Earlier this year I started taking terse notes on things I accomplished during the workday. Simple one-liners in a little black Moleskine. But I work in tech, so surely a better solution was a combination on vim, markdown, and a GitHub repo, right? Wrong. I’m back to pen and paper.
Do you know what you did yesterday at work? And the day before that? I certainly don’t have the ability (err, desire?) to remember every little thing I start or complete during the workday. Yes, the company I work for has a ticketing system. And yes we have a project management system. And routine stand-ups. And check-ins, one-on-ones, email and Slack and Teams and Zoom chat trails…
But at some point within the last year I came across a forum in which people were detailing the ways they track their work on a basic level: with a running log. Some users were uploading a single plaintext document each day to a repo or cloud storage folder. Others, one document per week/month/project. And of course, a select few did it the old fashioned way: pen and paper.
So I started simple; with pen and paper. I figured having a notepad directly in front of me would keep it top of mind, unable to dismiss it to a forgotten tab or hidden window on my workstation. After a few days it became second nature keeping my list updated.
I think part of what made it work was keeping a low pressure mindset. This wasn’t meant to be a verbose, detailed list of every commit I made to a router, firewall, or switch. Nor was it meant to mimic meeting nodes from every Zoom call I attended. Instead I found a rhythm, jotting down things like “attended planning meeting for site XYZ network refresh,” or “added and tested tertiary RFC1918 route between site ABC and DEF,” or “resolved DNS suffix lookup issue for US-WEST VPN region.”
And then I decided to take it up a notch.
A week or so ago I decided to try moving this log to something digital. The benefits were vast: an auditable date & time stamp in case management questioned what I worked on and when I worked on it. Built in loss-prevention and backups since I wouldn’t be relying on a single point of failure (or loss); a Moleskine notebook. And the fact that I didn’t have to carry around a notebook and pen with me.
So I set up a GitHub repo and tested out using a single plaintext doc per day, per week, and per month. I hated it! For the same reason I used to take handwritten notes in college, I found I preferred writing down on paper the tasks I was completing each day. It added a sense of accomplishment. It forced me to really think about what was worthy of writing down since—gasp—it was written in permanent ink! And with a digital log I found it was all too easy to end up writing novels, which wasn’t the point of this exercise.
So I’m back to the notebook and pen, jotting down anywhere from a few to a half dozen things per day, just a few lines here and there.
