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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

I've adopted a practice like this at times, and it definitely helps, but then there's also those days where it starts with a standup, you get pulled aside after to help someone wit their changes, then there's a production issue, then your manager needs some data for an exec meeting, then... and you're left at the end of the day trying to piece it all together. Ironically those are the days where it's most useful to have had something like this, but I've never figured out the balance.

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I always keep very sparse notes with pen and paper. Once the dust settles, I transcribe them in full sentences into my digital journal.

This act of reconstructing a coherent narrative from disparate events is an enormously useful part of writing the journal.

It helps to write down every task that won't be solved immediately, before doing it. This is also great when you're doing multiple things in parallel.

Almost like keeping a personal write-ahead log. :)

Not quite. A write ahead log memorializes the final state of the outcome. It should be everything you need to recreate the result or net effect.

if you write it down before you start, it’s more like the intent.

If you have one of these workdays, do you feel that you have actually accomplished anything notable in the changelog? I find that it is very hard to "sell" this electron-cloud-like helping out behavior when you have an assigned task to complete, both to myself as well as management.

Have I accomplished anything brag-worthy that day? Not really, but having the list helps on two grounds. One is to have an explanation of what was considered important enough to derail that, so I can look at trends (e.g. Am I the only person on the team who knows about X so I'm getting derailed by questions about X? Maybe it's time to revamp the X docs or give a presentation on X). The second is placating stakeholders elsewhere in the company. "We didn't do that thing you asked for yet" on its own sounds like you just don't care about them. "We didn't do it yet because of incident XYZ123 impacting $xxxK in revenue needed to be fixed" usually works better.

Simple, just write everything down. Making a quick note takes about 12 seconds. I make about 8-9 quick notes to summarise all tasks in the day. Everybody has that amount of time to do it, EVERYBODY.

There is some cognitive burden (Find the note app, decide how to store them, remember to open it) but if you do it for about 20 days it just becomes second nature and habit.

I have day by day notes, for everything I have done and things I've discovered, going back about 8 years now. Every single day, because it only takes 1-2 minutes a day to write them. If you turn this into a habit the mental context switch cost tends to zero.

It has been a great source of links, notes, reminders, everything, I see it as my digital memory.

I've found that the simpler the system, the more likely I am to stick with it! I tried a complicated org mode setup, automated obsidian plugins, and others but what ended up being the most effective for me was just a very long bullet point list in notion! I simply added headers for each month.

"Simple" but not always easy. I have executive function / working memory issues so that cognitive burden you mention can be untenable. My solution is to lower the load/latency of the note-taking. I have a hotkey that pops up a text box where I can jot a note, it shoots that to a file, then I organize it with a TUI at the end of the day (or whenever!)

I have played around with various methods (OneNote, personal wikis, Markdown, etc.), but I have found that keeping 2 primary plain-text personal notes has helped me a lot, preferably with Notepad++.

1) A simple text file with important information, with everything including logins, host names, how-tos, even things like team members’ names and roles. I rarely change anything and often just add information while marking previous obsolete info as such.

2) A simple TODO list that I just keep adding to. Many times I will get requests that aren’t necessarily tracked in project management tools (either there’s something that can’t be encapsulated in a user story, or the overhead of putting it into the software is just too much).

In addition, IMO too much has been formalized into disparate systems and can easily get lost or difficult to access. Keeping personal notes like this enables me to have much more control and allows me to easily search the entirety of my knowledge base with a simple text search or even regex.

Edit: missed a few words

As a remote worker, it would be really cool to have something running locally that had access to my Zoom logs/meeting transcripts, Slack, email, calendar, etc.

Then take that and have it summarized what I did all day on the computer.

This is technically what Microsoft Recall promises to do and no one is happy about it.

Isn’t it also what Apple Intelligence promises to do?

No, IIRC Apple Intelligence does not make such claims. It can keep context within interactions and know about information in some of your silos. Recall has a much bolder feature set in that it wants to beware on everything you see on your screen.

The point of many tasks like this is in the doing. Writing throughout the day what you are working and planning has an effect on your focus and productivity, in and of itself.

Automating this kind of thing is automating your own defeat.

I use Manictime for this. It keeps track of active applications, you can add tags and it can take screenshots at defined intervals. https://www.manictime.com/

I agree 100%, it's hard to keep this kind of thing up

For me, it is the opposite: I can't work without writing down todos in org-mode. Granularity may vary: I start from 2-4 todos per day and write down anything that I can't do write now (2+min tasks) throughout the day (org-capture). If the work is smooth, several hours may pass on a single TODO heading, if I'm stuck, I can drop to individual "- [ ]" list items, to mark the progress. It helps with extending working memory and having the immediate feedback helps with executive function.

No-thought generous fibonacci effort estimations help detect if some tasks take too long (emacs nags in mode-line) and I need to regroup e.g., split the current todo into sub tasks.

The changelog is generated automatically (from the org-clock-in tasks) by Emacs (org-agenda).

I feel like I have the worst of both worlds.

I can’t work effectively without a todo list, but I have extreme trouble keeping with the habit.

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