Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_st | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. I did something slightly simpler: a single file with a per-day section. This helped immensely with quarterly reviews (I'd forget a lot of things I'd accomplished), and REALLY helped when I hit an obscure bug (typically a configuration thing) that I'd seen several months previously.

View on HN

I'm glad to see I'm not alone! I also had ~/Work.MD stored for the past few years. Each day I add the date as a new top-level heading, and write notes of what I did.

I've recently started contracting (and billing hourly) so I've switched to using an org-mode file, which contains commands, links to internal stories, and other things.

As I'm contracting I figured I might be asked to justify the hours-billed, etc. So for the first time I'm explicitly writing the daily-log with the expectation that I'll share it, and the employer will see what I write.

That (perceived) level of scrutiny has really improved the detail and coverage of what I document.

only share if you have to. and better negotiate on outcomes instead of hours. just a tip :-) took me a while to understand why

I'd mostly share the specific details of what I'd done with my peers, rather than the "higher up" who hired me. It's like documentation, or knowledge-sharing, which is an important part of team-work.

But good comment, thank you!

Yup this is exactly what I do as well. In physics you are required to keep a detailed lab log. I kept doing it when I started my coop and slowly it evolved to the single file with day entries. I also keep a separate file for ongoing personal todos.

Same here. After a year or so i got tired of actually 'vi ~/worklog.txt' and made an alias. The alias opens up that txt file in VI, goes to end of the file, and starts a newline in insert mode haha. LOVE IT

Reply on news.ycombinator.com