Dino’s Journal 📖

Why do I keep a work journal at the office? I was looking up “journals” and found a blog post from a software developer who kept a work journal. I thought it was interesting and decided to give it a try. A few weeks after, I read Cal Newport's books and found out that he too kept a journal at work. So that was even more incentive to keep one.

What do I use as a work journal? I have a medium sized, ruled, Moleskine 007 Limited Edition notebook. It has rounded corners, an elastic band to keep it closed and comes with a bookmark ribbon. I bought it at Barnes and Noble. Other stores carry Moleskine notebooks, but only Barnes and Noble seem to offer the limited edition ones.

How do I use it? In general, I use it anytime I need to write something down at work. More specifically:

• I bring it to meetings and use it to write down meeting notes.
• When I'm in my cubicle, I keep it right in front of me. I write down whatever work related idea I come up with.
  • For example, realizations or insights about algorithms or design patterns. Why the current code works and the previous didn't. New SQL queries that will prove helpful in the future. Etc...
    
  • I keep a daily schedule on my journal.
  • I keep a weekly summary.
  • I record the number of code reviews I've done during the day.
  • I record the time I arrived at the office and the time I leave.
  • I list down the tasks I am working on for the day. I migrate unfinished tasks to the next day so I don't lose track of them.
  • I write down a list of things I need to test for a specific task. Sometimes while working on a task, an important test scenario comes to mind and I will write it down so I don't forget. It serves as a test case document of sorts.
  • I track Sprint schedules and deployment/release dates.
  • I use it to help me solve programming problems.

What benefits have I noticed from keeping a work journal?

• The biggest benefit is being able to reference my daily schedule. Being able to quickly check what I should be doing at a specific time during the day, allows me to stay focused at work.
  • A related benefit to that is being able to track how many “deep work” hours I had for the day, as opposed to time spent doing something else, like getting stuck in meetings, doing compliance trainings, responding to emails, etc...
• Another benefit is not losing track of bugs, issues or tasks that I needed to work on. In the past, there were a number of bugs that fell through the cracks because the discussion was done on email, but everyone was so busy that it wasn't tracked accordingly. Tracking those in a work journal stops that from happening because I usually spot them when migrating tasks over to the next day.
• Another benefit is the use of the work journal to help solve programming problems. I've mentioned this in my previous journal entry.
  • A related benefit to that is that I can go through old entries to see how I solved problems in the past.
• Another benefit is it stops me from having to use my phone as a note taking tool when I'm not on my desk. There is a time and place for the use of phones at the office; using phones while in a meeting is not one of them. Sure you could have been typing down the bug number or ticket number that you needed to look at later. However, to the CEO who happened to walk by the conference room while the meeting was ongoing, it will look like you weren't paying attention. That's not a good look. It will also come off as being rude to the meeting organizer or whoever is talking at the moment.

Tags: #Work #Productivity