Ask HN: How do you take notes throughout your work day?
Recently I've been really curious how engineers take ad-hoc notes throughout their work days.
Personally I've been using Obsdian.md and creating a new file for each day that I work.
Anyone using a specific tool, or maybe even a physical notebook?
Follow up question is whether you ever reference your notes or go back and look through them again.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 69.0 ms ] threadThere's no specific format (no tags, for example). There is just a new heading for each work day: "## Sep 13, 2021 Mon". I also don't go crazy with Markdown syntax. I very rarely render the Markdown. It's mostly bullet lists, code blocks and links to other files. My text editor allows me to click the links without rendering Markdown.
The file is located in a directory called work_journal. Content that is linked from journal<year>.md is broken up into directories: diagrams, images, logs, projects.
I do have a few other files that are project or tech-specific: tech_xyz.md, project_xyz.md, but those are edited infrequently and, once created, mostly used for reference. I also have a few temporary files called scratchpad.md and commit.md. Scratchpad is for quick pastes from logs and need to be massaged between systems and commit.md is a running edit of the Git commit message for stuff I'm working on.
The major downside is that the file is really only editable on one PC. I don't trust the enterprise sync solution I have available to me, and I certainly don't want this kind of info in the cloud. Thankfully it is very rare that I have a need to edit the file from another computer.
I like the idea of a monolithic journal per year. How long have you been at it (if you don't mind me asking)?
Just one big markdown file with a heading for each day
Cool to know other people do the same
In those cases where the matter is private (maybe 1/4 of all), I attempt to document it in company's knowledge base or at least share it in the company chat.
All other things go to my personal Obsidian.
[1] https://marcel.is/tils/
I do this for a few reasons.
1. Taking notes on a computer during meetings is disrespectful IMO. Every time I see people do it, 80% of the time they are checking email, checking a site, looking up stuff instead of paying attention to the speaker or meeting. I get pissed when people spend the meeting looking up alternatives just to challenge the person speaking. It isn't that challenging an idea is bad (it is critical in fact), it is you need to listen to comprehend and not listen to respond.
2. The vast majority of notes are worthless after a few days. They were relevant to complete a task but not noteworthy for my career or to learn something I need to keep forever as a reference.
3. Writing something makes me personally more likely to remember it.
In the 5 subject notebook, I keep the sections as "Meeting Notes", "Active project(s)", "Design", "Personal notes" and the last one is usually open for just misc crap that I don't need to categorize right now. The design part I almost always take pictures of and put in my notes app, but I only take the pic of the final design and the notes on why. Design here is typically software architecture type design, product design, UX etc. It is faster for me to sketch it then to try and put it in an app.
I've done this for my entire career, 20+ years now and just refined over time. I also am a huge fan of note cards during the week while I am working. For example, I'll write my plan down for the day/week/month on a note card and then work through it. The time period is chosen based on what I am working on at the time, and sometimes I have one for a day, one for the week, one for a month etc. Just helps me keep myself organized, and again, writing it forces me to remember better, personally.
As for using it, I have gone back and used stuff in the past year that I wrote down 15 years ago. Typically this is more design concepts or how to solve an interesting problem, or what were issues I ran into using XYZ design or module etc.
Thank you!
For the typewritten stuff or things which are good references to begin with, I went digital fairly traditionally as I'll explain.
So far no one has been able to convince me there is anything better than a secretary.
As an executive needs leadership documentation, I think it's best to have a full time operator who puts their focused effort on the notes I need taken, the selection & crafting of those to be destroyed, confidential, released, or published as well as their organization, filing, retrieval and backup.
At the opposite end of the spectrum without any staff you want to minimize or eliminate all of these same efforts without fully compromising the advantage you would have if there was a specialist doing this for you.
Even when I am an executive, during a time when I'm making progress at a scientific bench the only way to get complete documentation is to spend at least half the time sitting down to document where you are, instead of making more progress at the bench.
When that sitting-down pose can not be attained for the duration of a project, that's when somebody has to sit down afterward and that's not always the most useful documentation, and never complete enough.
You can get to the point where the only reason to make notes is if you will certainly go back to look at them, or if they are an essential element of otherwise unobtainable documentation.
This may have some similarities to engineering projects where you are sitting down for both the progress-making & documentation-generating efforts. Either way what you need is someone standing there with a clipboard & audio recorder who will type it up and file & retrieve it for you. You can probably imagine how you would be able to leverage such a conventional system better every year.
Without that you are almost always going to have to settle for less-than-ideal documentation, so truly optimize for this instead. Then take a few years to get better at leveraging what you really have to work with.
Until you get a secretary, at least use your PC text editor & file manager as a substitute for their typewriter & filing cabinet.
These are two of the business machine essentials that IBM wanted all offices to be able to use an early IBM PC for instead, as a high-tech alternative. So they offered printers and hard drives, and you should probably still hang out in your file manager yourself if there's no one else doing it for you.
Make yourself a storage partition on a HDD and create your own folder for each subject manually as needed, giving the subject a short meaningful name like a secretary would do on the tab of a real manila folder. Then take notes right into text editors no differently than DOS, and file them into your desired folders manually. There will be a creation date, modification date & access date associated with the files & folders and the text can be some of the most rapidly searchable.
It's OK to make a folder for a single worthwhile text file, since you will sometimes want to search by folder, other times by filename or contained text. Try to stay organized and don't make too many subject folders though in case you want to be able to search them easily manually sometimes. In real filing cabinets there was usually only one layer of subfolders, which are supposed to be much more familiar today but sometimes I wonder.
With 4 primary partitions addressable by DOS, these were supposed to represent the four drawers of a filing cabinet. A common arrangement would have been one drawer with a main folder for each product, one drawer with a main folder for each customer, one containing each month's invoices, and one with each month's correspondence.
Storage for one's personal notes is not usually a large requirement, and you may not need a database to be helpful.
Compreh...
i recently moved over to mediawiki due to work, but it is a behemoth compared to org-mode.
0: rmpr.xyz
- Vim-like bindings that don't suck
- Growing and fantastic set of community plugins, including a presently-in-alpha plugin offering Jupyter support (!)
- Markdown-based wiki-type thing, with mobile, sync, and publish support
- Wide range of pleasing themes
- Development is active and is proceeding relatively swiftly; there are new versions available quite often (it's self-updating)
- Electron UI, which I know raises some eyebrows, but in my experience it's comparable to e.g. VSCode in zippiness (so: not terrible, good enough)
Disclosure: I'm working on obsidian plugins, and I paid for a commercial license, but I'm not in any other way associated with the project, i.e. I don't see myself as plugging myself here.
While not FOSS, it's an impressive indie project that I'm enamored with.
Obsidian's community plugins are awesome!
At the end of the week I review the notes and if it's important enough I rewrite the notes on a personal wiki.
For notes I have a(n) (paper) agenda with on the left the week overview and on the right notes. Best agenda ever. https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/castelli-agenda-h83-2020-2021-18.... All remaining notes I write on empty A4 paper.
The "blog" notes are one page per task, linearly organized. It could be a Jira issue, or something that needs to be done but is not in Jira. The note contains anything relevant to the task: the specification, what I found, what I plan to try, what I did. After the task is completed, I leave the page and usually don't edit it again. If later there is a problem or someone asks something related to the task, I will look it up.
The "wiki" notes are hierarchically organized, and contain e.g. company processes, contact list within the company, individual projects, frequently used software or frameworks. The notes are my extended memory, I refactor them as needed. The idea is that I need some information repeatedly but in long intervals, and it is more convenient to quickly find it in my notes than try to remember, try to find, or ask people.
Technically, I use either OneNote or CherryTree, depending on what the company allows.
I mostly use paper to sketch database relational diagrams. If my task requires me to write a join across several tables, I will design it on paper, write the code, then throw the paper away.
I’m also currently giving FSNotes a try and I actually like it, it might become my go to notes app.
Mind you that the notebooks seem to be actually "categories".
One notebook can be dragged into another to create trees.
I immediately thought of Jack Nicholson jeering, “no tickey, no laundry!”
One section for each year, one page for each week.
Copy unfinished todos from the last week at the being of every new week.
I wish I could TAG things in it to give me a quick way to group things...
At first glance it's ugly as hell but after a while you will realize it's perfect
The format is an H2 for every day, named after the day's date, followed by an outline that covers what I worked on, including details that stood out, links to tickets and slack discussions, etc.
If I ever need to embellish upon a point, I add an H3 as the subheader and write up whatever needs embellishment. Same goes for useful queries I might want to reference later and other daily scratches. This makes for a useful [TOC] for apps that support it (I'm using typora)
In slack we have a room we post low-detail lists of what we worked on for the day. I generally just copy and paste my daily outline to it. It's TMI for the team, but the ease of doing so ensures I post consistently, and since a lot of my work tends to affect a lot of the team, I think those concerned tend to appreciate the extra detail.
Also, like @OnACoffeeBreak, I use a full sized notebook and a fancy pen to help keep me focused during meetings or when I need to sketch out an idea.
Forward sends me an email tomorrow, next week, with all of the notes I tag for that day. Takes it off my mind until I need to think about it.