I picked up bullet journaling a few years back and that’s how I track my work:
o Sales meeting with Foo Corp
- Suggested to Sam that we use PostgreSQL
- Made us $X by doing $Y (star drawing)
. Fix a thing
/ In the process of fixing a thing
X Done fixing the thing
And that’s about it. I write this in an epaper notebook (Supernote Nomad) that I take everywhere in the office. At a glance I can tell you what I’m working on, what I did, and who I told what. And when I’m writing my annual self-review, I can search it for the star drawings to know what I can brag about.
I specifically do this instead of an iPad because I found it vastly less distracting during meetings. I tend to leave it laying there while I look at the speakers and pay attention, rather than just checking Slack really quickly, and oh, better look at my email, etc.
I’m loving the Nomad. I’d buy it again if I lost or broke it.
The Remarkable Move finally pushed me over the edge to trying an epaper device. I bought it, used it, and sent it back[0]. In short, the hardware was great, but the software’s awful. Remember how iOS use to be skeuomorphic not just in appearance but in behavior, like you could only turn one Calendar page at a time because that’s that it’s like to navigate a paper calendar? Move’s software’s like that, with a thousand grating limitations because “that’s now notebooks work”. Can you add a dictionary to the ebook reader? No, because real books don’t have dictionaries! My gut instinct is that they don’t have the engineering resources to implement new features and that’s the excuse they give.
Supernote goes the opposite direction. Its software is leagues better for navigating within books. Like, circle some text on the page, tap an icon to make that a header, and now it appears in the doc’s table of contents. Tap it there and you’ll jump right to it. You can link to other docs. It’s closer to “a book… but better”.
o Sales meeting with Foo Corp
- Suggested to Sam that we use PostgreSQL
- Made us $X by doing $Y (star drawing)
. Fix a thing
/ In the process of fixing a thing
X Done fixing the thing
And that’s about it. I write this in an epaper notebook (Supernote Nomad) that I take everywhere in the office. At a glance I can tell you what I’m working on, what I did, and who I told what. And when I’m writing my annual self-review, I can search it for the star drawings to know what I can brag about.
I specifically do this instead of an iPad because I found it vastly less distracting during meetings. I tend to leave it laying there while I look at the speakers and pay attention, rather than just checking Slack really quickly, and oh, better look at my email, etc.
This is salve for my ADHD-scalded mind.