How I keep notes (eighty-twenty news)

A few years back, I decided to try to put a little bit of structure on how I kept records of such things as

ideas and thoughts I have, related to my work
procedures I performed in setting up machines and software
phone calls I’d had for arranging real-life things
important identifiers and numbers and so on
meeting notes
to-do lists

I’ve ended up with a loose collection of journal-like documents, each with a different feel.

A master org-mode document, which is always open in a buffer in my Emacs session.

It contains
- a plain-text time-stamped journal of thoughts, ideas, workings-through of proofs and formalisms, book and paper reviews, talk notes, meeting notes, phone call notes, etc.
- detailed step-by-step records of how I’ve installed and configured various pieces of software for specific tasks; “how-tos”, essentially, for when I have to do the same kind of thing again
- detailed step-by-step records of how I’ve set up various servers
- to-do lists
I use org-mode sections, with one top-level heading called Journal containing the bulk of the entries.

To-do items each get a top-level heading of their own and an org-mode TODO tag. Completed to-do items are demoted to second-level and moved into a “done items” top-level heading.

When I’m doing paid work, I use org-mode’s timesheet-management commands org-clock-in and org-clock-out under a Timesheet top-level heading; a couple of simple scripts help me prepare summaries for invoicing.

Here’s a sample of just a few headings - each entry in the real document also has a bunch of text contained within it.
```
* Journal
  :PROPERTIES:
  :VISIBILITY: children
  :END:
** (2011-05-08 14:31:13 tonyg) Vertical interpretation vs Horizontal interpretation :STUDY:
** (2011-05-19 00:00:00 tonyg) Inter-network routing: should be *tunnelling* not *chaining*
** (2011-05-19 11:49:40 tonyg) Memory Pool System - API for virtual machine interface? :STUDY:
** (2011-05-19 18:30:50 tonyg) Scripting languages integrate with system languages. :STUDY:
** (2011-05-23 00:00:00 tonyg) Origins of Credit-based Flow Control and Acks, functional this time
** (2011-05-24 10:13:33 tonyg) Message buffer size should be determined by arrival-time jitter  :IDEA:
** (2011-05-24 10:14:08 tonyg) Fine-grain scheduling in a distributed system using PLLs :IDEA:
* TODO Build an imperative workalike os.rkt that uses real threads  :PROJECT:
* TODO Upload ~/src/racket-kademlia
* TODO racket-rc4: RSA, DSA, DH, ECDH, ECDSA, etc
* TODO Thank-you notes for xmas gifts!
* Old, done to-do items
** DONE Configure Flashbake and git-syncing for Uni
** DONE Write presentation
** DONE View mini-DVD and write up evaluation
```
Some of the journal entries have gone on to become blog posts here.

The document lives in a git repository, and a git commit is executed by cron every five minutes. I have checkouts of the repository on the two or three machines I use most frequently. I make extensive use of a variant of Emacs’ time-stamp feature:
```
(defun stamp ()
  (interactive)
  (insert (time-stamp-string)))
```
… which inserts text like 2019-05-19 13:15:43 tonyg when I run M-x stamp.
A second such document, very similar, that also includes slightly more in the way of private or personal information, that I don’t have checkouts of on as many machines.
A paper journal, which I use when I need the different style of thinking it affords. The freedom to draw sketches and rough lines connecting thoughts is useful from time to time. I use a nice fountain pen that a friend gave me, even though it smudges horribly because I’m left-handed.
A Google doc that is a project-specific journal for one of my main projects, Syndicate. It’s a Google doc because I share it with various collaborators, and because I occasionally want to put pictures in the file. Otherwise it’s similar in feel to the main org-mode document I use: a record of thoughts, ideas and workings-through.

In every case, the documents function as append-only logs of thoughts and workings-through. I draw on them when digesting and summarising in later write-ups and in writing actual software. They’re mostly useful as an audit log, for finding out what I was thinking or what I did in the past, or for trying to reconstruct an argument.

The electronic documents are searchable, of course. It’s inconvenient that they are in different places, and I sometimes don’t know which of the small number of documents has the item I am looking for, but it’s not too unmanageable.

The paper documents are a different story. I intend eventually to photograph each page of my paper journal as a kind of backup, though I haven’t yet started doing so. Indexing that archive will require a bit of work too.