On Keeping a Logbook (2010) | Hacker News Reader

On Keeping a Logbook (2010)

austinkleon.com

73 pointsapproxim8ion32 comments

I always keep a notebook around. But I use it an extremely short-term external cache system to offset my brain.

I jot down stuff I need exclusively for the current day. An issue number. The phrase " Bob about the thing". A doodle I make in order to give my hand something to do while I attend a meeting.

The pages become completely unintelligible very soon, sometimes during the same day. It is useful - taking something out of the head and putting it in paper allows me to spend less time worrying "I must make sure I don't forget that issue, I must email bob about the thing". Once the issue is addressed, or bob is emailed, 80% of the time the task is done, and the notebook has fulfilled its primary function.

Months from now, it will have become complete jibberish, I won't be able to understand any of it. But I can still enjoy the doodles.

You described my exact process and results until a few years ago.

I added dates once in while. Then I started to write down was the plan at the beginning of the sprint somewhere. Then some type of personal bullet journaling stuff irregularly. Then personal todo list ended up there, not sure why.

So, it more crowded now. And it’s nice to be able to get slightly more details than “bob about the thing”

I love to see how todo lists in their context.

Earlier this year I experimented with writing a work log each day. Every time I finished a task or I reached the end of the workday, I would make some notes. After a few months I stopped.

Occasionally I found it very useful for reloading context on a Monday morning. Other than that it seemed like just another job I had given myself. Going back and rereading my notes from that time I see that I didn't put down enough information. Most of them don't make much sense to me today.

I kept my log in OneNote and created a shortcut that I could click on to jump to that page. It worked great and for me, it's important to include images and handwriting along with text and it all be searchable.

A personal log like the article's author wrote about is much more appealing to me and I think it would be far more useful. Jerry Pournelle used to talk about his log when he was on Leo Laporte's podcast and I've often wished I had the discipline to maintain something like that.

I've kept a diary for well over 15 years now. I'd recommend:

1. Don't put pressure on yourself to write a lot. I often write a single sentence. If more is on your mind, write more, but most of my entries are a sentence or two, and that's fine, and still very meaningful to look back on. I can't stress the degree to which not putting pressure on myself to write a lot has allowed me to keep doing this, and yet some entries are very long, if I get caught up in it.

2. Build it into your routine. It fits into my morning stuff I'm doing like checking email (and I have a checklist for each morning).

1. What habits did you create to not lose it? Do you always check for it before you go to another room, or keep it on your person, check for it before you leave the house, etc.

2. Did anyone unauthorized ever read it, did it matter to you?

It's electronic. I use an app called Day One.

Looks great, I appreciate it!

I've found a plain (hardback, moleskine-like) notebook with no preprinted page numbers / dates works for me. Dates are filled in when entries are made.

It avoids situations where there's a feeling of wastage when a page isn't fully filled, or cramped writing when there's more than a page worth of information to write down.

I've kept journals before and found them to be really beneficial. But first, a caveat:

A bit ago, someone else on HN wrote that he had kept lab style notebooks for work projects. All was fine until someone sued the company and his notebooks were subpoenaed. After that, he changed his note taking and made sure he destroyed them when the project was over. (IIRC)

Have an abusive or vindictive ex-spouse or partner? Even personal journals and diaries can be subpoenaed by a court. At the same time, a daily journal is a great tool to track that abuse.

I used common "single subject" 70 page spiral notebooks with a modified bullet journal style: the first page was a TOC; ~60 of the right-hand pages were each used for a single calendar date, so the notebook covered two months; a few of the back pages were used for a yearly calendar, persistent info or recurring lists; left-hand pages were reserved for monthly and weekly calendars, overflow from single day pages, or specific projects.

Because spiral notebooks are cheap, I never felt bad about "wasting" pages by leaving them empty or just writing one or two things. I also liked the larger page size compared to pocket size notebooks.

YMMV and such, but I think written journals are under-appreciated among "tech" folks, who are more likely to use an electronic journal.

It’s essential, though the Bullet Journal spells out nice, thoughtful, and adaptable techniques. https://bulletjournal.com/pages/book The reviews have caught hundreds of important ideas and tasks that had slipped my mind.

> essential

For what? Many people do fine and much better than fine without.

It actually looks like a typo as the sentences reads much more logically as "It's not essential, but ... "

FWIW I keep checking in on the Bullet Journal blog once a year or so to get some ideas, but I started keeping a variant of Bullet Journal about 5 years ago.

It's definitely been useful for not forgetting upcoming events, reflecting on the last month and for tracking trends on events in my life (e.g. sporadic food logging when making more of an effort to lose weight). One of the most positive outcomes was from recording key details about events - e.g. if I've met someone new at a language exchange, jot down their name and a detail or two about them. I found just re-reading these notes a day before I'm likely to encounter someone again has massively helped the next interaction because I'm not just going "Oh, what's your name again?"

For them, obviously.

Why do people come out of the woodwork and act like jerks every time a notes post comes up?

Why waste the energy? If you don’t get value from taking notes, just move along to the next post.

Commenting on the internet is note-taking for jerks.

I don't see how calling into question either exaggerated or ambiguous claims in a neutral tone is being a jerk.

Because there is a whole industry around hyping PKM systems and note taking systems with pretty weak evidence to support their actual utility. Calling them essential creates the impression that those not using them are deficient.

Yet, given that people are both massively productive with and without these systems, it really calls into question the effusive marketing and community promotion of these tools.

I use obsidian everyday, but I recognize that I could do just as well with some other tool. It's preferential, not essential.

Exaggeration is not necessary for communication of value.

Success.

I don't see how this can possibly be true given that people are successful without log books.

I use Logseq for this.

Every task or conversation gets a todo. “Meet with bob about x” “Work on pdf forms” etc.

Those that I’m doing get set to “doing” which helps keep me on task. When I’m done with a task it’s marked “done” and I get the elapsed time that it took.

Anything not done gets cut and pasted to the next day.

When it’s time to meet with my manager I have what happened on what day very neatly laid out and I simply scroll down.

I've started moving towards this sort of thing for my daily work using Logseq's journal feature. I add small snippets of detail about conversations and findings I have during the workday to a daily note. I've found it really helpful for the searchability aspect.

The challenge I face with anything written is keeping up with the notebook and a pen, though I do like the idea.

Not _quite_ the same, but may provide some food for thought. A classic: https://users.speakeasy.net/~lion/nb/book.pdf

Apart from bullet journal, what are other relevant techniques to keep logbooks?

The "lab book" form might be of interest. Here's an example guide to keeping one:

https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/notebook/notebook.h...

When I first did a chemistry class in high school, this was the first thing they taught us. At the time I thought it was the most boring pointless thing ever. Of course now I realise how important it is in academia and industry (to have evidence of the discovery process) and while I don't have to do this or follow it exactly, I do approximate to this and have found it very useful. It's also the only useful thing I took out of chemistry class as I was a terrible student :)

In addition to that, I now keep an open text editor tab with the following items and update it several times a day:

An in-progress list

A todo list

A "blocked" list

A "done" list (sections for each week)

That works pretty well for me.

I discovered this independently. After years of trying and failing to organize my notes by project/folder I finally was inspired by my scientist wife's labbook entries and decided that to try an append only log (which happens to be an org file).

My current main labbook.org file has 20k lines and a header for each day. Super easy to just search for any content/tags. I use org todo tracking (which mostly just automates toggling between [TODO][DONE]) and the org babel features mean that I can also use it like a python/jupyter notebook with little code snippets and visual graphs. I use snippets of python, graphviz, shell most often but occasionally sqlite/duckdb/too.

It's really the only system that's worked for me.

I use org-mode with the journal plugin, but I'm soon going to switch to zk[0]. My technique is called interstitional journaling[1], and I keep track of my location (I travel a lot) and the date in the header of the file, which gets generated by org. You can set up an interstitional journal in anything though, Logseq[2] supports it out of the box.

[0] (https://github.com/mickael-menu/zk)

[1] (https://nesslabs.com/interstitial-journaling)

[2] (https://logseq.com/)

I used to keep a clipboard with as sheets as I could hold and then drop the oldest into a cabinet.

Then I did the “hackers pda,” just a stack of index cards with a binder clip. And I would spike the oldest onto one of those restaurant order metal spikey things.

Now I just use obsidian. But I miss the tactile and visual artifacts.

> Then I did the “hackers pda,”

Hipster PDA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA

I enjoyed using that. I eventually moved to just carrying a travel notebook though. A bit more bulk, but a lot less likely to just up and lose it.

Commonplace books, reading reflection, daily log, zettelkasten are all alternative techniques that achieve much the same as a log book, with various pros and cons to each. Building a Second Brain is also an interesting technique, but is more focused on knowledge documentation rather than logging and benefits massively from being digitised.

I'm a believer that logbooks, journals, diaries, notes, or whatever else you want to call it, are a personal thing and so it's about finding your own way of achieving what you want to achieve with those things. I've not found a single technique that works for me as it's described. That may be an issue with the author, the article, the concept or (more likely) me. But I try to adopt the ideas that I found work well and drop those that didn't.

I keep a bullet journal, although it's kind of somewhere between a bullet journal, commonplace book and daily log. Similar to the article, I tend to take lists of tasks each day; not as a todo list, but as a list of things I want to achieve. As I achieve them, they get ticked off. As I progress them, I write notes about what I'm doing or have done towards them, perhaps splitting them down into smaller tasks, etc.

There's also some personal tracker things from bujo I use, but they are generally just metadata around each daily log. Things like mental health, meal tracking, etc. But the most important thing is separating daily logs from single and double page spreads, and labeling them in a contents page for easy navigation.

If I come across something of interest, I treat it like a commonplace book to capture that interesting thing; recipes, project ideas, reference materials, arbitrary thoughts, and more. Similar to zettelkasten's fleeting notes concept, anything I want to revisit later I write down.

In my opinion, the power of this technique comes from how to link these things together - just writing them down isn't all that useful to me. So maintaining an accurate contents page to be able to quickly jump to a project or tracker spread makes navigation easier, while also maintaining an index for collating specific ideas mentioned sporadically across the entire logbook means I can trace an idea through the logbook (or multiple logbooks). These both mean I can actually go back and look at something specific, or quickly scan for topics that may relate to a new idea and leverage the work I put in when originally writing it.

But, this is just what works for me and doesn't necessarily mean anybody else would benefit from it. And I think this is the key thing naturally omitted by many note taking tutorials, blogs, etc. They're trying to sell you on the solution to end all your problems, when there's no guarantees that the technique even works let alone will work for you.

That's a great write up, thanks!

I used to keep logs at work in Microsoft Word 2000

These days I use WikidPad, a personal wiki.

I kind of do this. I keep an engineering notebook of all the progress made on a side project. It is helpful for when you need to come back to it after a week or two.

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