Keeping a Work Journal
Earlier this month, I read Mark Erikson's blog post on keeping a work journal and decided to take a stab at it. While I didn't implement it exactly as Mark laid out, I enjoy the process and the benefits it gives me (spoiler alert: it's more than what Mark says).
My Implementation
At the start of the day, I will create a folder for that day and create a "Daily Journal" page. That page acts as the main place for my thoughts and goals that day. I will add secondary pages for things like meeting notes and scratch paper, but those are not the main focus. Then, I create the first section: Goals.
The Goals section will contain the tasks that I want to accomplish that day and look something like:
- Complete UI Workflow for
$FEATURE_1($TICKET_NUMBER) - Write tests for
$FEATURE_1UI - Reach out to UI Team for UI Review
- Review PR from
$DEVabout$FEATURE_2
Doing this at the beginning of the day helps me stay focused and informs how I structure my work that day. Throughout the day, I'll check things off as I completed them, add a dash to the checkbox to indicate I worked on it without completing it, or leave it blank if I didn't get to it.
Throughout the day (or at the end if the day was really busy), I'll add the second section: Log. This is the main "journal" part where I log what has happened each day. This will contain things like:
- Who I spoke to about what issue
- Tasks that I worked on
- Interesting problems that I solved (with code examples if applicable)
Each thing that I did gets entered as a bullet point with optional, supplementary information as sub-bullets. This helps me solidify topics that I discussed that day or problems I solved for later lookup and reflection. I may revisit them and make a blog post out of it (which I did for the Styled Components post) or simply tell a team member about so they can know too.
Finally, at the end of the day, I'll create the last section: Reflections. This is a more free-form section (although I typically use bullet points) where I talk about how I felt about the events of the day. If I wasn't able to get a task done on time, or I wasn't happy with my implementation of something, I'll write about how that made me feel. Additionally, if external factors came into play that day and impacted my demeanor, then I'll document that as well. This lets me not only log the work I did on a given day, but how I felt about it. It also lets me get any negative feelings out of my system, which helps me separate from work and enjoy my evening/weekend.