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2021-08-07

Re: Think in Writing

tags: mind

skyjake writes:

Programming is such a complex task that it helps immensely to write things down. At the end of a session one can just dump one's thoughts and next steps into a text file, and pick them up the next day, or after a month, getting back up to speed quickly.

gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-08_think-in-writing.gmi

local copy

I can second, and I cannot recommend it enough. So I'll write down, how this works for me. It is not limited to programming.

---

Somewhere I read, that apparently Richard Feynman insisted, that the thinking happens on paper [a] --- what is not written down, does not really exist. And as a physicist by education myself, I can support that. If you cannot write it down somehow, it might be lost.

---

I keep a detailed log of my work and my thinking at $dayjob. I use emacs/org-mode for that. I keep accounting of time to specific projects in org-mode, albeit in a separate file. I also keep private and work files completely separate.

The Journal

So, I have ONE file called "journal.org". It is a file+datetree+prompt type of org journal. I started this file on my first day of this $dayjob five years ago, and I keep adding to it. The file holds more than 200000 lines (yes, including all the empty ones!). I have no intention to start a new file, or one file per year or something such. Allthough company-mode starts to become slow, and starting consult-line takes more than two seconds to start, I cannot see any advantage in using smaller files.

Structure

I have written a capture template to start any new day. Actually there are five separate templates, one for each weekday. They hold slightly different entries, e.g. a checkbox to update my accumulated times on Monday morning, and checkboxes for my two regular meetings on Thursday.

There are more capture templates and yas snippets to document recurring tasks, mostly consisting of lists of org-mode headers and checkbox lists.

Content

What goes into the file? Lots of things.

Other

Some numbers

2_journal.org 224645 lines, close to 9 MiB (as of 2021-08-06). approx. 3400 lines per month.

some 60 additional .org files: 16000 lines

WorkLog: 119882 lines, approx. 4 MiB, approx 1100 lines per month.

Some 250 other files: 70000 lines

tl;dr

Well, this turned out much longer than I expected --- thanks for your time!

Cheers,

~ew

Footnotes

[a] Probably in "How to take smart notes" by Söhnke Ahrens.

[b] Robert Pirsig -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance --- This book has a very interesting section about what happens, when you run out of ideas. And I totally agree with that description. Something like: you need to sit in front of the problem (broken motorcycle) and stare at it for a while. After some time a little fact will surface in your mind, knock on the door of conciousness and ask if you are interested. If you dismiss this fact, it will disappear and not surface again for a very long time. Been there, done that. However, if you listen to this thing, often it will lead you closer to the source of the problem. It's often some tiny fact that you thought is understood or done, when in fact it is not. And you have only this one chance.