Three years of keeping a work journal
September 15, 2025 · 4 min read
It is one plain text file. Every working day, one line, written at the end of the day rather than the start: what I did, and one thing I learned or got wrong. No formatting, no tags, no tool. It is nine hundred lines long now and I have never once regretted the two minutes.
The first thing it is good for
Performance conversations. Not in a careerist way — in the sense that I used to walk into them genuinely unable to remember March. Six months is longer than my memory for my own work, and the file remembers on my behalf. The first time I brought it, the conversation changed from a negotiation about impressions into a conversation about facts, and it has stayed that way since.
The second thing, which I did not expect
It is a very good detector of stuck. When I read back a week and every line is a variation on the same sentence, that is not a memory problem, that is a signal. Three lines in a row about the same flaky test means the test is not the problem — something structural is, and I have been treating a symptom for three days without noticing.
How to actually keep it
The only rule that has mattered: write it before you close the laptop, not the next morning. Morning-me writes what he thinks happened. Evening-me writes what happened. They are not the same file, and only one of them is worth reading in six months.
Skip days freely. A gap is information too.