A huge downside of writing this down on paper is team collaboration. Imagine that instead this is kept in a tool like Notion which the entire team can access. At first this feels incredibly uncomfortable - your notes are there for everyone to see. However it’s a massive force multiplier because often the work is picked up by someone else later on, and instead of asking you they can self-serve. It’s pretty common that by the time they need it you would no longer be at the company.

I don’t have experience writing in a lab journal format, but for documents like growth experiments and how they worked, or RFCs, this is a godsend. It takes a lot of work to keep it tidy, but it’s worth it.