A note from Feb. 11, 2021.
Last year when I worked with my collegue S, I happened to see he kept a rundown text for the work in a screenshare. Well, journaling is not new to me because I write often. In fact, this blog is a show case of the collection, but writing a journal just for work is something new to me.
I started a work journal after the 2021 new year holiday. It has been a month. I started really simple: emacs window with an org-file stored in the Desktop directory.
Initially I wrote down my plan of the week and daily progress of my projects. This served really well for the weekly round table meeting as a reminder of what I have been working on.
After a couple of weeks, I extended the writing to meeting planning, and meeting summary.
Later, I wrote broader things including my feelings of not getting enough support from the team because of work from home.
When I found I didn’t understand the architecture of the service, I wrote down my understanding bit by bit.
When I found I couldn’t hold the legacy service in my head, I wrote down my investigation of the code path.
When I found I simply didn’t know how to proceed with a bug fix, I wrote down my troubleshooting steps.
All from a first person view.
I have written ten thousand words since I started! The work journal has helped me unblock myself every single time.