Since a few years ago, I started making a habit of taking daily notes about thoughts, stuff I did during the day, new learnings, or anything else really… Like I’ve written in the post title, a sort of “work diary”.
This might sound silly, but believe me, it’s not, and for me at least, it proved to be extremely helpful.
I don’t really wait for the day to end in order to do this (because I might forget important things – yeah at 6pm my brain is usually in shutting down mode 😅), but I rather do it while I do things.
Which types of notes am I talking about? Any kind to be honest.
I usually take notes of things I would like to remember in a week, six months, or even two years. I think you should decide the level of granularity / details, and frequency you want for your note taking, since this is quite personal of course.
To give some concrete examples, here are a few kinds of notes I like to capture:
- New learnings (could be anything really: some trick in the language I’m using, a good practice I just learned, an inspiring blog post I just read, etc…).
- Solution(s) I have found to some problem.
- Feedback from colleagues.
- Mistakes I made, and don’t want to repeat again in the future (of course!).
- Nice comments in code reviews (both mine or from other people).
- Decisions I made while coding or designing something.
- Just writing down a problem I’m having and don’t know how to solve – you‘ll be amazed about how writing down problems in a brief text can open new perspectives in your mind about how to solve them…
- And this list could go on forever ♾️….
Maybe you are wondering, why taking notes of this things? Are you ever gonna read them?
Well, again (it proved useful to me through the years, which doesn’t mean it will be 100% useful to you, but… it might :D)… And yes, I definitely read them later on!
Some reasons of why this works for me:
- I usually take some time by the end of the week to reflect which things I learned, which things I did “right” (and “wrong“). Which were my main achievements, what important things happened around me, etc… And what could be better than my notes for this?
- I usually like to check how my career is going… Am I stuck, am I happy, am I sad, am I going in the right direction (or in the wrong one?)…. Anyway, again, notes help here, a lot.
- When it’s time for writing a self evaluation (usually during the performance review cycle), going through my chunk of notes, is extremely helpful to remind me about the important things I’ve done during the semester (and also which things I didn’t do so well).
- Sometimes is just a matter of dumping things out of my mind… As engineers, we carry a lot of stuff in our brains (every single day), so writing thoughts down, can be a really mindful practice 💆♂️
- Last but not least, I usually like to reflect on the decisions I took recently (or some time ago), and why… Believe me, this one might surprise you… Would you make those decisions again? Were they good or bad (or meh)? Did they pass the proof of time? Well if you didn’t write them down, you will hardly remember 😅.
The point here is that no matter how good your memory is, you will eventually forget stuff, so having things written down somewhere is definitely helpful.
Oh, and some bonus tip before this chunk of bytes leave the screen of your device:
- Try to keep your notes concise, so they are easy to go through later.
- Add links to related things when possible (i.e: slack threads, PRs, documents, blog posts, etc…).
- Don’t forget to write down the date when you took the notes.
I hope this small tips are useful for you, and if you are not taking notes yet, go for it, you will not regret it 😉
Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: This post represents just my thoughts and my personal opinion about this subject. I’m not talking on behalf of any company I work, or I’ve worked for, nor giving real examples from neither of them.