Daily work journal // Wanderings in the Silicon Forest

How I use a daily journal to keep track of the chaos at work.

I work as a Linux Systems Engineer. Our company, like most other companies, has a lot of chaos. We have a mix of legacy systems that nobody fully understands anymore and a bunch of new “cloud” stuff that changes by the hour. Keeping track of what’s currently going on, let alone trying to recall stuff you did last year, or a few years ago can be a real challenge.

I’ve found that keeping a daily “work” journal is a big help. Sitting down at the end of the day and summarizing everything that happened and what I did helps me keep track of things that may come in handy a week, month, or year down the line. I try to write things down as I go through the day - whether it is quickly summarizing a meeting or phone call, or documenting problems and troubleshooting steps and findings along the way to resolution. However, some days I’m better at it than others. Then there are days that are not really worth documenting - e.g. got tied up in pointless meetings or something that wastes the day. But even then I try to write at least something so that when I’m looking back through my notes at the end of the year I can see whether it was just one of those days, or if I missed a day that I should have written about.

One of the things I really liked about RedNotebook was that the interface was focused on the calendar. It was easy to go back and look at what I wrote on a particular day by just finding it on a standard calendar widget and clicking on the day link. Joplin doesn’t have a calendar interface (maybe it should?), so I’m organizing my daily notes into folders. I tried breaking them down by year folders and then month folders but since my work pays no attention to month boundaries I quickly gave up on the month folders. Yearly folders are a good organization level for me. While my projects still don’t end at year boundaries either, it is helpful when at the end of the year my boss asks for a summary of all the things I worked on for the year. I can spot-check jumping through the notes for the year which triggers memories of things that were a big project at the time, but that I’d forgotten about by the end of the year.

Another nicety of RedNotebook was that you didn’t have to actually create a note for a given day. If you started entering data for that day then a note was created automatically to hold that data. With Joplin, the creation of notes is mostly manual. There are ways to automate it - there is a REST API built in that you can script against, but Joplin has to be running for it to be available. OK, maybe I’m just lazy, but remembering to create a new note every day is a bit of a pain - especially when I’m slammed with work before I even get to my computer. So, to make it as easy as possible to create a daily journal note I make use of the template feature of Joplin.

In the desktop version of Joplin you can store template files under ~/.config/joplin-desktop/templates. These template files are just markdown files that you can add variables to that get populated when you create a note from the template. For example, here is what my daily journal template looks like:

# DJ - {{#custom_datetime}}YYYY.MM.DD{{/custom_datetime}}
[Meetings](#meetings) | [Oncall Issues](#oncall-issues) | [Tickets](#tickets) | [Projects](#projects) | [Notes](#notes)
## Hours:

|Start|End|
|-----|---|
|||

---
## Meetings
###

---
## Oncall Issues
###

---
## Tickets
###

---
## Projects
###

---
## Notes
### Subject
-

Really, the only variable I make use of is the date. I want the title of each Daily Journal note to contain the date. So, the first line of the template is a Markdown Title heading (’# ‘) followed by {{#custom_datetime}}YYY.MM.DD{{/custom_datetime}}. The {{#custom_datetime}} part tells Joplin that this is the beginning of template code that it needs to evaluate. The ‘YYYY.MM.DD’ just tells Joplin that I want a string containing the 4-digit year, 2-digit month, and 2-digit day of the current day. Joplin assumes that if the first line of a note is a top-level ‘#’ heading then that heading should be used as the name of the note. You don’t have to have the name match the first line title, but it is a useful assumption for this. The quirk I’v found is that Joplin doesn’t actually fill in the name until you actually type something in the new note. So I usually try to remember to create the new note from template first thing in the morning and then enter the time I started work in the table so that it triggers Joplin to fill in the name.

Everything else in the file is basic Markdown formatted sections. I put a simple one-line table of contents right below the header to make it easy to jump to the main sections of the daily journal. Joplin’s Markdown allows you to create links to #-level headings just like you would for an external HTML link. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to get the links right if your sections headings contain multiple words with spaces or special characters. To be honest, I rarely have so much data in the actual daily journal note that I need to jump to other sections. Most of my work is done in either work or project tickets in JIRA. So those sections usually just contain links to other notes in the Joplin database where I track that work. Joplin makes it easy to generate a link to any other note in the database with a simple right-click. So if I get assigned a work ticket in JIRA, I create a new notes for it and get the Joplin Markdown link to it, then I paste it under the “Tickets” section of today’s journal note. Since often tickets can take several days to resolve, I can keep all my notes specific to that ticket in the ticket note, and just have a link to the ticket note on the days that I’m actually working on it.

The “Meetings” section is just a place I can quickly jot down notes from a meeting, like people in attendance, any TODOs that come out of it for me, or things I need to follow up on later.

I use the “Projects” section much like I use the “Tickets” section. It mostly just contains links to other notes that hold the details about the project and the work I’m doing on it. I have another template I use to track project data, but I’ll save writing about that for another post.

The “Notes” section is just for random things that come up during the day that don’t fall into other categories. Examples are things like conversations I had with co-workers that I want to make note of, special “asks” from managers that don’t fall under official tickets but they need done ASAP, things like that. It can be professional, or personal - whatever I feel I need to keep track of and tie it to a specific day.

I’ve tweaked this daily journal entry over time, but I’m pretty happy with the way it works for me now. The linking feature keeps things organized instead of having to search day-by-day for that one step I did to fix something way back when. It’s not a perfect system, but it works well for me.

Next time I’ll write more about my project template and how I use it.