Use A Work Journal To Recover Focus Faster And Clarify Your Thoughts by Charles Féval
Charles writes about his journey with daily work journaling and what Sam Bleckley calls Lab notebooks to help with discovering issues, avoiding repeat work and recovering from interruptions.
4 minutes later you get a call request from your manager. You answer.
Hey, Mitch is saying he needs a doc urgently and you’re not answering his IM. Can you get to it?
poof
Where the freak was I?
(from Focus | Monkeyuser)
He makes a good point about the reasoning beyond returning and reading the notes:
After all, I’m writing pages of text, of which I will never read more than a fraction. But that’s not the point. The point is structure, and the point is caching.
In the related Hacker News discussion on the article, user simpaticoder remarks (emphasis and reparagraphing for readability mine):
The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem.
Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model, recovering the time you used to spend going over the same nodes again and again in a haphazard way.
In distributed systems in particular, the work is often detailed, manual, error prone and high latency - with a solid mental model you can get through a checklist of steps with minimum difficulty and high confidence that you didn’t miss anything. This ability to take something abstract and make it more concrete on the fly is a critical skill.