The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017)

There's a todo list at the top of each day's entry. But the rest is mostly free-form. Some days don't contain anything. Others contain meeting notes. Design ideas. Results of experiments. It's all plain text, so it's easily grep-able. Sometimes I look back at them to answer "why did I do that"-type questions. Sometimes $manager wonders what I've been working on or why it's taking so much time. I can just point at the journal and say "I've been doing 3 meetings every day and I've been onboarding people so I haven't had time to work on XYZ".

It's not much effort. And imho it's definitely worth it.

I make entries for each meeting, date, participant, notes, incoming and outgoing tasks. Also adding in sketches, designs, and other stuff that I wanted to write when I didn’t have a computer near.

I started this because I found having a laptop or phone out during a discussion with someone off putting. People would open up if I was jotting small notes but would not if I had a laptop open.

I can keep the notebook in my front pocket. Started out with hardcover moleskines but am not trying out rhodia, leuchtturm, and others.

Each one lasts about 3 months and I have a stack 4 feet high so probably 10 years or so.

Before this switch i would default to using memory. It was easy, it worked, and i have a rather good memory. Most things worth remembering somehow just "sticks" without any mnemonics.

After the switch, i got 10x the information i used to get before, and while i initially settled on using my inbox as a "todo list", flagging items that needed attention, this also became rather inefficient after a while.

I started keeping a journal. Every meeting i go to, i jot down notes, every agreement is written down. I still keep my todo list, but it's in Emacs org-mode now. Notes are handwritten.

As the author also hints, handwriting helps commit things to memory, so the times i actually consult my notes are rather rare. Instead, by simply having written them down, my brain somehow accepts that "it's under control", and focuses on something else, but still remembers it.

Someone who has nothing to directly contribute to the meeting needs to be present to keep the goal of the meeting in focus and ensure a single shared outcome at the end. Yes it's slower, sometimes less efficient and sometimes deep subject matter knowledge is important, but six people leaving a meeting with their own accounts of what happened is almost worse than no account. Wherefore art thou minute takers?

Once that is in place, then many of the comments in this thread about needing personal notes to remind them about what to do and when, or what the team agreed to do next, surely are no longer necessary?

When everyone can rely on that, then by all means keep personal meta-meeting notes about emotional response, etc. for reflection. I think that's something I would like to work on.

Habit is the main journaling challenge, a fact barely touched in the article. There are two habits that need developing simultaneously: taking notes and reviewing notes. It’s true that simply writing something down leads to better recall, but that’s not what the article is about. The article is about creativity.

To make something based on your past observations you have to review and synthesize. That skill is much different than taking notes to remember stuff.

I agree with the author that there is nothing better than pen and paper. But There are scenarios where all I have is my phone and I still want to take notes. This leads to another can of worms: how to organize all the notes you generate on a daily basis.

I built a general purpose note-taking tool [0] to help me develop the habit of taking and reviewing notes. It has also become my repository of snippets of information generated from my phone.

I use the snippets I create to inform writing I do elsewhere: documents, outlines, letters, etc.

[0]. https://www.tatatap.com

A few months and teletraces later his journal was thick enough to publish into a book, so he did exactly that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg

Funnily enough I actually love notebooks, but I cannot for the death of me keep a neat and nice design when keeping notes using a physical notebook, which means that I loose all motivation. However, having a minimalist tool like jrnl helps me to actually write, not just collect blank notebooks.

Defaults to markdown which is ideal.

There is also a nice insert date time plugin so you can time stamp your entries more easily.

It's a fluent setup.

I use the blank side during calls to jot down notes which I transform into meeting summaries and email later. Then I clear it.

I find whiteboard writing very satisfying and the the fact it’s always out there in the room with you - can’t minimize it or just not open it - keeps you always synced to your tasks. Space is limited so it’s always relevant. You’re at some point forced to take care of things to make room for new things - can’t scroll down.

I used to use Evernote, but it got unwieldy and Apple Notes did everything I needed it to.

Very likely, if you write down notes about work-related activities they are the property of the business.

So, who has physical journals from current and previous jobs at home, and how many people have electronic ones on systems other than corporate approved/internal ones!?

I'm not judging, just saying!

Last year I took a senior manager position at a fairly large company. I am also building a side project (not competing, totally unrelated). Between those 2 things my mind is constantly full.

I depend on my project plan to move through time / between tasks. But I still depend on my memory and a high volume of unstructured notes to move through small increments of time. You simply can’t plan every single sub task.

I have noticed when things get really busy and I start getting tired, everything around me speeds up. I really like the idea in this article that writing a journal by hand slows life down.

I’m going to try structured journaling. This year’s Big Project is about to go live, and I need a way to slow it all down for a few minutes each day.

I ended up building a product (https://www.friday.app/) to make this easy and automated. While it's built for teams to share updates and reflect (think weekly updates, retros, etc), there's "single-player" mode available too.

I like the digital journal format because I could never start the habit with paper. The automated reminders were critical to establish the habit. I still keep a regular notebook where I'll document thoughts, but it's more ephemeral.

At the time I was using raw yaml, but eventually transitioned to emacs org-mode.

I still do it personally and find it invaluable. I still heavily use moleskins, but regularly sit down to transcibe them into digital form, but don't throw the physical notebooks away, just in case.

The most feature thing for me is I can use my tablet. Dealbreaker otherwise. I’ve been looking at Notion but their iPad app was trash last time I used it

Besides don’t hunch and don’t get fat, “keep a journal” is what I would tell my younger self

This is how I get to keep journal, by having it as a 5 letter command in the terminal.

For the past several years it’s been in the form of a git repo of text files, more or less by date append only.

I can’t imagine not having one now.

OneNote is also now free.

It started as a simple Todo/done log, but then I started using for notes and general scratchpad.

1. Loose-paper and Whiteboards -- Sketches and concepts that rarely last longer than 5 minutes before being erased or trashed.

2. Short-term journal -- When a concept needs to stick with me for 1-day or so, I write it down into my short-term journal. This is a tiny Field Notes journal I keep in my pocket, always accessible. This journal is extremely tiny, and thrown away on a regular basis (Well... more like thrown into a bin. I don't think I've re-read any of my old ones, but I do keep them just in case). I rarely visit anything aside from the most recent 3 or 4 pages.

3. Long-term journal -- Some concepts need to stick with me for more than a day. These I copy into my long-term journal. Anything in the Long-term journal is indexed... yes, documenting your documentation. If its important enough to be long-term archived, its important enough to be thoughtfully organized and categorized for quick recall. I suggest a journal with multiple bookmarks and pre-numbered pages, such as the Leuchtturm1917.

My first "long term journal" was a standard $1 80-page spiral notebook. If you manually number all the pages, then you're going to be well organized. Once you're familiar with an organizational scheme, upgrade to a Leuchtturm. (Moleskins don't have numbered pages...). Some people prefer dates instead of numbers: it really depends on what organizational scheme works for you.

4. Team Activity -- Anything requiring coordination with others becomes a team event. Usually an email, but it could be a note on a desk, or a message left on their whiteboard. Or a formal Jira issue ticket.

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The important thing to note is the hierarchy... from ephemeral whiteboard all the way up to formal team coordination.

Generally speaking, your notes should traverse the tiers up and down as needed. This means copying notes over-and-over.

As computer wizards, we are often familiar with the computer automatically copying our work for us. In the paper world, you must copy notes manually. Despite its tedium, copying notes from one tier to another is extremely important.

Writing a note directly into your long-term journal probably means getting the concept wrong. You should get a first-draft figured out somewhere else first (whiteboards). Or, maybe a concept isn't "deserving" of a slot in your long-term journal yet. Keeping it in your short-term journal first helps "reduce the noise" found in your long term journal. Even if you know something is important enough for the long-term journal, keeping it in the short-term journal first can help you figure out how to properly organize it.

Finally: Copying notes within the tiers is a form of meditation that helps solidify and memorize ideas. If something is truly important enough to traverse the tiers of organization, then its probably something you want to store into brain-space.

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Teammate communication is simply another tier. You definitely want to get your thoughts and concepts figured out before communicating.

Every meeting should have a TLDR summary of what was accomplished that is shared with everyone that needs to know.