Keeping a Logbook or Journal

I ended yesterday’s post by noting that if you maintain a daily journal or log of your activities, you can get a timesheet for free. But what if you aren’t maintaining a log or journal? This

I've used #orgmode for this in the past. https://t.co/wDL1kHTm9O

— Gareth Smith (@totherme) June 13, 2016

tweet inspired me to write about my journal, what’s in it, and how I maintain it. You won’t be surprised to learn that it’s all Org based.

I’ve always maintained a log book in which I kept track of what I was doing and ideas or notes that I might want to remember later. I’ve always thought of it as a sort of Lab Notebook. Before Org, I kept everything in a quad ruled, bound computation book. That’s a good solution but Org mode is much better.

Org capture makes it easy to make entries that are automatically filed according to day. The file is tree structured as¹

* Year
** Month
*** Day
**** {time-stamped entries}

but the Org agenda search commands make it easy to jump to a particular date if I need to.

By far, the most important aspect of the journal is the tags. For example, every time I publish a blog entry it gets logged in my journal with a tag of blog. That makes it easy to find published blog posts, especially since each entry contains a link to the metadata for the post.

The tags make it possible to keep unrelated subject matter in the same file. For instance, I used to have a separate log file that I used to record events with other people that I might need to recall. A typical example is dealing with an account problem for some service. I can record the time and date of the call, who I talked to, and what the resolution of the problem was. Now I just add those entries to my journal with a tag of LOG. If the call was with my ISP, I add a tag of isp and then I can search the relevant entries by looking for entries with the tags LOG and isp.

Although I keep data in files other than my journal, I try to put as much as possible in journal.org. That includes pretty much everything I do during the day and even what restaurant I have dinner at if I eat out. Using a single file makes it easy to search for items or to make large edits on the file². If you aren’t using a journal yet, I’d start with a single file until you discover that you need more. Once you get used to keeping the log, it will become second nature and you won’t have to think about it. And you’ll get a timesheet for free.

("j" "Journal" entry (file+datetree "~/org/journal.org")
         "* %<%R: >%? %^g\n%t")