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Comment by jayliew | Hacker News Reader

moconnor: did you keep a journal while you were building this app?

I'm thinking to myself as I am reading this that there's no way you could have gotten from A-Z, then only after that started filling in the blanks accurately about what you did on day #X. (Heck, I can't remember what I ate yesterday!)

Motivational, good stuff, thanks for sharing.

Now I'm thinking of an app for HN'ers who just need a little help getting something like this off the ground: An app that lets you chronicle every day a short paragraph of what you did to move the ball forward.

Plus, there will be a nagging^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeer-accountability feature built-in. Your progress is public and other HN'ers can "tap" you on the shoulder if there's a lack of progress and say "what's up with this?"

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I didn't keep a journal, but after a couple of weeks when I decided to write this post I jotted down what I'd done when. The filesystem helped with a lot of dates (creation, last modification and so on). Going to England in the middle was a good, specific memory aid too - it's easier to remember what I was doing and thinking in an unusual place.

I love your appjournal idea!

Personally, I keep a timesheet on when I started and finished working on something, for instance

Tue 19/10/2010 | 15:40:00 | 17:10:06 | 1:30:06 | Looking at admin interface for sensor daetails. Trying to fix None issue, seems to be related to subclassed models. Adding code to twisted for CT settings

Turns out that one of my Django models is breaking the Django admin interface, and also that I have to have calibration details for the Current Transformer sensors we use (http://gridspy.co.nz)

Another one

18/10/2010 | 8:50:00 | 9:56:36 | 1:06:36 | Server maintaince, removed orbited, checked memory usage. Killed backup scripts, installed python 2.7

Naturally it is all in an Excel spreadsheet. :)

Do you find that it helps? The closest thing I got that looks like what you got above there are my git log messages!

Seconded. Using distributed RCS, you commit often and therefore have a pretty good log of your daily activities.

I don't commit anything with

"Talked to client" "Wrote email" "Made blog entry" "Spent 60 minutes wasting time doing X"

Also, the gaps in the timeline are just as telling. I always feel that little bit guilty returning from HN and seeing a 1hr gap where I could have worked.

Great idea, please do this. It should also record the choices encountered at each step and tabulate the paths not taken, which would be very useful if something doesn't work and you need to backtrack.

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