Keeping a diary is pivotal to how I work. I used to write things down in notebooks, but you can't grep dead trees, especially handwritten ones. So I keep a simple flat text file with a new timestamp every day, and nearly everything I do makes it into this file, at some level. I can answer all kinds of questions, from when someone joined or left a team, to how I installed that driver last year, to which servers I installed three years ago and the problems I encountered configuring them. Pretty much anything unusual, or middlin' difficult, or just thoughts on engineering problems. It's candid, I swear and call things as I see them. These notes are an extension of my brain.

I start the day with:

    % note (which just runs Emacs on my notesfile)

and

    M-x new-day

which just appends the current date to the file and positions the cursor, all ready for typing. Dirt simple.

I used to have macros and whatnot for carrying forward lists of TODO items and important tasks, but that was overkill and keeping things simple seems to be the key to success. Likewise, apps like OneNote and so forth just got in the way and wanted to own a piece of me.