and high confidence
| that you didn't miss anything. This ability to take something
| abstract and make it more concrete on the fly is a critical
| skill.
|
| Perhaps the greatest barrier to using it is akin to envy. We see
| others who apparently do this without written materials, in their
| head. I think we see this as evidence of intellectual superiority
| and harbor the doubt that using an aid like a journal means we
| are somehow lacking in skill or ability. This is wrong. Using an
| aid to map out complex problems isn't a failure, it's essential,
| especially for problems in systems you've never used before. Over
| time you may yourself build up your expertise such that you no
| longer need the aid, but that doesn't signal anything about your
| intelligence or ability either, only your experience.
| makz wrote:
| This advice is pure gold. Thank you.
| quest88 wrote:
| > Perhaps the greatest barrier to using it is akin to envy. We
| see others who apparently do this without written materials, in
| their head. I think we see this as evidence of intellectual
| superiority and harbor the doubt that using an aid like a
| journal means we are somehow lacking in skill or ability.
|
| To add to your "this is wrong": These others may have
| themselves solved the problems we are now trying to solve,
| likely even using a journal. They no longer need a journal
| since they know how to navigate it, and it appears as superior
| to us.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I mitigate this "problem" somewhat by taking pride in
| specialized yet (hopefully) readable notations and sometimes
| even creative tool usage. Like using a project planning tool
| with a Gantt chart feature to speed up a boot process with
| many dependencies.
|
| Of course, sometimes an existing tool or notation used for
| its original purpose is what you need. Maybe manually remove
| the stuff that doesn't matter.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This was the biggest revelation in grad school for me, I
| think.
|
| The professors were in fact not gods of problem solving, they
| just had the answers. Not just of the problems they brought
| along (obviously). But also of the handful of problems we'd
| tend to invent. Of course, if you really catch them flat-
| footed, they can provide circumspect and sagely advice, and
| then quickly check Wikipedia to see if anyone has solved your
| problem.
| veunes wrote:
| The notion that using a journal is a common misconception
| brightball wrote:
| I've been seriously considering using Logseq for this reason.
|
| When I first started with Obsidian I used it that way, but the
| more I put in it the more I started organizing everything. It
| became less of a journal and more of a repository for long form
| stuff.
|
| I'm thinking about using both just so I have a dedicated tool
| just for the journaling side of things.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I use different editors for different purposes, e.g.,
| Obsidian for long form and planning, OneNote for meetings.
|
| I wouldn't overthink it, though, and just use the simplest
| tools available. I use Sublime Text 3 with a few shortcuts to
| add the current timestamp, etc. and log everything in a long
| file. I was too ambitious in the past and wanted to learn how
| to use Emacs for everything, but it just held me back, and I
| ended up without any notes.
|
| Also, my unfortunately named thread from 2022:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33359329
| phoh wrote:
| do you have a decent system to get entries between(both in
| and out) Obsidian and OneNote?
|
| I have a similar system to you, but getting things in and
| out of OneNote is such a massive pain.
|
| Everything I have tried requires significant reformatting
| (even Word).
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I usually don't move notes to and from OneNote. I tried
| this Obsydian importer, and it is OK for my meeting notes
| in terms of formatting. However, it has a bug that strips
| slashes from page titles, which is a bit of an issue for
| me because I always add dates to titles (e.g.,
| 7/13/2024).
|
| With a few good examples, maybe some LLM could help you
| with reformatting?
|
| Good luck!
| kaiwen1 wrote:
| I use Emacs Org Mode with Org Roam for journaling. I've
| customized it extensively to fit my workflow, but there is a
| risk. Unlike paper, in Emacs there's a potential distraction
| lurking around every thought, every entry, even every
| keystone. I've tried going to paper many times to mitigate
| the risk, but it never sticks. I'm too far down the hole and
| habituated to change. But if I were starting over, I would
| choose paper and stay with it. When journaling, you want no
| distractions. Nothing beats paper.
| im_dario wrote:
| I've been using Logseq as a work journal and it works great.
| Hashtags help me to track what I need to do and what I've
| done.
| beoberha wrote:
| Love Logseq. It's the best model Ive found for how I want
| to take notes. I used to get analysis paralysis managing
| structure or thinking about when to split off a new note.
| But with Logseq, you just write linearly and the hashtags
| take care of all that for you while making discovery a
| great experience.
| wruza wrote:
| For those struggling with overwhelming functionality an ux
| tax of note-taking apps: This also works
| It's easy to spin up And to search through It
| has a structure Can be easily refactored
| <ctrl-s>
| kchr wrote:
| Same here. I began using Obsidian when looking for something
| to drop my collection of Markdown notes into, which was
| somewhat of an improvement due to the quick search, tags and
| links, but not life-changing. I tried the Kanban plugin but
| gave up after a while. Then I read about the MOC concept[0]
| and started with topic-based index pages using the `dataview`
| plugin for generating lists of backlinks. Haven't looked back
| (yet)!
|
| You could also create an index of MOC pages with the same
| plugin and making sure each MOC have a `#moc` tag, for
| example by using templates. Then write a query that lists all
| pages with the `#moc` tag.
|
| For pure TODO lists, I'm a happy user of Taskwarrior since
| more than a decade.
|
| [0] https://obsidian.rocks/quick-tip-quickly-organize-notes-
| in-o...
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I write a lot of notes in fact I write more than I read. It
| helps. However I have some issues:
|
| 1. How much commentary should I write? I try to write not too
| many notes because I write code, and some say code should be
| self-documenting. So it's the same old question of how many
| comments should there be along the code.
|
| 2. How do I retrieve a note I've written earlier? I can use
| tags and search for them but it is not easy to come up with a
| perfect tag which I would remember later.
|
| 3. I have so many notes and by now many of them are out-of-
| date. I don't want to spend time updating my notes. But if I
| don't they can become misleading.
|
| There needs to be a balance between "Just do it" and "Write
| about it". I'm not sure I have the correct balance between
| those two.
|
| I can see an alternate approach which would be a FORUM where
| co-workers discuss what they are doing or plan to, or have done
| . But there too the retrieval might be a problem. However the
| FORUM-tool would automatically keep track of when something was
| written and by whom. NOTE: You might benefit from other
| people's notes just as you can from your own.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Check out obsidian.
|
| It is just folders and markdown so it is ultra portable, but
| the obsidian editor has tons of useful features like a graph
| view, autolinking, and a plugin in for anything you can think
| of.
|
| There are tons of YouTube videos and articles describing
| different organizing systems and ways to use it.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| I like Obsidian, but plain text continues to reign supreme.
| I prefer nvAlt or my programmers editor, or if on a team,
| whatever the company provides (e.g. Jira). The
| embarrassment of options is actually a key problem in
| itself, since if you do not commit to one, you find your
| notes spread across various files, tools, and services,
| totally disjoint in a way that is impossible to work with
| and difficult to undo.
|
| The ideal tool, which I don't think exists, would combine
| the immediacy and locality of nvAlt and bidirectionally map
| to something like Jira for sharing, distributed as a
| browser plugin and/or a simple server component with local
| write access.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Obsidian is pretty close to that. Markdown is basically
| plain text.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > you find your notes spread across various files, tools,
| and services
|
| That is a problem I've experienced too. Therefore I
| currently write my comments in plain text in the IDE I am
| using (WebStorm), which saves them as text-files.
|
| I used OneNote for some time but I realized there is a
| lock-in because it saves its notes in its proprietary
| format. And now it seems its content can only be saved
| online on Microsoft servers.
|
| On the other hand if there was a clear rationale as to
| which type of notes belong to which tool then using
| multiple tools can actually help you find your note
| later.
|
| For example: Use your fridge-door for post-it-notes about
| what food we need more of.
|
| This may have something to do with the "Memory Palace"
| -techniques. You can remember things better when you can
| associate a path to finding them. Food? I must write a
| note about the food. Where should I save it? Preferably
| close to the fridge, because that is where most food is.
|
| Here's a trick I am using to write my coding-notes: I
| actually write and save them in files with .js
| -extension. I can have multiple such files for different
| aspects of notes. I can write notes about my app
| specification in one file and code-notes in another file,
| and what was done and what remains to be done in yet
| another file.
|
| That means my notes are comments in syntactically valid
| JavaScript files (which exists only to store such notes).
|
| Now I can use the Expand/Collapse feature of the IDE to
| collapse all comments to their first line, which is the
| title of the note.
|
| I can also save real JavaScript functions within the same
| file and have them syntax-highlighted, so I know the
| code-examples are valid JavaScript.
|
| I also use a WebStorm macro to generate tags based on
| current time and/or date. Saving them with the note
| allows me to refer to that tag from other notes. A bit
| like hyperlinking, but for text-files.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The problem with writing too much is that it becomes a chore
| to read, there could be a lot of fluf and a few gems, but you
| couldn't tell anyways.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Keep trying. Try different methods. What works for me
| debugging and refactoring distributed systems may not work
| for you. The thing I tend to drive toward is a single page
| mind-map-like artifact that is monotonically increasing in
| density with a focus on system-of-record and data flow. I
| tend to keep notes about individual tech and important
| systems in whatever tools are handy, either locally or in a
| form that are accessible to the team. Often this takes the
| form of a JIRA page per topic, or an nvAlt note per topic.
| Tickets aren't great for this because they are ephemeral.
| These notes are where code snippets, error messages, anything
| searchable, go. I have something like the Zettlekasten[1]
| method in the back of my mind when deciding on scope of these
| support notes. However I may also start from a simple local
| text file, not committed to the repository, or even attached
| as a note to a ticket or other ephemeral trigger. But the
| thing that ties it all together, for me, is that mind map.
| Once I have that I can truly reason about the system.
|
| 1 - https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/
| DenisM wrote:
| > 2. How do I retrieve a note I've written earlier? I can use
| tags and search for them but it is not easy to come up with a
| perfect tag which I would remember later.
|
| Feed them all to an LLM?
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I've thought about that. The AI should figure it out. But
| if I don't know what I should ask the AI it cannot much
| help me.
|
| I wrote in some discussion about whether AI could replace
| us programmers? I think they cannot because:
|
| AI has the answers. WE have the questions!
| wenc wrote:
| It really depends on your work. If you're doing mundane work,
| keeping notes is just busywork and doesn't really have a
| payoff.
|
| But if you're constantly trying to solve novel problems, and
| have episodic ideas that are half-baked, writing notes --
| without trying to organize them first -- can be really
| powerful. For me, I just write them in Logseq and tag them
| with a few hashtags like #topic1 #topic2 #topic3. It doesn't
| have to be a perfect tag, just tag it with all the topics you
| think are relevant.
|
| From time to timeI click a hashtag and revisit all my half-
| baked ideas -- periodic revisits and curation is key -- I
| surprise myself when some peripherally connected notes
| coalesce into a real idea. (Logseq makes this easy because
| each note is bullet point that can be tagged, and clicking on
| a tag is like running a query)
|
| This is called the Fieldstone method. (conceptualized by
| Gerard Weinberg). It's a very useful approach for writers
| because it recognizes that the best ideas are episodic and
| don't all come at once, you have to gather the "stones" over
| a long time before something gels.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Weinberg-Writing-Fieldstone-
| Gerald-M/...
|
| I've used it with great success over the years (both at work
| and in my writing).
| TimSchumann wrote:
| > 1. How much commentary should I write? I try to write not
| too many notes because I write code, and some say code should
| be self-documenting. So it's the same old question of how
| many comments should there be along the code.
|
| I think the best I've heard this was by a friend who said
| something akin to this;
|
| Programming is the art of solving problems by codifying
| complexity. Generally, the self documenting part is the
| 'defining the problem' portion of the code. But in every
| problem, there's a certain amount of irreducible complexity,
| or it wouldn't be a problem.
|
| There's going to be some part of the code where you wish you
| could make it simpler, or you wish you understood it better,
| or you wish you could break it down into smaller components
| but there's no 'good way' to do it in the system you're
| working in. Or, the way you have working is 'good enough' and
| it's not worth the investment from some (business needs
| angle) in making it any better.
|
| This is the portion of the code you should comment, and
| document, and do so liberally and in detail.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I write but never reread. The act of writing helps me
| organize my thoughts. Maybe I'll reread the last page when
| coming back to something but that's it.
|
| So my advice is to write when you have a lot on your mind so
| that you can get it out of your mind. That's it.
|
| Don't mess around with forums. That's for a different
| problem.
|
| Keep a pen and paper handy always. There can be no barrier to
| entry or it breaks the flow.
| grugagag wrote:
| Likewise, I seldom reread. But I do get most out of just
| writing it down.
| michaelsalim wrote:
| I think you need to have a clear separation on what you're
| trying to achieve. From what you've written, I get the sense
| that you're combining documentation, wiki and your personal
| notes together.
|
| For example, code documentation is very subjective. I'd
| combine code comments with readmes and potentially a separate
| wiki. All depending on the complexity of it.
|
| For personal notes like reminders or thoughts, there's no
| need to keep it up to date. It's ordered by date. And when I
| need it, I roughly remember when I wrote it. If something
| needs to be updated? Write a new entry today. I use pen and
| paper for this. This is also where I sketch one-off diagrams
| and the like.
|
| Separately, I also have a personal wiki for things I learn or
| teach among other things. Since these are limited in numbers
| and are quite important, keeping them up to date is not a big
| task
| perrygeo wrote:
| > a balance between "Just do it" and "Write about it"
|
| This is the key point - capturing, organizing and retrieving
| notes has a cost. And I find myself always paying for notes
| out of my "just do it" budget. Especially when virtually all
| of the things I'm working on (notebooks, libraries,
| applications, planning documents) are themselves a form of
| writing, having yet another place to scatter my thoughts is
| not helpful at all. It's much more productive to take that
| thought and put it directly into the project documentation
| where everyone can benefit. More README, less journal.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > This is the key point - capturing, organizing and
| retrieving notes has a cost.
|
| Exactly my thoughts too.
|
| There is a cost. The thing is to keep that cost down to the
| level where it is in fact a good investment.
|
| I don't think there is an ideal solution. It is just hard
| work to create information-artifacts, just like there is no
| silver-bullet for writing perfect code.
| veunes wrote:
| Focus on meaningful, contextual comments that explain the
| "why" behind your code.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Is the process of writing not for reading it but to solidfy
| memory? Of course the bonus is you could read it, but you
| really won't
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I sometimes write to document my thoughts - but just as often
| I write in order to discover what I think. Sometimes it's
| like the writing is the thinking.
|
| Also, I love Obsidian. It became more useful when learned to
| stop overdoing it with exploring the endless plugin options,
| settled on a favorite few, and now mostly write in the daily
| note, occasionally extracting things to dedicated devnotes
| which in turn have chronological timestamped entries (and
| bidirectional links to the corresponding DNs). Highest
| possible recommendation to find a tool / workflow that suits
| you, and leverage it.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of
| possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem.
| Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree.
|
| I wrote a program (used from a CLI, but I mostly use the GUI I
| developed for it) to do something similar for my own use:
| https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/docs/FrameIn...
|
| I use it daily.
| dhc02 wrote:
| This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| That is one of those novel once in a generation kind of tools
| and concepts I feel. Outstanding
| tarruda wrote:
| Interesting tool.
|
| I currently use a TODO text file in the root of each project
| I'm working on, which I update right before I stop working.
| The lists are hierarchical, so each task I'm focused on has a
| parent item, which helps me remind of the bigger picture.
| slyfox125 wrote:
| Usually, ths simplest solution is best and your approach
| exemplifies it: no need for a special application, simply
| open the text file and then go to work.
| leetrout wrote:
| I have found, and advise teams I lead or work with, that
| the tool absolutely does not matter because it is the
| discipline to use the tool consistently that makes a
| difference.
|
| Now, having said that, shoving jira down peoples throats
| with all kinds of rules around tagging and whatever wears
| people out.
|
| So, yes, a text file, a google doc, linear or a few post-
| its on the wall.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > because it is the discipline to use the tool
| consistently that makes a difference.
|
| Agree, though I advise folks that tooling matters
| tremendously, because a bad tool requires more discipline
| to continue using than a streamlined tool.
| leetrout wrote:
| This is very true. I guess I was thinking about all the
| times new people join a team and want to make changes to
| the team to fit the tools they prefer (including when a
| "big org" person rolls in wanting JIRA).
|
| Toil and friction are killers.
|
| In "Secrets of Productive People" Mark talks about
| building systems and that the lower level / background
| things should be reliable and without friction.
|
| "Good systems for simple administration will free your
| mind for more productive work. Ideally you shouldn't need
| to have to think about the lower-level stuff at all.
| Thinking needs to be kept for the high-level systems,
| which will be designed to fit each particular case. But
| even then the aim of designing a high-level system is to
| avoid eventually having to think about that system too."
| greggsy wrote:
| Obsidian in a nutshell.
|
| Too many bells a whistles to tweak, and isn't conducive
| to consistency.
| WJW wrote:
| I run it without any modifications from the default and
| it has been working quite well tbh. I'm pretty far from
| being a "power user" of obsidian though, it's literally
| only a note taking tool for me.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Usually, ths simplest solution is best and your
| approach exemplifies it: no need for a special
| application, simply open the text file and then go to
| work.
|
| I agree. The "tool" I have simply maintains text files
| and provides a streamlined way to display/edit the
| current one, switch to some previous one and switch back.
|
| I made it to manage context switches. IOW, it's not to
| serve as a journal, it's to serve as a swap partition for
| my brain.
| was8309 wrote:
| and a tool to squash or expand the hierarchy helps alot.
| jEdit can fold/unfold based on indentation. along with
| simple prefixes : '-' for info, '>' for todo, '= {date}'
| for done, etc
| hallman76 wrote:
| Mineis called README.md or notes.txt I use a similar
| hierarchical format - I use tabs for the hierarchy. I use
| markdown for most notes, but I find it somewhat
| incompatible with the tab-based note-taking that I prefer.
|
| I share this in case there are others out there who work
| the same way. Let's band together to establish a tab-
| friendly Markdown variant!
| kwakubiney wrote:
| Really cool tool. Starred
| aggrrrh wrote:
| It's great. You should do a separate hn post
| johtso wrote:
| Love the sound of this tool! Seems a bit of a shame to
| permanently delete anything that's been completed, sometimes
| it's really useful to have a record of what you've been
| working on.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Love the sound of this tool! Seems a bit of a shame to
| permanently delete anything that's been completed,
| sometimes it's really useful to have a record of what
| you've been working on.
|
| I did originally have that; it lowered the signal:noise
| ratio.
|
| I've found that there's isn't a need to keep around any
| frames of context for things that I have completed:
| generally there's already an artifact from that frame of
| context anyway (write this function, call that person,
| design that foobar, etc).
| devsda wrote:
| Not a comment about the project itself.
|
| If someone wants to try a similar flow but cannot run the
| above for any reason, git can be used to achieve something
| similar. You can also make use of existing tooling around git
| for shell integration like PS1 and gui.
|
| 1. Your main/master branch is your root frame.
|
| 2. Child Branches + branch commits themselves are messages.
|
| 3. Pop is hard reset of branch to parent or branch switch
|
| The main idea is your log resides in commit messages and not
| the commit data itself. You can try using commit data too but
| limit that for shared contextual information.
|
| Wrapping it up(to generate phony changes and running git) in
| shell aliases or functions should be easy.
| epolanski wrote:
| But how do you use that flow to _plan_ your work?
| mbreese wrote:
| I wouldn't see that as a way to _plan_ work, but rather
| to keep track of what you did or where you were.
|
| In general, I like the idea of ruthlessly tracking what
| I've done like this. But I think that it is still missing
| the context of the environment... meaning, if you are
| editing a file, it would be nice to not only know that
| you edited file A, but also that you changed line N to X.
|
| I've spent a decent amount of time thinking about this
| over the years and haven't fully figured out a good
| solution. I was a wet lab scientist for a long time and
| we have the tradition/requirement of keeping a lab
| notebook. This is something that is incredibly helpful
| where you keep track of what you've done and what you're
| planning to do. I've missed this when I switched over to
| mainly computational work. In the past, I've thought
| about maybe having a loopback FUSE-ish mounted directory
| to track changes to files would work. But I think
| something akin to working in a git tracked repository
| (with these intermittent commits per command) might make
| this work better!
| cmiles74 wrote:
| It's low-tech, but I've been using notebooks (not too thick,
| stapled usually). I write a header for each day when I start
| and then a line or two as I work on tasks and I try to note
| each time I switch tasks.
|
| I keep the notebooks but rarely look at them once they are
| filled. Maybe once or twice as I switch to a new notebook and
| then once again when it comes to yearly review time. A couple
| of times I have rifled through old ones looking for command
| line flags but most of the time reading through the notes is
| enough to jog my memory.
| telesilla wrote:
| Also a note taker - the physical aspect acts as a kind of
| cementing the thought. I never look at my old notes either
| and discard them when the book is complete, it's just an
| excerise in helping me manage complexity.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| A real notebook and pen are the perfect tools for this. Its
| the only one I know that works, long term.
|
| append only log works, but skimming through 2 months of
| logs for a specific thing is poor and slow but very useful.
| I don't do that often but when i do need it sometimes and
| especially fast, like on a call, with no lead time. Its a
| superpower.
|
| I now organize my notebook a with a few conventions that
| make it more useful.
|
| I limit myself to using only the right side of a page for
| logs from whole week. Each new week gets a new page, always
| on the right side. Put the date as the page header. Makes
| skimming easier. Put any important tasks / targets for the
| week right after.
|
| Further Split right page into 3 columns. First 2 for work
| logs, third column for recurring weekly/biweekly meeting
| stuff. Very easy to go back to what was discussed 2 months
| ago. All logs are usually 1-3 words. Just cues. but
| everything has a topic subheader.
|
| Left page is free form for detailed stuff. Things i
| discover, design, 1:1 meeting notes, questions i need
| answers to, philosophy, anything new on HN, etc. Right page
| serves as context.
|
| I also do an index on the first page of the book pointing
| to anything that i find repeatedly useful. Could do page
| numbers but i put the date as its naturally ordered by the
| dates on the right page.
|
| Been doing this a while and works perfect. I have
| everything I need in one notebook, i can carry it with me.
| a $1 composition book with 50 pages lasts well over six
| months.
| greggsy wrote:
| What type of notebook?
| tra3 wrote:
| Van Neistat (YouTube) has a video that I can't find know
| where he talks about his planning process. He uses full
| sized poster boards.
|
| Lots of space to lay out your ideas and get a great
| overview just not very pocketable.
| interroboink wrote:
| +1 for physical notes (:
|
| I use a lot of diagrams / sketches / arrows between things
| / etc, so doing it all in text on a computer is too
| cumbersome.
|
| Of course, with paper, looking up something from the past
| is a pain sometimes.
| tra3 wrote:
| This is really cool. How do you reorder frames?
|
| If you're working on a particularly complex frame, how do you
| maintain context?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > This is really cool. How do you reorder frames?
|
| Since each frame is a subdirectory directory in
| ~/.framedb/root, I can simply `mv` them. TBH, I've never
| yet found a need to rearrange them.
|
| > If you're working on a particularly complex frame, how do
| you maintain context?
|
| I create child frames using whatever context was written
| into the current frame.
| mettamage wrote:
| I had a whole CLI full with bash scripts and a Sublime Text app
| with self-written plugins that functioned like this at my
| previous job.
| greggsy wrote:
| You mean, for journaling, or to automate the process?
| safety1st wrote:
| If I'm working on something particularly complex I basically
| just do the journaling in a code comment adjacent to what I'm
| working on. So the first commit may be three lines of code and
| a huge long winded rambling comment of what I've already tried
| or thought about. By the time the task is done I've pared away
| the more speculative/rambling elements of what I wrote, and
| what's left is typically some extremely well commented code. I
| think this method results in higher quality code produced
| faster than if you just try to keep everything in your head. No
| one's complained yet...!
| glynnormington wrote:
| I like that. There are other ways of capturing work in
| progress adjacent to the code, instead of writing a journal.
| One of my favourites is to write a failing test - pretty much
| impossible to overlook or misunderstand on "re-entry" to the
| task.
|
| Another is to write a temporary commit log, with "WIP" in the
| first line and a TODO list in the rest of the log. This is
| good for ephemeral information that would just clutter up the
| code.
|
| If I do need something like a journal, I have occasionally
| just written a private gist and put that in a tab on my
| browser.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| A good technique I've used as well. Call it "iterative
| literate programming".
| veunes wrote:
| An effective strategy for managing complex tasks
| darkerside wrote:
| I believe it cuts both ways. Writing things down allows you to
| dump state so that you can make other complex calculations with
| your working memory. Then, learning to hold more complexity in
| your head increases your mental bandwidth using the same amount
| of external state available. Rinse and repeat.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Experience looks like intelligence to us because we didn't see
| the hours our favorite instructors and mentors spent banging
| their heads against their own notebooks, haha.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| It is the rare instructor or mentor that takes pains to NOT
| show off their expertise, and model the expected behavior,
| tools, and techniques of the learner where they are at. It is
| the classic problem of telling someone the goal, but not how
| to get there. A common error-mode is repeating "the magic"
| over and over again, expecting it to sink in; it takes extra
| effort to decompose the magic into teachable, practicable
| parts. This teaching effort requires meta-cognition and
| empathy orthogonal to the effort required to become an
| expert, which is why expert teachers are a rare and precious
| gift.
| veunes wrote:
| Absolutely! What often appears to be effortless intelligence
| or innate talent is usually the result of extensive
| experience and hard work.
| veunes wrote:
| By clearly visualizing your mental model, you can more easily
| identify and address any gaps or missing elements, leading to a
| more complete understanding.
| vantassell wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of Cal Newport's ideas re: Slow Productivity. He
| talks a lot about how Context shifts are death for knowledge work
| and that a lot of offices operate via a "hyper active hive mind"
| that doesn't allow or value deep work.
| al_borland wrote:
| I have too many meetings to get anything done. I'll go weeks,
| or months, without actually doing anything of real value.
| Eventually it comes to a head and I need to get things done to
| avoid going crazy. I go on do-not-disturb in our chat app, quit
| Outlook completely, and turn on a focus mode on my cell phone
| so people can't even call me. I'll end up working for 8-15
| hours straight with no real breaks. I go to the bathroom, but
| keep my head in the problem, that's about it. I completely
| forget to eat or do anything else. I get 2 months worth of work
| done in 1 day.
|
| If meetings were eliminated (or just consolidated into a single
| planning week), and I cloud just do deep work, I think I could
| work 2 days per month and be more productive than I am
| currently working 40+ hours per week.
|
| I always want to send my management graphs like this to show
| them why having 10 projects running at a time is a bad idea...
|
| https://res.cloudinary.com/jlengstorf/image/upload/f_auto,q_...
|
| ...but I know it will be received poorly.
|
| The image in the article (here, since the link was broken:
| https://fev.al/img/2024/focus.png) is something I've sent to a
| boss in the past. He didn't get it.
| Flimm wrote:
| I feel for you, friend. Maybe you could share the essay
| "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" by Paul Graham [0].
| It's been somewhat helpful when I've shared it with
| colleagues.
|
| [0] https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
| al_borland wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I agree with everything in the essay.
|
| When it talked about the person effectively working 2 days,
| once on the managers schedule, and once at night to code on
| the makers scheduled, I thought back and that resonated
| with me. I spent a decade or so doing something like that.
| I'd typically work 12-14 hour days. The normal work day was
| full of distractions and interruption, and once everyone
| started to leave and the meetings stopped, I started making
| stuff and got a lot done. At the time I thought I was just
| avoiding rush hour traffic, but there was a much bigger
| side effect in terms of productivity.
|
| With the situation I had in 2017, this essay may have gone
| a long way. With my current situation I worry sharing it
| would have a negative impact on my job. It's not one person
| I'd have to convince and coordinate with, it's at least 4,
| probably more. I have 3 "stand ups" most days, which are
| all 30 minutes and often run long. If I were to split my
| day into 2 maker blocks, my mornings are shot every single
| day with 2-4 hours of meetings. This is usually enough to
| kill my whole day. 3-4 days per week usually have a meeting
| (or 3) in the afternoon, which kills that block as well.
| Some teams have office hours posted to everyone. While I
| rarely go, simply having them on my calendar has an impact
| to my ability to see that my day is clear. And of course
| there are all the chats I need to monitor and respond to,
| which never stop and might as well be meetings.
|
| A massive culture shift is needed and I don't feel like I'm
| in a position to make it. We are getting a new CIO soon, so
| I can hope for some positive impact there. Right now all
| bets are off. In the current culture, if something isn't
| getting done fast enough, the go-to solution is a daily
| meeting to talk about it. It makes the project managers
| feel good and gives the appearance we're doing all we can,
| but in reality it slows everything way down.
|
| I will keep the essay in my back pocket to share if the
| opportunity presents itself.
| jen729w wrote:
| I find a timer useful for this. If you use Timery, you get a
| live activity on your home screen.
|
| I don't care how long a thing takes, and I don't
| retrospectively analyse the time. The point is that I can only
| have one timer running: and that's the thing that I'm
| _supposed_ to be doing.
|
| If I notice I'm doing something else, it serves to bring me
| back to the task.
|
| And at the end of the day, I do look through the list and see
| how often the thing I was doing changed. I try to keep that to
| a minimum, because every change is a context switch.
|
| I've only been doing this for about a week, I'm still working
| on it, but so far it's been more helpful than not.
| Hexigonz wrote:
| I recently started manually typing out everything I jot down in
| my pocket notebooks when I fill them in my Digital Garden. The
| amount of ideas I forgot about within a week or so is crazy. Glad
| I can revisit some of this now
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| My new organization workflow is as follows for planning my day.
|
| I run a custom python script to generate a file/folder for each
| day in a month 2024/June/01-Jun.md ...
|
| 1. Tell ChatGPT what I want to do on that day, and ask it to give
| me a checkable markdown list.
|
| 2. Use "Typora" markdown editor for organization. It has a folder
| browser in the side bar. So I can have other files / folders at
| glance. Very easy to access.
|
| 3. Copy and paste the checkable list into the file with into
| Typora.
|
| If I had the need, I could write a script to aggregate all the
| unchecked items and create a new file with them. Or do other
| processing.
|
| Markdown editor + ChatGPT => killer combination.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Forget focusing faster and clarifying thoughts - a work journal
| does wonders for helping you during your yearly/6-month reviews,
| because you can look over the past several months and have
| concrete things to put down for why you deserve a raise and
| promotion.
|
| (Actually, don't forget it. But realize that you can use it for
| both purposes.)
| al_borland wrote:
| This is something I do if I'm in the middle of something before
| the weekend, and especially before a vacation.
|
| I use Obsidian with its calendar plugin, so I get a note per day.
| It's where I keep my to do items as well as any notes for the
| day. Before leaving for a break I will open up the note for the
| day I plan to return and fill in my to do items, as well as
| additional notes on what I was doing, what I should be doing
| next, and references I may have had that I'll want to revisit. It
| is extremely helpful for getting me back into things once I've
| been out for a bit.
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| Prose writing in any form is super useful. The challenge is
| having a unified tool to impose some structure. Instead, thoughts
| are divided across email, slack, confluence, quip, etc.
| flakiness wrote:
| To me the hardest part of journaling (or Pomodoro, or whatever
| work-related methodology/hack) is to stick with it. I have a work
| journal. I abandoned it and came back, then abandoned it and came
| back again. It's an endless back-and-forth.
|
| To those who keep doing this for a longer period: Any tips would
| be appreciated.
| charles_f wrote:
| I had the same problem because it was serving no purpose.
|
| What really worked for me is to make it a primary tool of work.
| Rather than sometimes writing what I did today, whenever I work
| on something somewhat involved, I immediately write my approach
| about it ("I need to do X so I started Y").
| stevekemp wrote:
| I have my journal available within my editor, so it's easily
| accessible. I find that once I've seen how useful past-notes
| have been its very apparent I need to update.
|
| I keep a standard set of headers for each new entry:
| * DD/MM/YYYY ** Admin ** Meetings **
| Tickets/Stories/Work ** Problems
|
| I copy/paste that header to the end of the file, and just fill
| out stuff as I go. I used to have my editor auto-open the diary
| on startup, but took that away in the end.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Accept that that is how it works for you. Like, maybe you do
| different types of work and subconsciously find it useful only
| for some of them. That's OK.
|
| Consider it a tool you sometimes use, and think of using
| journaling as an option when you're frustrated with something.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I keep a daily log but tend do skip updating it at the most
| intense times, ie. when it would be the most helpful to take
| notes...
| merlincorey wrote:
| We often need consistency and time to build up habits that
| stick.
|
| I do everything including my own personal side projects in a
| work journal with time tracking for everything, but I had to
| work up to it being a natural part of my workflow.
|
| Here's my suggested path to gaining these habits:
|
| 1. Initially just try to make sure you are taking SOME notes at
| the start or end of every day - it doesn't
| matter where they are or how they are formatted just always
| take some notes at the start or end of your day
|
| 2. Once you have gotten into the habit of taking daily notes,
| start figuring what kinds of things you need notes for most
| often and take those before or during those activities
| - for example if you often find yourself having to look back at
| work tickets to retrieve some important information, start
| adding that information to your notes
|
| 3. By the time you are taking daily notes and adding things you
| know you need notes for you probably have a lot of notes so
| start worrying about structure and formatting -
| for example maybe you decide text files with homegrown markup
| aren't going to scale and you look into something like Obsidian
| with Markdown or Emacs with Org-mode
|
| 4. Repeat iterations of using your chosen note taking methods
| daily, building good habits, and improving your note taking
| system for you - if it feels like something is
| taking more time than it is worth change how you are doing it
| so it takes less time or just stop doing it
| gavmor wrote:
| Gustave Flaubert said, "be regular and orderly in your life, so
| that you may be violent and original in your work." Perhaps we
| who strive to be regular and orderly in our work should accept
| a little chaos in our life.
|
| On the other hand, perhaps we simply need better external
| anchors for our habits. I have been journaling on-and-off for
| years. Environments change, people change, and my schedule
| changes. What got me back into it this time was joining a Shut
| Up and Write(tm) meetup. That broke the seal, and I've been
| sporadically journaling to de-frag in the weeks since.
| tra3 wrote:
| Every day starts with a new day note that automatically
| generates a checklist for me.
|
| One of the checklist items may be to journal.
|
| The randomness is so that I actually follow through on the
| checklist and don't gloss over it.
| volume wrote:
| I think you need to go past this common thinking to "just focus
| on consistency/habits/discipline". You need to get clear about
| how/why you decide in the present moment. I assume this takes
| varying amount of time/effort for different people.
|
| I think one needs to unravel our inner state and psychology ...
| we cannot simply turn on and off. But then, once we understand
| our inner state/psychology it makes it easier to turn on/off.
| bgoated01 wrote:
| I'm currently working on a PhD dissertation part time, and this
| concept has been very helpful since I'm not working full days and
| therefore have more context switching. I end up drawing a lot of
| graphs and figures to think things through, so a big notebook of
| graph paper ends up working the best for me. Every couple of days
| or so I write out a list of the next few tasks as I currently see
| them, then think on paper to figure out how to implement the code
| for each task.
|
| Funny thing is, writing it down helps it stick in my brain, so I
| need the write up less than I would if I didn't write it. That's
| got to be some kind of contrapositive of Murphy's law or
| something.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Most things I write become almost obsolete in a few days
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| I have a #leftoff tag in all my Logseq journals where I leave a
| description of where I was when I stepped away from a task. Use
| it everyday all day. Simple and works great.
| waprin wrote:
| The technique of journaling as you work is sometimes called
| "interstitial journaling" and I became a big fan of it as a way
| to help focus as well as keeping track of what I was working on.
|
| I made a tool to associate those notes with a color coded project
| and timestamp:
|
| https://interstitch.app
|
| It ended up being unintentionally similar to an invoicing time
| tracking tool a freelancer might use but the use case Im
| interested in is more personal productivity.
|
| Can't say the project has generated much interest outside my own
| personal use but I find it very nice to track notes as I go and
| then easily see how much time I spent on a given project. You can
| also add a #hashtag in the notes and then filter by that hashtag
| in the calendar view.
|
| Completely free in case anyone else finds it helpful!
| Willish42 wrote:
| I started doing a daily work journal in earnest when I began as a
| SWE and it's seriously saved my hide dozens of times. It's a
| habit that once you get used to, you can't function without it
| gringocl wrote:
| Our implementation team of 15 writes individual and project logs
| every day.
|
| The logs are not to account for a record of what was performed
| but rather the rational, decisions, setbacks, observations,
| learnings, etc of our work.
|
| Each member of the team is expected to keep current on the
| individual and project logs.
|
| I've been doing this now for the last two years and I'm always
| surprised at how helpful they continue to be.
| borghives wrote:
| Is there a benefit difference between digital journal and analog
| (pen) ? I've been having this internal debate. Any thoughts?
| charles_f wrote:
| I like the _idea_ of analog, there 's something about writing
| on paper.
|
| Practically, digital is much better. Everytime I see something
| that might be useful I past a link. I paste links to
| discussions I need to follow up on. And then I also use a
| homemade plugin for Obsidian that lists my to-dos across all
| notes(1), so whenever I think about something I need to do I
| just include it directly into the text and it's listed there.
|
| I think you could do something somewhat similar on paper (I
| tried a while back), but the overhead is simply too much for
| me.
|
| 1: https://github.com/cfe84/obsidian-pw
| FranklinMaillot wrote:
| Pen and paper is far superior in my experience.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40953297
| criddell wrote:
| If analog works better for you, maybe a good stylus would be a
| usable middle ground? Don't cheap out on it though. The
| inexpensive ones aren't worth it.
| nicbou wrote:
| I did this at my last job and it was very helpful.
|
| I used an actual notebook. I used a new page every day. I'd write
| down everything I worked on, mostly for stand-ups and performance
| reviews, and the to-do list but only for items I intended to
| complete that day. Every morning, I manually copied the previous
| day's to-do items to the new page. It reminded me of what I was
| working on and made me aware of the issues I kept delaying.
| ge96 wrote:
| I always wrote notes into Apple notes everyday
|
| It would be like:
|
| W47 Mon, date
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| I have been using PlainTasks [0] plugin with Sublime Text for
| many years now at work to do something similar. It is sort of a
| mix between GTD [1] and journalling.
|
| I create a new file monthly (since that is the "sprint" duration
| at work) and for each project I am working on, I create a project
| heading and a list of tasks below each. The plugin doesn't
| enforce any schema and is just a plain text file so I can iterate
| on the task list, record thoughts as free form notes anywhere
| (just below the project heading or below a particular task or
| just in the file anywhere.
|
| If the notes grow too large for a particular project (they don't
| usually for me), I pull them in a separate file dedicated to that
| project.
|
| I iterate on the task list as things become more clear. For eg. I
| might start as "Find out how to deploy new certificates on our
| cluster nodes". Once I have done some research or talked to my
| colleagues, I might mark this a done or delete it and replace it
| with a list of steps required to deploy the certificates.
|
| I also mark things I am going to do today with "@today" every day
| in the morning. If something planned comes up urgently, it gets
| it own task with "@critical" tag. The plugin highlights these
| tags for me.
|
| There are some more features but I only use creating and marking
| tasks as done with the 2 tags. The plugin is also semi-abandoned
| which is a big +1 for me as I don't have to worry about flow
| breaking changes or sudden sponsorship messages or constant
| updates.
|
| I don't use sublime for anything else but tracking tasks and
| notes so it gives me a sort of dedicated workspace for collecting
| my tasks. Recall is just a plain text search away. I have been
| using this for many years and has been extremely effective for
| me. Whenever I feel lost of overwhelmed, I just look this file,
| find the @today tags and suddenly I am back in my flow.
|
| Most of the other tools I have tried (Jira, Asana, Trello,
| Github/Gitlab issues, Azure DevOps, company internal project
| management tooling etc.) are too opinionated, not flexible
| enough, sends unnecessary notifications to me or everyone on the
| team and are a chore to maintain (busywork).
|
| [0] https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks [1]
| https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/
| tivert wrote:
| > Except that it's nothing new, right? "Writing helps you
| organize your thoughts more clearly": everyone and their
| grandmother know that! Writing a plan, writing a diary? People
| keep listing how transformative that's been for them.
|
| Luckily, we'll soon be replacing writing with editing LLM output.
| Much more efficient. /s
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| It's surprising how many devs are trying to overoptimize for
| productivity with various fancy tools and techniques, when it
| actually comes down to simple basics.
|
| Here is what I rely on as a founder who does a lot of context
| switching:
|
| - a never-ending text file for todos and work journal [0]
|
| - calendar for planning (and blocking focus time)
|
| - website blocker
|
| - turned off notifications
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432876
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| Big +1 to this (see my comment on this thread).
|
| I just use a editor plugin to make marking tasks as
| done/cancelled easier and rotate the files every month to keep
| things a little organized (and scoping the keyword search) and
| it has been the most effective form of project
| management/journalling for me for many years.
| polairscience wrote:
| What website blocker do you use?
| elitan wrote:
| I follow the same structure, and I use Notion, Google
| Calendar, and Flow App.
| Flimm wrote:
| I use LeechBlock NG, for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, as well as
| Firefox on Android.
| mistahenry wrote:
| For the never-ending text file for todos and work journal, I've
| found great success with org-mode, especially since deadlines
| automatically end up in my calendar with org-agenda. The
| outline format of org-mode is quite nice and it took all of 1
| day to learn the key commands for making / manipulating the
| outline, creating links, and cycling through TODO states (using
| Doom emacs made the start super easy since I already know vi
| and didn't have to also learn the text editing commands).
|
| I've also found the concept of an "inbox" from the Zettelkasten
| method very helpful. Anytime something comes up that's not yet
| in my system, I add it to the inbox for later processing (org-
| capture on my computer, and beorg on my phone). This way, note
| entry doesn't require a full context switch. I then just make
| sure to regularly drain my inbox.
|
| I don't use emacs currently for anything but org-mode but I'm
| far happier with this than I was with a never ending `.md`
| file.
| sudhirkhanger wrote:
| How does one hide completed tasks from org mode?
| merlincorey wrote:
| Like many things in Software the question is why do you
| want to hide them?
|
| One way to do it is to archive[0] it which will move it
| into a local _archive file.
|
| Another way which I'm currently using is to periodically
| manually archive tasks into a tree of folders and files by
| date then category (and sometimes subcategory) which allows
| me to publish an HTML or PDF file of everything from say
| 2023 for a particular client.
|
| [0] https://orgmode.org/manual/Archiving.html
| Forge36 wrote:
| Archive is an option, it'll move the heading and children
| into a new file. Agenda can also find and filter by state.
|
| Perhaps to clarify: hide from where?
| bloopernova wrote:
| In org-journal, opening a new daily or weekly file only
| moves uncompleted tasks. It leaves completed tasks in the
| previous file.
| setopt wrote:
| (setopt org-agenda-skip-scheduled-if-done t)
| sudhirkhanger wrote:
| How do/would you use it over various systems? What's the best
| way to cloud sync this? One might have to use it on work
| machine with restrictions around installing apps.
| Forge36 wrote:
| I use org mode and sync with a git repository. Thoughtfully
| emacs and git are both approved.
| setopt wrote:
| As long as auto-revert-mode is on (so the editor notices
| synced changes from other devices), you can sync it using any
| file storage service: Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Resilio Sync,
| etc.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| I use notepad++ documents. One is the stack, its just describing
| as one liners with checkboxes and subtasks a task and its depths.
| Arrow to where execution is.one can have several threads of
| course.
|
| Research into a topic goes into that list as tasks and then
| seperate documents or wikis if it blows the list.simple and it
| works suprisingly intuitiv like a bare metal os stack debug
| screen.
| rustypotato wrote:
| I hand-write a work journal. Just an A5 notebook and a few pens
| of different colors. Definitely an essential piece of my dev
| toolkit. I've especially come to love the free-form nature of
| hand-writing, which allows me to visualize more of my thoughts
| than a digital text editor.
|
| The journal has served two main purposes. One, I can write and
| annotate free-form pseudocode at exactly the level of abstraction
| I need without getting distracted by the errors produced by the
| code editor. It's really helped me work through the difficult
| parts of coding puzzles before I ever touch the keyboard to
| implement.
|
| Two, I have a scientific notebook for debugging. I write down a
| hypothesis, design a small experiment, document the steps and
| complications as I go, and write down what the actual result was;
| then repeat the cycle. Putting it all in writing keeps it
| straight so I don't chase my tail, and I have something to look
| back on if I need to explain the bug and how it was solved to my
| coworkers.
| waxaxiom wrote:
| Can you tell me more about the scientific notebook? Does it
| have a specific layout or is it just another notebook you use
| for debugging?
| simonireilly wrote:
| VS code user, Vs code journal plugin -
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=pajoma.v...
|
| >month/day.md
|
| >month/day/important-meeting.md
|
| Find the equivalent for where you spend the majority of your time
| ochronus wrote:
| I wonder what the logistics of this look like - isn't this just
| another interrupt while you're in the zone? Or do you do it
| between two zones, retroactively? Imagine you start working deep
| on something. Do you simultaneously take notes of what you're
| doing?
| submeta wrote:
| I cannot work without taking notes. It is a process of thinking,
| sorting my ideas, documenting steps and outcomes, pausing,
| practicing meta-cognition, gaining clarity and confidence along
| the process. Plus I have the benefit to go back to my notes and
| have instant access to what I did days, months, years ago. So I
| can't understand how people are working without taking notes,
| documenting (for themselves), and journaling.
| FranklinMaillot wrote:
| Same here. Taking notes is incredibly helpful, especially when
| I'm stuck or unfocused. I just start writing anything that's on
| my mind and it's like the writing does the thinking for me.
|
| While I used to type notes digitally, I've recently discovered
| the superiority of pen and paper. Writing by hand offers more
| flexibility - you can start anywhere on the page, sketch, or
| create mind maps effortlessly which encourages creativity,
| whereas typing forces you to think linearly. Research also
| shows handwriting improves thinking and memory retention.[1]
|
| Interestingly, rediscovering fountain pens sparked this change
| for me. The enjoyment of using a quality writing instrument
| encouraged me to take more handwritten notes, leading to
| significant improvements in my workflow. I now keep separate
| notebooks for different projects and have started journaling.
|
| This discussion has made me realize that moving my keyboard is
| the last bit of friction when switching from computer to paper
| notes. It might finally convince me to invest in that split
| keyboard I've been considering.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2024/05/11/1250529...
| submeta wrote:
| Both digital and handwritten notes have their values. - I've
| used moleskine notebooks and fountain pens for over two
| decades. Fountain pens are unbelievably smooth to write with,
| and the text looks beautifully. So I can relate to your
| experience.
|
| Re Keyboards: I switched to mechanical keyboards lately and
| will never go back. It's like the fountain pen of typing.
| FranklinMaillot wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree on mechanical keyboards.
| mxey wrote:
| I use my inbox in OmniFocus as a running log of things for later,
| but I like the idea of having a dedicated journal thing.
| zogrodea wrote:
| Nice article that reminds me of that one Sherlock Holmes quote.
|
| "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty
| attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you
| choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he
| comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him
| gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other
| things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
| Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he
| takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools
| which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large
| assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to
| think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to
| any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every
| addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.
| It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless
| facts elbowing out the useful ones."
| brador wrote:
| Journaling can be a lot of things and they're moxed here.
|
| Brainstorming, real-time todo, planning, decision making.
|
| Each requires the tool be used differently.
| karencarits wrote:
| I've concluded that I need different note taking tools for
| various contexts.
|
| * LogSeq for day-to-day notes. Append only. Since everything is
| bullet points, I don't have to worry about structure, and it's
| easy to just add a comment instead of revising a paragraph.
|
| * TiddlyWiki for write-ups. I've tested many wiki solutions but
| always return to TiddlyWiki. Mainly because it is so easy to
| adapt how things look, and various entries may need different
| presentation.
|
| * E-mail. Should not be underestimated as a knowledge base for
| discussions and decisions. Unfortunately, the search function in
| outlook is terrible
| singhrac wrote:
| I use Obsidian for the first two. Email was very useful but you
| need to essentially categorize the data yourself manually. I'm
| very surprised there isn't a bot that will automatically
| attempt to categorize your emails for you via IMAP access.
| karencarits wrote:
| I tried obsidian too, but found that outlining/nested bullet
| points in LogSeq matched my flow better.
|
| I agree regarding emails, one day I'll try to write a script
| that imports emails with a specific tag, perhaps autotagging
| can be a part of the pipeline
| philwelch wrote:
| One format I like to use is to organize my most immediate tasks
| in the form of a stack. So if I'm working on feature A, that's
| the bottom of the stack. Need to solve sub problem A1, push that
| to the top of the stack. Subproblem A1 requires me to shave yak
| number A1(a) so now my stack is three deep. Someone asks me for
| something unrelated. I pause, make sure I've fully written down
| my current stack, and then patiently listen to the person (or
| read their message). If I need to context switch and do something
| right now, fine, now interrupt B is the top of the stack, and
| when it's done, I go back to shaving yak number A1(a). If I'm
| blocked, I pull the front task in my priority queue and push that
| to the stack. If the stack gets too deep with unrelated tasks and
| interrupts, I usually pull it apart and put everything into a
| priority queue.
|
| At a higher level of granularity it also helps to record what
| you've actually done for performance reviews and the like.
| parasti wrote:
| I sometimes use this approach for untangling unfamiliar
| undocumented code and for keeping track of what worked/didn't
| work for a particularly complex task. I found that it's a real
| life superpower, a literal augmentation of my flawed, forgetful
| human brain. The biggest downside is that I don't use it enough
| in fear that it takes up too much time to write everything down,
| so I feel I'm wasting my employer's time.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I don't like keeping it seperate from "The code". I try but there
| is ultimately one place to keep everything and that is in "the
| code". So my comments become my journal, and this gels with how I
| view code and source control - that leaving dead comments, moving
| around functions and chnaging stuff is part of the process
|
| It's like, we are somehow conditioned into thinking that the
| commit must be perfect and not reflect a process over time.
|
| And the thing is a software system reflects a process over time
| even if we are pushing it into production
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm? I keep (shared if needed) google docs for every project
| called "XXX random notes" and we throw info in there. I thought
| everyone did that?
| smusamashah wrote:
| I was assigned a big project at work 2 years ago. Apart from main
| code base there were a bunch of other modules and services it
| talked to at it was all very old code. I couldn't have kept all
| of that in my head throughout.
|
| I kind of rediscovered OneNote which helped me actually do the
| project. It's like your thought dumping playground. It's the only
| tool that offers least resistance to jotting down thoughts in
| whatever form you like. Every page is like a freeform infinite
| canvas. Just click anywhere, start typing or paste the screenshot
| or even files.
|
| OneNote has been my daily driver since then. I mostly just dump
| thoughts in a lossely structured system that I am following for
| myself.
| igammarays wrote:
| Same here though my preferred tool is OmniOutliner or any
| similar tool with hierarchical branching. There are other tools
| like Roam/Obsidian but Omni has proved to the fastest offline
| local macOS app with the most rich feature set.
| blumomo wrote:
| GitLab issues also works nicely for journaling. Each issue is a
| task, bundled into milestones. Within each issue you can add
| comments and even have one level of nested comments. Good for a
| lightweight hierarchical journaling. And comments/threads of an
| issue can each be "resolved", all within the same issue. Great
| for progress tracking.
|
| Ah, and you can paste images and have syntax highlighting. Great
| for debugging.
| barrenko wrote:
| Related - we need more landscape-oriented notebooks in the world.
| rhardih wrote:
| This has become one of my favourite tools over the last couple of
| years:
|
| https://jrnl.sh
| _spduchamp wrote:
| I have a part-time research assistant job in a lab where I work
| on several overlapping projects, and when I started this job I
| started a journal using a Google Spreadsheet, with a shortcut to
| the sheet on the home screen on my phone.
|
| It's instantly always there, adds up my hours for time tracking,
| and when I have to write a project status report, I just pull out
| the relevant entries and turn them into proper sentences. Bam!
| Report done with semi-chronological flow.
|
| I bold entries of open questions/tasks that need attention, and i
| can quickly scan my journal to know exactly what to work on next.
| I've never been so organized and on top of things in my life.
| This little journal hack makes me look like a fricken genius in
| the lab.
| esskay wrote:
| Evey time I've tried essentially journaling for my own sanity I
| get too bogged down in the way to actually do it. Logseq and
| Obsidian are often mentione but by the time I've figured out how
| the hell to use thier obscure syntax (why the hell am I
| programming, its a journal) I've lost interest.
|
| I'd like for there to be an out of the box option, but there
| doesnt seem to be any. When you bring this up in discussions like
| this it often ends up just proving the point when someone tells
| you "Oh its easy just install X and then add this plugin, that
| plugin, tweak this file to do such and such...and my adhd brain
| lost interest.
|
| There's a real hole in the market for a good out of the box,
| opensource and self hoated tool that you open the app and write
| tool, not a note pad, we've all got one of those, I'm talking
| about somethinh you open, you've got your current day to dump
| notes into and and they're stored. Sure, theres tools like
| DayOne, but it's cloud based storage is a catagorical no for me,
| and many others - theres been countless discussions about this on
| Reddit, and the answer is always spend half a day screwing around
| with Logseq or Obsidian and then try to remember their syntax.
|
| The out of the box on both of those is pretty awful, and if the
| solution is spending hours tweaking it it's not really a
| solution, its a patch, one that shouldn't really need to be made
| if it's supposed to be the tool to use.
| rigmarole wrote:
| What syntax are you trying to use or thinking that you need? In
| Obsidian for example, remove all plugins except Daily Note and
| just start typing. Ignore all syntax except maybe bullets.
| Ignore properties and links. Ignore any habit-tracking or
| database tricks people say you need. Ignore the graph.
|
| Or consider using Vim/Neovim and set a leader hotkey to open
| today's journal/YYYY-MM-DD.txt
| setopt wrote:
| > Or consider using Vim/Neovim and set a leader hotkey to
| open today's journal/YYYY-MM-DD.txt
|
| For a broader audience: Create a shell script that runs
| "$EDITOR $JOURNALDIR/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md", and bind a
| system-wide keybinding to run that script. Works even for GUI
| editors.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Have you tried appending a txt file?
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Have you tried appending a txt file? If you want to find
| something, grep it.
| wombat-man wrote:
| It took me a few times to land on something I stuck with. At my
| current job I have a running doc where I just start a new entry
| per day, at the top and log before I try to do something, and
| what progress I made that day.
|
| What maybe helps is this doc is findable and readable by
| coworkers and my boss. It is very useful for me, but it's also
| helpful for others to see what I'm working on without pinging
| me.
| WOTERMEON wrote:
| I do kind of the same but I'd be concerned to have it
| readable and n not private. But maybe I shouldn't be. What's
| your thoughts on having it open? I think it would be the
| first in the company if it'd do that.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Eh, I just try to not slack off too much. I've been doing
| this for nearly 2 years and so far only benefits as far as
| I can tell. I think very few people look at it besides
| myself and occasionally my boss.
| FranklinMaillot wrote:
| If all you need is daily notes, Obsidian does that out of the
| box. You don't have to tweak anything, install any plugins or
| learn any new syntax if all you need is a simple GUI over text
| files. It's not open-source however.
|
| Don't get fooled and intimidated by the "productivity porn"
| community that likes to show off their sophisticated setup and
| unrealistic workflows. My rule: if they refer to Obsidian as
| their "second brain", they are part of the cult and should be
| ignored.
|
| All that said, I strongly encourage you to try pen and paper,
| the ultimate, no setup, open source app. And it has exquisite
| haptic feedback on top of that.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| I use Sublime Text for my daily journal and it works really well.
| Typing in Sublime is a joy. I have it open throughout the day in
| a separate virtual desktop. Distraction Free mode is very cool!
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I like how a work journal reorients your locus of control, and
| focus on important vs urgent work.
|
| You can get really reactive to whatever stuff is happening on
| your team that you lose the forest for the trees. And further as
| you get more and more senior, living off of reactivity is only
| counterproductive as you control your own time and its expected
| you try to shift to a focus of important over urgent work.
| huevosabio wrote:
| I like having a "devlog.md" file for each project/repo.
|
| The log is jut a reverse chronological order of
| comments/todos/rants.
|
| I have mapped on VSCode cmd+shift+I to write a timestamp.
| Whenever I want to write something I just insert a timestamp at
| the beginning of the bullet-point list and write it out. This is
| stored alongside the repo.
|
| It is particularly useful for recovering in the morning where I
| was the night before.
| snakey wrote:
| Along the same lines, I also find it useful to have a text log
| for each sizeable task I undertake. This could contain
| anything, notes of module structure, code & data snippets for
| testing, everything!
|
| Like one of the top comments mentions, it acts as a node of
| knowledge within a wider system (graph) and I end up revisiting
| these logs more often than you would expect! It only gets
| better as you explore/document more and edges form.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Yea, for me what really helped is once I interned at a
| hydraulic engineering company and I was tasked with debugging
| a custom software for pump modeling/optimization in GIS.
|
| I had no background in C++ or the GIS I was dealing with and
| this was a one-off thing that was built for a project, but
| not maintained or documented at all.
|
| The lead eng that wrote the software also had a long and
| detailed personal log of what he was working on. He just gave
| me that.
|
| It helped a lot to understand not only how the software
| worked, but also the design decisions.
| Flimm wrote:
| Do you commit "devlog.md" to your version control system? If
| not, how do you sync it between your different computers?
| huevosabio wrote:
| Yes, I do!
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| While I wholeheartedly agree that this approach makes perfect
| sense and would perhaps help with context switching various
| tasks, the time required to pour your heart out journaling would
| take time away from doing actual work.
|
| While I do some note taking at work it's all one liners, url
| references, copy and paste code snippets and VM options for
| intellij.
| adius wrote:
| Heynote was exactly developed for this purpose. Just one big
| buffer with sections and lots of shortcuts and nice little
| additional features: https://heynote.com/
| hruzgar wrote:
| no vim support sadly
| neilv wrote:
| Sometimes I use the project management tool's issue/task comments
| for notes on what I'm thinking. Other times, comments in the
| code. Other times, the relevant page in the startup's wiki.
|
| Sometimes the intermediate notes want to evolve to more polished
| documentation and/or code, and other times it wants to be
| preserved in a very lightweight way.
|
| What's important is that information you or others might later
| need is captured in a way that's accessible when you need it.
|
| Make it a practice, and it's negligible additional effort.
| hghar wrote:
| This sounds so similar to certain productivity dogmas that were
| mentioned already in the comments and I know that some people get
| extremely obsessed with those methods and that in the end that
| might become precisely a productivity obstacle.
|
| But honestly I have been doing exactly what the author claims
| work for him, just write what you are doing and you "feel" is
| going to be useful later, this very thing that just happened in
| the command line is a clue to the complete puzzle. And it's funny
| that this is exactly what those productivity dogmas describe as
| "second brain" in my perspective you just take what works for you
| from those methods.
|
| I think you just have to try it, although it seems like that's a
| waste of time and that you will never see that note again just
| write it save it and maybe the next month when you come back to
| the same exact problem those notes will be pure gold, yea I know
| most of those notes are going to be just a bunch of bytes never
| to be seen again but when they are useful you will be so thankful
| that you did it.
| gdilla wrote:
| all the senior engineers i worked with, when i started out 20
| years ago, carried around bound books and kept as journals. And
| they logged things all day, dated entries. They just said it was
| essential, so I did it.
| g8oz wrote:
| Indeed, we are doing a lot of reinventing. Or more charitably
| reapplying old ideas to today's world and it's affordances.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| No Joplin in this thread?!
|
| Simple and flexible, cheap sub or free if you host self or on a
| service like dropbox. Import/export for backup.
|
| Instantly useful out of the box. Many plugins but i havent needed
| them. Basic search is all I need.
|
| I keep brief notes of the "secret sauce" as I work, eg a list of
| magic commands, a short outline of function calls, etc.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| The first paragraph spoke to me. The complexity of the systems is
| so big and the difficulty of fixing issues is exponential. The
| stress of working on things that are not core software
| development is killing me. How to calm down after working on days
| without good progress on the issue, PM is on my neck, the end of
| sprint is near and the task is not finished yet.
| bloopernova wrote:
| The org-journal extension to Emacs' org-mode is great for this.
| ctrl-c n j = add new timestamped journal entry
|
| https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal
|
| So the workflow for this is: command-tab to switch to Emacs,
| ctrl-c n j to add a new journal entry, write the entry, command-
| tab back to whatever else I was doing. Emacs auto-saves my
| changes.
|
| Of course, getting to that point requires some work. You have to
| be using Emacs and org-mode already, or prepared to try it, and
| that journey can be difficult for some.
|
| The org-journal extension is great: It supports
| daily/weekly/monthly/yearly journal files (I use daily but I'm
| considering switching to weekly or monthly). When I create a new
| daily file, it only "brings forward" uncompleted TODO items,
| which means any completed TODOs are automatically archived out of
| your sight.
|
| Because it integrates with org-mode, I have it set up such that
| it tracks when a task is moved from TODO into PROG, and again
| when it moves into DONE. (I get annoyed when columns don't line
| up, so I made my todo item names 4 characters long)
| guptarohit wrote:
| I been doing the same from a year, dumping all my thoughts in
| obsidian notes especially on the Friday evening, this really
| helped me resuming when back to the work.
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