Keeping a journal
In this article I’ll describe how taking notes improved my productivity.
Many years ago, upon starting a new job, I decided to keep a journal; generally when you start a new job you spend some time doing training and learning about your surroundings, which can be quite overwhelming. And you get exposed to all this new knowledge in just a couple of weeks!
Keeping a journal seemed the best strategy for me to not get lost and be productive as quickly as possible.
My strategy for journaling was (and still is) quite simple: I jot down notes on a text file divided into sections. Every day I create a new section and every task gets its section.
It looks roughly like this:
* <2021-11-01 Mon>
Another training day!
** AWS training
Concepts:
- AWS console: https://aws.amazon.com/console/
- ec2 (virtual server)
- NLB (network load balancer)
** CI and Deploys
- Jenkins at: http://ci.example.com/
This snippet shows how I would take notes in a day of training where I got to learn about AWS and how this company does Continuous Integration and deployments.
Let’s see another example: fast-forward six months, the training are over and now Jira is your worst enemy (or friend!). This is how my notes would look like:
* <2021-12-09 Thu>
** PROJECT-1234 Provision new reverse proxies
REMEMBER! need to change the listening port to 8080!
(it's the new standard)
Also, try to schedule a pairing session with John before sending
your code for review.
This snippet shows my notes for a hypothetical Jira ticket (PROJECT-1234) with two reminders.
To summarize what I’ve shown so far, my strategy for note-taking is quite simple: I try to capture short thoughts, reminders and notes grouped by context (which can be a task, a training session, a meeting). In some cases I copy/paste the output of a command, or a piece of configuration file, or an error message.
The general idea is: if one day I need to work on a task similar to one that I’ve worked on in the past, or I encounter a problem that I’ve already solved, can I refer to my notes to find sufficient information? If I take a week of time off while working on something, will I be able to resume right where I left?
I use the same journaling strategy for personal stuff: installing Home Assistant on your Raspberry Pi? Notes! Trying a new command-line tool? Notes! Switched to a new phone contract? Notes!
So far I did not mention anything about specific software or technology because it’s not really important; I found that solutions with the least friction work best for me, but it’s a personal choice.
For my note-taking I use Emacs’ Org Mode, at 5% of its potential: I don’t use any key-binding other than “insert date” and the TAB key to expand a couple of macros; the only other main feature I use is the syntax highlighting, that makes my notes more readable and helps in distinguishing one section from the others. I could be using Markdown with Vim, or Notepad, or any other text editor, and my workflow would be pretty much the same. Actually I don’t recommend using Org Mode at all unless you’re already using Emacs: writing your notes should be as frictionless as possible.
With that said I’ll mention a couple of software that could help get you started with note-taking: