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Do you keep a work journal/diary? How?

4 points by gt384u ↗ HN
I've observed over the years that people who I respected as "good at what they do" disproportionately often use a journal to keep track of their work.

I'm starting a job soon and want to try doing this for myself as I'd like to be able to reflect on what it is that I do. One obvious solution to this is a bound paper notebook and pen, which have nice properties of taking both text and images easily with pen or pencil, but suffer from not being searchable and are yet another thing to carry. Also, as a software engineer I find I can type much faster than I can write.

Another option I'm investigating is using emacs and org-mode, but I haven't found a way to nicely embed images into emacs besides ASCII art with artist-mode, which I find to be relatively crude for the sort of sketching I typically do.

How do you guys go about journaling for work? If you include images along with your text, how do you do it? Bonus points for lightweight or portable solutions.

9 comments

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j45
I've recently (and finally) turned to Evernote. They've got it figured out quite well.
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[dead] dgroves
I suggest Getting Results the Agile Way: http://gettingresults.com/wiki/Main_Page

J.D. Meier, the author, is notorious for his productivity at Microsoft. J.D. Meier was kind enough to beta test his system with me and many others before he wrote his book.

Despite my bias, do not take my word for it. The whole of the book is online for free; and I encourage you to check it out for yourself.

jordhy
I use Day One as a professional journal and Path for personal stuff.
dtromero
I use a dedicated gmail address. Here's why: (1) It's portable. I can send myself an email from my phone, laptop, ipad, etc. (2) It's searchable. I can go back and search for specific keywords or topics I wrote about. (3) It's easy to organize. I can label my posts as personal/work/etc and setup filters to apply these labels based on the subject line. (4) Short learning curve. I use my personal gmail account everyday. & (5) It's relatively secure.

Edit: (6) It's free.

fourmii
I've been using Evernote. And recently, I started using Trello as a PM tool to help me organize my tasks. They're both free and have decent iphone apps, which I often use when I'm at events and meetups and don't want to use my laptop. Another huge plus: both are free.
paulsutter
My email from 1982 was a pretty good journal of my high school life and work (I was a programmer).

Today my text messages are a good journal of my personal life, email a good journal of my work, and my Facebook timeline a good journal of my interests (I post news I find really interesting).

Those are all "implicit" journals but they work pretty well. I can "relive" the financial crisis by reading my facebook timeline.

If you want a pure, deliberate journal, today that would take the form of a blog. I wonder how many people still keep a private, deliberate journal along the lines of an old school diary. Interesting survey maybe.

rasengan0
i currently use deft + org-mode 6.33 in cygwin emacs -nw trying to ween off 7 years of tiddlywiki (tw). currently i'm finding friction with search having been spoiled on the excellent YourSearch UI http://tiddlywiki.abego-software.de/ tw will support imgs inline but with org-mode i just use links and view from the host OS. After years of trying everything the only bit of wisdom that has worked consistently is ISO date stamp everything in any system (client or cloud) so you can extract a log later for archiving and analysis. no xml, json just one log record prefixed with iso date for sorting ([0-9]{4}(\.|\-)?[0-9]{2}(\.|\-)?[0-9]{2}(\s|T)?[0-9]{2}\:.+) KISS actually is slick