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Ask HN: How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?

27 points by readonthegoapp ↗ HN
I have daily stand-ups, and one of the common refrains every day is, "I don't remember what I did yesterday."

On Mondays, it's more along the lines of, "I have no idea what I did Friday...".

I take 15 minutes before my meeting preparing for the standup - to try to hunt down what I did yesterday, and this morning (before the meeting).

My current daily workflow is I have a huge list of TTD checkboxes (with custom strikethru CSS) in Typora. As I complete each item, I delete it - guaranteeing that it is never seen or heard from again -- especially when I need to remember what I did yesterday and this morning.

How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?"

36 comments

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onion2k
"I don't remember what I did yesterday." is shorthand for either "I was switching between lots of small tasks" or "I feel like I didn't make much progress and don't want to admit it". Neither is bad but devs don't like to be called out so they gloss over the details. A good scrum master knows what each dev has on the sprint board and they can prompt for more info if necessary, but generally it's fine unless it's near the end of the sprint and there's a hard deadline.
sgtnoodle
I don't think that's the case about it being pride. It's pretty common for intelligent people to immediately forget minutiae. The fact that folk completely forget work over the weekend means they're fresh for a new week. Throw taking care of small children into the mix, and there's zero room for anything extra rattling around.

"I don't remember what I did yesterday," seems more likely to really mean, "there's nothing that anyone cares about." It's an answer to the question that they wanted to be asked, i.e. "What does the team need to know about the progress of your work?" Framed in response to what they were actually asked, "what did you do yesterday?"

It's actually a pretty good response, assuming they're generally effective employees. They are avoiding wasting everyone's time conveying what they believe to be unnecessary information.

You can run a more effective startup by directly asking for status updates on important tickets rather than vaguely asking, "what did you do?" Ask for information, not a story. If you literally want folk to go into minutiae on something because you think it would be helpful, then ask them for that. "How did you solve that problem?" And they'll ramble on the whole meeting.

kbelder
>"there's nothing that anyone cares about."

Yes, but especially there's nothing that you care about. Some people find it nearly impossible to remember something that they see no value in.

My wife has tried to explain to me the difference between hand-towels, dish towels, wash-clothes, face-clothes, and so on, many times. I want to make her happy... but I just can't remember what she said five minutes later. It's like my brain rejected it in some sort of self-defense memetic immune response.

A lot of tasks at work are like that.

(I kind of vaguely have a notion of 'big towels' and 'small towels', but that's as fine a distinction as I can make.)

smoyer
I keep a journal which includes bullets for what I've done as well as check-boxes for tasks I need to do in the future (Essentially the original format espoused by Bullet Journal). I fill only 15-20 lines on a typical day so it's not to onerous!
1B05H1N
Voice memos. I feel like an old timey PI or wanna be author so it all works out.
mentalpiracy
I want to use this, but I have an extreme aversion to speaking into devices.
clint
Because I don't prepare and it rarely matters
livinglist
I usually just go over what I did in my mind beforehand.
lukepm
I highly recommend TimeSnapper ( https://timesnapper.com ) if you're a visual person, it lets you take occasional screenshots throughout the day and then play it back like a movie, super helpful for jogging my memory. I'm not associated with them, just a long time user - they used to have a free version which was pretty good but I paid for it when they introduced a Mac version. Also backtrack ( www.backtrack.team ) is pretty good for keeping notes in meetings.
bluefirebrand
> I take 15 minutes before my meeting preparing for the standup

A daily standup should be a < 15 minute meeting most days, on a fairly large team. < 5 minutes a day on a small team.

It seems like a waste of time to me to spend any time on preparing for it, and if that means my update is "I don't really remember what I did yesterday because I jumped around a ton", so be it.

Frankly even now that I'm a team lead I find these meetings fairly useless and my only real takeaways most days is what people need help or more work.

jwandborg
Talking in front of a group can be a stressful situation depending on your emotional state.

It sounds like you've found a system that works for you, imagine not having that system, being sleep deprived, or simply focusing on the next thing instead of the last thing you did.

I know a lot of things about a lot of things, to the point where I know a lot of things I don't know a much about, but I usually end up forgetting what I did yesterday, how old I am, how old my daughter is, birthdays other than my daughter's and my own.

People are different, so empathy is key in communication, I'm not too good with empathy, but I try not expect others to behave as I would.

layer8
I use ManicTime and email history, mostly.

> I take 15 minutes before my meeting preparing for the standup - to try to hunt down what I did yesterday

I would advise to take those 15 minutes at the end of your workday, and write it down. Then you’ll remember better the next day/week. Those 15 minutes are also an opportunity to plan what to work on the next day/week (and write that down as well).

rendall
I'm having a hard time imagining a stand-up where everyone on the team does not already know what you were doing yesterday. The board has your closed tasks and your current task. Your stand-up is to give progress on your task. What's going on that people don't know what task they have been working on?
KptMarchewa
Because I wake up 5 minutes before this meeting and my mental energy is spend on making coffee.
tejisant01
This is THE comment. Completely related
rendall
>> What's going on that people don't know what task they have been working on?

> Because I wake up 5 minutes before this meeting and my mental energy is spend on making coffee.

Funny.

I was asking about the format of the dailies, though. "How did the 'endpoint creation' task go, yesterday, KptMarchewa? Did you complete it?" is a question even a coffee-deprived sleep-addled dev can mumble an answer to.

pcthrowaway
I wouldn't put it past myself to forget an endpoint I implemented yesterday, that's why I document them as soon as I finish.
rendall
Hmm. I guess I'm trying to suggest that the format of the daily stand up, or even something about the development pipeline in these situations, are leading people to forget what they are doing day-to-day. If I were on a team where people were forgetting regularly, I'd tune the process. I find explanations like "I haven't prepared" or "There is something inherent to me" not to be satisfying. As a lead, I'd find it quite alarming, really. I mean, some people have medical conditions, and that's fine as an explanation, but as a routine? No. Something isn't going well. And, the explanation is almost certainly not "devs are at fault". Burnout is a possibility.
meowzero
When we didn't use JIRA or similar apps, I had a hard time remembering as well. But with JIRA I look at the ticket I'm working on (and the ticket is displayed on the screen) and say "I was working on Ticket XYZ". Of course, they can look at JIRA themselves and don't need me to say it. But that's what stand-ups are anyways—a status update when you can already see the status from JIRA. But that's a different topic.
escapedmoose
I usually take notes on what I do, but if I’m forgetting what I did yesterday, it’s likely because my brain is so completely absorbed in the task of the last five minutes that I don’t mentally exist on this planet anymore. I could figure it out, but that would require turning my attention back to earth, and the problem I’m absorbed in is too fascinating to let go right now.
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burner556
Because who wants to waste 15 minutes of being useless time prepping for a meeting that is again useless. Does every detail really matter? Do we really have to daily justify what we do? That breeds a lot of resentment. May I please go to the bathroom? Weekly Eng standups at most unless truely working on something in tight collaboration.
Railsify
maybe don't delete the item?
readonthegoapp
that's a pretty good idea.

i was thinking it was a non-starter, but maybe it is not.

it's just that, it leaves a lot of noise, and i have a feeling that it will lead to a lot more work -- i.e. i'll just have to delete them at some point later -- maybe right after the standup?

what i really want is a simple workflow that handles it -- something like what you'd find in Todoist or similar -- without all the ceremony, drama, formatting, slow plugins, etc.

i know Notion bought some automation company. maybe they'll incorporate something.

but notion doesn't even have 2FA, so.

Railsify
add "date complete" text then use display:none when you want to hide it.
svilen_dobrev
what is blocking you? where are you trying to go? why? This is what matters. what u did isn't that interesting anymore. too late to revert. just history.
nunez
i used to have this problem; it was due to me not doing a good enough job keeping a paper trail of what I was doing in tickets/git/my journal and having lots of stuff going on.
emptysea
I have a slack reminder to write down what I did before I get off each day. Works great!
flarg
I write everything down in my personal wiki, everything, absolutely everything, emails, chats, work I did, tasks. If it ain't written down I didn't do it or know it. Works like a charm for recalling what I did and also lends some perspective.
smcleod
I use the app Things and each day have a todo / note called "standup 2022-02-24".

I make a very quick note of each major thing I do, each thing that blocked me and things I know I need to do tomorrow, e.g:

- Y: created basic CI pipeline for application

- B: was blocked from working by having pointless meetings in the afternoon

- T: add security scanning to CI pipeline

marconey
I use Qbserve [1] after seeing it mentioned in a previous thread.

Really helpful for seeing where time was spent over the course of the day/week. Collected data all stored locally too

[1] https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/

tailspin2019
Cool. I’ve not come across this before. I currently use the app “Timing” [0] on Mac which is similar (and pretty good).

The downside with both of these though is no local sync across multiple Macs, which is a killer feature for my use case. Timing offers sync but it’s cloud-based (no E2E) which rules out using it for me. For now I just have separate sets of tracking data on a couple of Macs…

I may give Qbserve a closer look though.

[0] https://timingapp.com

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conradludgate
My brain has some very bad mid term memory (on the hour/day scale). I always forget what I ate for breakfast/lunch. I always forget small tasks I worked on, or where I left my ticket state on.

I can figure it out though. I can replay events from a point I remember and get to it, but it's usually pointless for me to do so, and often better for me to come into tasks from a fresh perspective

afarrell
If you are worried about a colleague being judgemental, it can be stressful to speak to them -- especially if you are somewhat embarassed. This stress decreases available working memory. This makes it genuinely harder to remember what you did the previous day.