Skip to main content

Take note: Take notes! | Summa Blog

Popularity Report

Total Popularity Score: 0
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...
Loading...

Rank

Bookmark History

Saved by 2 people (0 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-06-20


Public Sticky notes

If you’re like me, you’re working on many things at once. You’re continually developing, doing research, fixing bugs, helping people, etc. When it comes time to do your status report, how do you remember what all you did this week? When you see a bug that looks a lot like one you fixed two months ago, how do you remember what you did to fix it? The solution is simple, and yet I find many developers don’t do it. Take notes. You should take short, but informative, notes as you work, on all the things you work on that day. These notes don’t have to read like the next Great Novel. The purpose of the notes is to trigger your memory into remembering what you were doing when you took the note.

Highlighted by joel

This is really all you need. There are some specialized note-taking tools that work well, however. When I’m in a Microsoft Windows environment, the Microsoft OneNote program is excellent. It has facilities for putting notes in folders, within projects, as you would expect; but it adds things like being able take screen shots, and then index the text in that screen shot so that you can search on it later. That’s useful for when an error message pops up in a dialog box and you need to capture its contents. You can highlight text, tag paragraphs, etc. etc. But for 95% of my professional life, I’ve just been grepping text files, and like I said, that’s really all you need. The important thing is that you capture the information.

Highlighted by joel

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been taking notes like this since a couple of years and they have been a real time-saver.

I have never used OneNote, but I’m eager to suggest WikidPad as a great alternative: open source, actively developed, no-nonsense, written in Python and customizable to the bone.

Highlighted by joel

I find the Harvest Co-op app (http://coopapp.com) to be ideal for this. It is like twitter for teams, and if you use Harvest for time tracking Co-op allows you to track time, too, by linking to your harvest account. Handy.

Harvest is at http://harvestapp.com

I don’t have anything to do with Harvest, btw, just a happy customer.

Highlighted by joel

I started seriously taking notes when I switched from networking to programming in 2005. It took a while to find a tool I liked but I came across Confluence and have been very happy with it since then.

Highlighted by joel

I’ve been taking notes like this for about three years now and I have to admit I still haven’t got it perfected yet. In the beginning I took verbose notes detailing everything I did, but after a few months it became unwieldy to go back and manually search through a hundred pages of notes trying to remember where I might find that detail I knew I had seen.
It was a little better when I finally started doing everything on the computer, but invariably it seemed like I was recording a lot of information that I never ever needed again, and spending a lot of time doing so, and when I did need some tidbit of data it wound up being the one thing during the day in question that I had considered unimportant or for whatever reason had not documented.
I’ve sort of had to resign myself to simply keeping a whiteboard with items that really stand out, such as stupid bugs that I fight for half the day only to find there was some tangential solution that really should be unrelated to what I am doing (”oh! my program isn’t working because the router needs to be power cycled!”).

Highlighted by joel

I’ve been using OneNote for a little while now for tracking daily status for stand-ups, and it’s pretty much what I need - good WYSIWYG editor, search, groups, etc.

Picking the right tool up-front seems pretty key, cause once you have a few months of notes written, it’s tough to switch.

Good post.

Highlighted by joel

I’ve been trying to do this for a while. Getting into the habit is the hardest part. I tried a paper notebook a week or two, and then made a Google Docs Spreadsheet with a single entry form. It adds a timestamp to the spreadsheet automatically, and I’ve got it in my toolbar and on my phone home screen, so I can make entries anywhere.

Highlighted by joel

I am the sole note-taker in the group which means that I get asked the questions about what we did and when. I use Evernote (non-synced) and record daily activities. I also set up a personal wiki on my server so that other people can access notes that I have taken. I have to use a windows machine at work so I use screwturn wiki (it was tough to get that unblocked!)

Also, time tracking with Rachota is a breeze! I have turned 2 of my 3 co-workers on to it.

Highlighted by joel

Readers (2)