The Value of Journaling
I started to journal my working day some months ago, and I can say that it has proven quite valuable to me. Let's see why I think it can benefit anyone and how I do it.
Journaling requires just a bit of effort and it can provide a high cost/benefit ratio (where the cost unit is time).
Fist of all, it helps keeping track of the tasks that don't strictly belong to the team backlog.
Journaling also helps me start the engine in the morning: when I start a day, I read the notes of the latest working day, creating the context I deleted from my mind when I closed the lid of the laptop and started my evening/weekend.
If you work in big company probably you are familiar with the concept of the "promo package" - that is the bundle of your amazing achievements that motivates your promotion to the next level.
If your journaling is well organised it can really help you to keep track of such achievements, and will make it easier to write the promo package itself. Go to your journal where you highlighted all the relevant contributions you made to a project and start from there.
Even if you don't need to write a promo package, you may need a summary of your achievements for the yearly review or similar. Anyway, it is just good to have a clear record of your amazing contributions.
Last but not least, to me one of the biggest benefit is psychological in some way. We all have those days when we are exhausted, but at the same time we feel like we didn't do anything relevant. Well, when it happens, I go to my journal and have a look at the notes of the day. Most of the times it helps me understand that I actually did something. Surprise.
This is my personal view of course, I am not saying the above applies to anyone. On the same line, the following is how I do journaling and what works for me.
Starting from the software, I use Obsidian with a couple of plug-ins: Tasks and Calendar. If you don't know what Obsidian is, well... I love it and strongly suggest to check it out. Let me just say that it is free and open-source.
When I started to journal I overengineered it a bit (no need to go into details), and the effort I put in was a bit too much for the actual benefit coming from it. So, I recently decided to simplify it and retain the valuable parts.
When I start the working day I create a note using the Calendar plug-in. The note is just a blank file having the date as a title. Whenever I do something during the day, I write a few lines to keep track of what I did. When I write a note, I add relevant links (documents I write/have to read, PRs, Jira tickets, etc.). If I have a meeting I note it down, and I add whatever information I believe can be useful in the future. When the note leads to some action item, I explicitly write it adding an "Action Items:" line with a list of tasks. Here is when the Tasks plugin comes in handy, because it allows me to write down the task adding priority, due date, etc.
I keep a separated note pinned called TODO with the list of tasks. The Tasks plugin has a nice query language, used to define some queries and display all the tasks satisfying the query. This is an example:
```tasks
not done
```
It will show all the tasks that are open and produce something like this:
At the top of the page, I have another query to highlight the tasks that are due today and that I wrap in a nice call-out:
> [!error] Due today
> ```tasks
> due today
> not done
> ```
Resulting in:
In this way, I have a quick view over any action item, and a way to highlight what should get priority today.
Most companies have some defined metrics that they use to evaluate people when deciding a promotion. Some examples can be "technical competence", "business impact", "self-improvement", etc. A nice way to keep track of the work you do that is relevant to those metrics is using tags. You can create a tag the usual way, putting a # in front of a word, like #tag.
When I do some work that I think relevant to one or more metrics, I add them as tags to the note I am writing. In this way, it is quite easy to have a view of everything I did related to a specific metric, and I am pretty sure I won't miss anything that will be useful to put together my promotion package.
Cool, that's pretty much it. We saw what I believe are the benefits of journaling your work, how I do it, and how to use it to keep track of the work useful for your career progression. Hopefully, you will give it a shot!
See you! 🚀