To impart value you need to make sense and to make sense you need to be able to see how an idea evolves, thus Journaling.

Personally having experimented with various tools and strategies that go along with each one of them I was finally able to settle upon the following as a well defined structured approach with a timeline for each step. This makes keeping track a habit than an overhead.

The Problem at hand

How to gain effective historical insight on demand from the vast and complex work we do as engineers across products, services and technologies?

As is the case for most Senior Engineers we are involved in multiple projects in some capacity or the other at any given point of time, be it maintaining, actively developing or designing another one.

Compounded over months, spanning across years there is a lot of personal knowledge and data points we acquire but sadly it gets lost or archived at best, looking it up is so often tedious that we just give up and go through the entire process to figure it out again.

Insights

Some key findings from the iterative journey over several months that has led to the final design of my journaling process.

Integrate journaling as part of your natural workflow eg: you finished investigating a bug, jot down a quick line about it.

Journal logs are meant for a timeline view and on demand insight at macro and micro level. The ToDo lives separately.

Flexibility and Discoverability is key whilst also maintaining a noticeable pattern.

Avoid tool overload, having tried multiple softwares and tools for different things. I have finally found a lasting workflow and free form approach with a single tool in maintaining my own google sheets.

Benefits

Retrospective review of business expectations and ongoing changes.

Insight into disruptions during your work week.

Analyzing all the metrics that you care about w.r.t your team and yourself.

Keeping a track of all the new learnings and keeping those up to date.

Effective historical insight on demand.

Approach

SDE Journaling Template

> Structure

- An hourly/daily updated log

- A monthly updated log

- TODOs sheet

- Today I Learned

- Archive