
The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017) - shekhardesigner
https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-more-senior-your-job-title-the-more-you-need-to-keep-a-journal
======
elric
I'm a software engineer, and I've been keeping a "lab journal" on and off for
the past decade or so. A single markdown file per day, with the date as
filename. First thing I do every day is copy the previous day's entry, give it
a once over & remove what's no longer relevant. This helps me remember what
I've been working on, and it's a track record of sorts.

There's a todo list at the top of each day's entry. But the rest is mostly
free-form. Some days don't contain anything. Others contain meeting notes.
Design ideas. Results of experiments. It's all plain text, so it's easily
grep-able. Sometimes I look back at them to answer "why did I do that"-type
questions. Sometimes $manager wonders what I've been working on or why it's
taking so much time. I can just point at the journal and say "I've been doing
3 meetings every day and I've been onboarding people so I haven't had time to
work on XYZ".

It's not much effort. And imho it's definitely worth it.

~~~
ironchef
I do the same-ish thing. Main highlights on mine: 1) I start off the day with
things I should be working on (samesies) 2) I use ### to demarcate different
"working sessions" ... one for each meeting, etc. 3) I struggle with finding
something that lets me: encrypt, search, big notes, and use multi platform
easily :( Closest I've found was google keep so far .. but i hate relying on
it like that. I'm pretty sure "something" plus encrypted sqlite will work once
i find it. 4) I name it Today.YYYYMMDD ... I'm trying to get into the habit of
retroing once a month, creating a Month.YYYYMMDD to try to be more reflective
and understand high level impact I had and systemic issues I'm running into.

The number of times this has saved me time figuring out "Oh .. i saw that
error before .. how did I fix it?" and "who did i talk to about X and what did
they say" months to years later has proven to be super helpful and I will be
continuing indefinitely.

~~~
et1337
Standard Notes is my Google Keep replacement. Fully encrypted, straightforward
business model, works great, apps available on iOS and Android.

~~~
tristor
Thank you for this suggestion. I hadn't heard of Standard Notes before and had
stopped using Evernote in 2016 to switch to just Markdown files on disk w/
Git. I've migrated everything into it and this looks pretty much perfect for
what I need (better tag management would be my only ask).

------
prepend
I still use paper as I find the act of writing down is more useful than
search. About once a year I dig into my stack of pocket paper moleskine
notebooks to look something up.

I make entries for each meeting, date, participant, notes, incoming and
outgoing tasks. Also adding in sketches, designs, and other stuff that I
wanted to write when I didn’t have a computer near.

I started this because I found having a laptop or phone out during a
discussion with someone off putting. People would open up if I was jotting
small notes but would not if I had a laptop open.

I can keep the notebook in my front pocket. Started out with hardcover
moleskines but am not trying out rhodia, leuchtturm, and others.

Each one lasts about 3 months and I have a stack 4 feet high so probably 10
years or so.

~~~
gorgoiler
Paper logs are critical for ideas.

One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted-
grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s.

Anything important can be digested into markdown, but with a note to the
journal page where the magic actually happened.

(It’s too bad that _magic_ usually turns out to be gibberish thought spam.)

~~~
paulcole
> One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank
> dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot
> V5s.

Counterpoint: Yes they can.

There’s this weird fetishization about paper notebooks. It’s like the people
who say that vinyl is unequivocally better (it’s not).

For some people the end result of digital notes is _vastly_ superior to
anything they can scribble in a notebook.

~~~
nitrogen
Do you have a good system for drawing diagrams and plotting graphs in
Markdown? Maybe some hybrid of dot, octave, and latex?

~~~
prepend
I use mermaid.js for graphs and charts in markdown. It takes a long time,
related to pen and paper, so I don’t use it for note taking. But it’s really
nice for procedural documentation.

------
8fingerlouie
As someone who "recently" (couple of years or more) switched from "senior
developer" to architect and at the same time got handed responsibility for
5-10 independent software systems, i completely agree.

Before this switch i would default to using memory. It was easy, it worked,
and i have a rather good memory. Most things worth remembering somehow just
"sticks" without any mnemonics.

After the switch, i got 10x the information i used to get before, and while i
initially settled on using my inbox as a "todo list", flagging items that
needed attention, this also became rather inefficient after a while.

I started keeping a journal. Every meeting i go to, i jot down notes, every
agreement is written down. I still keep my todo list, but it's in Emacs org-
mode now. Notes are handwritten.

As the author also hints, handwriting helps commit things to memory, so the
times i actually consult my notes are rather rare. Instead, by simply having
written them down, my brain somehow accepts that "it's under control", and
focuses on something else, but still remembers it.

~~~
GlennS
For this reason I try to write everything down twice. Once roughly by hand,
and then a day or two later tidied up and put on the computer.

~~~
permalac
How do you find time for that?

~~~
taude
I have a personal "shut down" period at the end of the day where I close out
my browser tabs that are no longer relevant, and review all the scribbles I've
written down in a notebook, transfering the few important ideas to the
relevant longterm storage, or to the appropriate project file's todo list,
etc.... I also write down the first thing I'm going to do in the morning
(because I don't believe the first thing to do should just be "catch up on
Slack" or "read email").

Helps me clear my mind, and it saves me a lot of time in the morning, because
I can start work and have some wins for the day within 15 minutes...and that
momentum carries me through....

Also, the shut-down period is nice, because when I'm tired at the end of the
day, it doesn't take a lot of energy.

------
tweetle_beetle
I'm not expert in meetings, but increasingly I feel like the modern approach
of "everyone invited to the meeting is there to say something" doesn't work.

Someone who has nothing to directly contribute to the meeting needs to be
present to keep the goal of the meeting in focus and ensure a single shared
outcome at the end. Yes it's slower, sometimes less efficient and sometimes
deep subject matter knowledge is important, but six people leaving a meeting
with their own accounts of what happened is almost worse than no account.
Wherefore art thou minute takers?

Once that is in place, then many of the comments in this thread about needing
personal notes to remind them about what to do and when, or what the team
agreed to do next, surely are no longer necessary?

When everyone can rely on that, then by all means keep personal meta-meeting
notes about emotional response, etc. for reflection. I think that's something
I would like to work on.

~~~
prepend
I’ve tried that but find the minutes have too much and too little. They do
help me mix in my own notes.

I’ve experimented with having a meeting wiki where everyone keeps notes in a
single file, that was pretty good. But suffers from “open laptop syndrome.”

I heard someone suggest, and want to try, assigning the note taker at the end
of the meeting. I’m not sure if it’s cruelty:effectiveness ratio may be too
high.

~~~
dragontamer
For now, I simply email my notes to everyone each meeting.

According to Roberts Rules, the #1 order of every meeting is everyone agreeing
that the previous meeting notes are correct. Only after the previous meeting's
minutes are finalized do you proceed with the current meeting.

\----------

A surprising number of people do not know how to run meetings. As such, most
meetings wander off unfocused. And since most people fail to solidify meeting
notes, action items from previous meetings are "lost".

It takes work to ensure that meetings are worthwhile. And very, very few
people seem to know the secrets (despite them being very obvious and well
documented).

------
joe8756438
Keeping a journal is important to anybody trying to realize something new.
There are tons of senior positions that don’t require a lot of creativity. And
there are tons of low level positions that do.

Habit is the main journaling challenge, a fact barely touched in the article.
There are two habits that need developing simultaneously: taking notes and
reviewing notes. It’s true that simply writing something down leads to better
recall, but that’s not what the article is about. The article is about
creativity.

To make something based on your past observations you have to review and
synthesize. That skill is much different than taking notes to remember stuff.

I agree with the author that there is nothing better than pen and paper. But
There are scenarios where all I have is my phone and I still want to take
notes. This leads to another can of worms: how to organize all the notes you
generate on a daily basis.

I built a general purpose note-taking tool [0] to help me develop the habit of
taking and reviewing notes. It has also become my repository of snippets of
information generated from my phone.

I use the snippets I create to inform writing I do elsewhere: documents,
outlines, letters, etc.

[0]. [https://www.tatatap.com](https://www.tatatap.com)

~~~
OJFord
Tatatap looks like a really nice straight-forward/utilitarian tool, thanks! As
an aside, as someone interested in building similar (focused on solving one
problem hopefully well) tools and earning some modest income from them, would
you mind sharing (roughly) what your distribution of free/paid users looks
like?

~~~
joe8756438
Around 3%. There are people that use it a lot and the rest aren't that
engaged.

~~~
murphm8
Taptap looks really cool and I would like to use it, unfortunately my
workplace doesn't allow 3rd parties to store the information that would be in
my notes. Have you thought about a self-hosted version?

------
SamuelAdams
Highly recommend reading the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. This book
started as a journal by Cliff when he worked at Berkeley Labs in the late
80's. He was an astronomer-turned-IT, and in science I guess they are just in
the habit of writing things down.

A few months and teletraces later his journal was thick enough to publish into
a book, so he did exactly that.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
When my dev team started at a company that was basically run by biochemists
(we were all hired to start up a specific product), they gave us all really
nice lab notebooks, I guess out of habit.

Ten years later, I had used about 5 pages of mine. My two teammates wrote
more, but none of us went past page 50 or so. OTOH, the scientists we worked
with had gone through multiple books by that time.

It's not an easy habit to get into.

~~~
asdff
Lab notebooks can be important for patent purposes. No surprise the chemists
are meticulous.

------
lnsru
Independently of the title I suggest keeping private employment journal. I had
so many situations when one wanted to do scapegoat out of me. But I had
meeting notes made few months/years ago and could defend myself very well. Of
course, there is this productivity topic too, but I treat it as a secondary
benefit.

------
revicon
A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of
notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder
structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder
called “Captains Log” and I make txt files for as many things as I can during
the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb
thing I want to remember to read later on but can’t bother with right now.
Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was
just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly
inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method
for years now, still going strong.

------
ahmedbaracat
I am considering getting a Remarkable tablet just to be able to have the best
of both worlds: hand writing and searching. Has anyone used Remarkable
extensively and want to share their experience?

~~~
jagraff
I use the Remarkable. I love it for marking up documents and writing brief
notes/sketches. Also (you may already know this if you've researched it) it
exposes ssh and you can get root, so you can pretty much put any program you
want on it. I've used
[https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable](https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable)
to write some basic apps for it.

One thing I'll note is that the hand-writing -> text converter never really
worked that well for me. I have messy handwriting so YMMV. I would still
recommend it, but if that's the killer feature for you it's something to keep
in mind

~~~
claytonjy
I'll second this; I love mine, but have written off OCR and searchability
completely.

I bought it to be an e-reader, but ended up taking a ton of notes in it. I
have notebooks for projects, for recurring meetings, a single-page "task list"
and a page-per-week notebook tracking what I plan to do, what I did, and what
I learned, which I use to inform my part of weekly standup meetings.

I prefer to keep most notes ephemeral; if it matters, I should be transcribing
it elsewhere (preferably to something typed; I have some shame about my
handwriting quality). I do keep all past weeks of my standup notes, and I
expect to draw on them heavily to inform performance reviews and promotions,
but I can go through them in order, so even there searchability is not a big
loss.

------
fastasucan
I just want to recommend [https://jrnl.sh/](https://jrnl.sh/) which is a neat
little terminal tool for keeping journals. I am sure most here could built it
them-self over the weekend, but why reinvent the wheel. It works great with
tags, dates (both displaying journal entries from date or date ranges and
making an entry for a date or a time "yesterday"). It also support encryption
and has a wide range of export options.

Funnily enough I actually love notebooks, but I cannot for the death of me
keep a neat and nice design when keeping notes using a physical notebook,
which means that I loose all motivation. However, having a minimalist tool
like jrnl helps me to actually write, not just collect blank notebooks.

------
noir_lord
Vscode has a nice journal plugin that uses a simple year month day directory
structure, has convenient actions like open today, tomorrow and yesterday.

Defaults to markdown which is ideal.

There is also a nice insert date time plugin so you can time stamp your
entries more easily.

It's a fluent setup.

~~~
greymalik
Do you know the name of the plugin?

~~~
noir_lord
Vscode-journal and vscode-journal-view I think, not at my PC.

------
flyinglizard
A large whiteboard in my home office, on wheels. Two sided, one is blank for
brainstorming, the other always full of things I have up in the air. Some
lines remain there for months, some for days, until the subject is done.

I use the blank side during calls to jot down notes which I transform into
meeting summaries and email later. Then I clear it.

I find whiteboard writing very satisfying and the the fact it’s always out
there in the room with you - can’t minimize it or just not open it - keeps you
always synced to your tasks. Space is limited so it’s always relevant. You’re
at some point forced to take care of things to make room for new things -
can’t scroll down.

------
stuff4ben
I've been using Apple Notes for the past several years. I create a folder for
the team I'm on and then a new note for a new project or task I'm working on
at the moment. Search works pretty well and it automatically saves and syncs
with my phone. I also maintain a TODO note that I update with what I'm working
on, usually on a daily basis, and things I need to look at.

I used to use Evernote, but it got unwieldy and Apple Notes did everything I
needed it to.

------
kseifried
File a ticket. I file so many tickets for work I do. Sometimes after the fact
("oh... they'll wonder why I ..."). A journal is good, but using whatever
institutionalized knowledge system your company relies upon (usually some form
of ticketing and documentation system). The tickets are good for
timelines/notes, and if they need to become something recurring, that's when
you document it.

------
linker3000
Something that I didn't see called out in the article is who owns your
journal.

Very likely, if you write down notes about work-related activities they are
the property of the business.

So, who has physical journals from current and previous jobs at home, and how
many people have electronic ones on systems other than corporate
approved/internal ones!?

I'm not judging, just saying!

------
zigzaggy
This is a great idea / application for writing.

Last year I took a senior manager position at a fairly large company. I am
also building a side project (not competing, totally unrelated). Between those
2 things my mind is constantly full.

I depend on my project plan to move through time / between tasks. But I still
depend on my memory and a high volume of unstructured notes to move through
small increments of time. You simply can’t plan every single sub task.

I have noticed when things get really busy and I start getting tired,
everything around me speeds up. I really like the idea in this article that
writing a journal by hand slows life down.

I’m going to try structured journaling. This year’s Big Project is about to go
live, and I need a way to slow it all down for a few minutes each day.

------
lukethomas
My journaling habit started with Ohlife.com way back in 2014. I found the idea
of quickly recapping my week to be therapeutic., plus it was great to see
entries over time.

I ended up building a product
([https://www.friday.app/](https://www.friday.app/)) to make this easy and
automated. While it's built for teams to share updates and reflect (think
weekly updates, retros, etc), there's "single-player" mode available too.

I like the digital journal format because I could never start the habit with
paper. The automated reminders were critical to establish the habit. I still
keep a regular notebook where I'll document thoughts, but it's more ephemeral.

------
mgkimsal
Not specifically because of job title, but I've found that I've tended to keep
notes during the first few weeks/months of any new job/engagement. There are
always curveballs and stressful moments, and writing them down has helped me
calm down a bit and 'step back' from the situation (not a lot, but it helps
some). I am not diligent/daily about it, nor do I keep it up for more than few
months at the most, but as another tool to keep notes while getting to know
people, it helps to be able to double check my recollection of their behavior,
our interactions, etc outside of whatever corporate note-taking system is in
place.

------
arminiusreturns
I have to say that when I was working in biosciences I did this and it was
very helpful for me and I'm sure for my successor, but the culture of working
around scientists was more conducive of it and I find the corporate world less
open to it or more likely to use it in ways it shouldn't be, so I've not been
doing it.

At the time I was using raw yaml, but eventually transitioned to emacs org-
mode.

I still do it personally and find it invaluable. I still heavily use
moleskins, but regularly sit down to transcibe them into digital form, but
don't throw the physical notebooks away, just in case.

------
teepo
I'm now in technical sales working with clients, meetings, deliverables, etc.
I've migrated from paper to Evernote, to emacs, out of emacs, and now journal
and take notes in emacs with org-mode and org-roam, and use evernote for
reference material. Searching notes is now a snap, and I can trust that my
reference material is indexed. I'd like to quit evernote, but the OCR, web
clipping, and mobile application are still working well enough for me.
(although I do monthly exports from evernote and import _what_I_can_ into
emacs and file system)

------
ulisesrmzroche
I got a 5 dollar Wordpress droplet on digital ocean for my work journal. I
also use it to keep up with Wordpress, even tho I don’t actually extend it

The most feature thing for me is I can use my tablet. Dealbreaker otherwise.
I’ve been looking at Notion but their iPad app was trash last time I used it

Besides don’t hunch and don’t get fat, “keep a journal” is what I would tell
my younger self

------
Aperocky
Shameless plug:
[https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh](https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh)

This is how I get to keep journal, by having it as a 5 letter command in the
terminal.

------
hprotagonist
My title’s never gotten higher than “research scientist”, and i’ve more or
less fastidiously kept a lab notebook for as long as i’ve been working.

For the past several years it’s been in the form of a git repo of text files,
more or less by date append only.

I can’t imagine not having one now.

------
_AzMoo
It's worth noting that journals can and will be subpoenaed as evidence during
civil cases in certain jurisdictions. If you don't want something coming out
in a court then don't put it in your journal.

------
redorb
I've been using oneNote for about 10 years now at work, one page per week..
the ability to search is really helpful.

OneNote is also now free.

------
znpy
On Linux, i use rednotebook for that.

It started as a simple Todo/done log, but then I started using for notes and
general scratchpad.

------
euix
I use a combination of sending myself emails and the Calendar system in
outlook.

------
Icedcool
Great Article on journaling.

------
dragontamer
Hmmm... the most important "paper skill" at my work is learning to "promote"
papers across the tiers of journals.

1\. Loose-paper and Whiteboards -- Sketches and concepts that rarely last
longer than 5 minutes before being erased or trashed.

2\. Short-term journal -- When a concept needs to stick with me for 1-day or
so, I write it down into my short-term journal. This is a tiny Field Notes
journal I keep in my pocket, always accessible. This journal is extremely
tiny, and thrown away on a regular basis (Well... more like thrown into a bin.
I don't think I've re-read any of my old ones, but I do keep them just in
case). I rarely visit anything aside from the most recent 3 or 4 pages.

3\. Long-term journal -- Some concepts need to stick with me for more than a
day. These I copy into my long-term journal. Anything in the Long-term journal
is indexed... yes, documenting your documentation. If its important enough to
be long-term archived, its important enough to be thoughtfully organized and
categorized for quick recall. I suggest a journal with multiple bookmarks and
pre-numbered pages, such as the Leuchtturm1917.

My first "long term journal" was a standard $1 80-page spiral notebook. If you
manually number all the pages, then you're going to be well organized. Once
you're familiar with an organizational scheme, upgrade to a Leuchtturm.
(Moleskins don't have numbered pages...). Some people prefer dates instead of
numbers: it really depends on what organizational scheme works for you.

4\. Team Activity -- Anything requiring coordination with others becomes a
team event. Usually an email, but it could be a note on a desk, or a message
left on their whiteboard. Or a formal Jira issue ticket.

\---------

The important thing to note is the hierarchy... from ephemeral whiteboard all
the way up to formal team coordination.

Generally speaking, your notes should traverse the tiers up and down as
needed. This means copying notes over-and-over.

As computer wizards, we are often familiar with the computer automatically
copying our work for us. In the paper world, you must copy notes manually.
Despite its tedium, copying notes from one tier to another is extremely
important.

Writing a note directly into your long-term journal probably means getting the
concept wrong. You should get a first-draft figured out somewhere else first
(whiteboards). Or, maybe a concept isn't "deserving" of a slot in your long-
term journal yet. Keeping it in your short-term journal first helps "reduce
the noise" found in your long term journal. Even if you know something is
important enough for the long-term journal, keeping it in the short-term
journal first can help you figure out how to properly organize it.

Finally: Copying notes within the tiers is a form of meditation that helps
solidify and memorize ideas. If something is truly important enough to
traverse the tiers of organization, then its probably something you want to
store into brain-space.

\-------

Teammate communication is simply another tier. You definitely want to get your
thoughts and concepts figured out before communicating.

~~~
sturakov
I sincerely appreciate you writing up your thoughts about notes and paper
hierarchy.

I tend to use a lot of paper for notes as well, and this hierarchy is
interesting.

My biggest issue is I do not regularly review my notes. And I know that there
are valuable pieces in my notes.

And I hate copying notes over, because of the time taken.

Your post is giving me pause and I am reconsidering the value of rewriting.

------
JTbane
The biggest issue for me as a frontline developer is the backroom decisions
that get made by seniors and architecture, that are subsequently poorly
documented or communicated.

Every meeting should have a TLDR summary of what was accomplished that is
shared with everyone that needs to know.

~~~
fapjacks
I agree, and maybe to help you out here, I'll suggest that whenever you use
the word "should" as in a value judgment, ask yourself what footwork you need
to do in order to make it happen. Merely suggesting it as as a value judgment
however is not footwork. Fully define the problem and bring them something
they can use, and I guarantee it'll facilitate way more than just getting you
what you wanted.

------
mister_hn
Isn't it also because of ageing?

~~~
munchbunny
You mean losing memory over time? Not in my case. I switched from doing things
in memory to keeping a notebook at the ripe old age of 24. For two reasons.

The first is that I simply couldn't hold everything in my head anymore because
I had to track 5-10 different projects at any time, and context switching
without something written down sucks when you have to context switch multiple
times a day.

The second is that writing things down was a great way to force myself to
clarify my thinking. I became more articulate across the board, not because I
got better at bullshitting, but because I was now reserving time in advance to
think through open issues in a structured way.

~~~
mister_hn
But with age come more responsibility and stuff to take care of.

