If you want a journal/log of your work, I do highly recommend the VoodooPad/Scratchpad setup. The “What was I doing?” file is not meant to be a permanent archive, just a short-term record. By the time I get to finishing or discarding, they should have already worked themselves into the rest of my workflow as a task, project or separate note. I have a second project for “Later:” items, but finished and/or discarded items are just deleted. I’ve been using the tag as a short-term reminder of what I finished recently, but things aren’t meant to stay in this note for long. I can add to remind me what to search for in Tags.app or Spotlight if I want related documents, emails, etc., and I can turn part of the status into a ] in nvALT to add additional notes. I don’t need file links or anything, just that little spark to get my brain on track. Each of my entries is prefixed with a timestamp on a TextExpander snippet (,dt), then a brief description of what I was working on and/or where I was at with it, if needed. If you start with a “Currently:” line and indent your entries one tab in, nvALT’s automatic list formatting works fine (it currently requires whitespace before the list item symbol), and Taskpaper and friends recognize it as a project. I’m adding my entries in TaskPaper format, just for cross-application compatibility (nvALT, TaskPaper, TextMate, Vim, etc.). The first line is just a tag to make sure the file shows up in my older searches (it’s ignored by QuickQuestion). stuff I intend to come back to and am not ready to delete yet 20:19 | something I've been working on for a while now The note looks kind of like 20:22 | something entirely different As a side-benefit–one I learned when I first started logging my work–consciously typing out or writing down what I’m doing makes it far more memorable and reduces the likelihood that I’ll hit that blank wall when sitting back down to work (or play, as I tend to consider most of my side projects). QuickQuestion does make it easy to access the question, though, and I can pop up a list of my current/on-hold projects just by triggering LaunchBar and typing ‘qq-space-doing’. For now, I’m just editing using nvALT, which is really just as easy in most cases. QuickQuestion doesn’t currently make it easy to append to a note, but I can use LaunchBar, a custom script (come back tomorrow…) or even a quick echo > on the command line if needed. I named the note using QuickQuestion formatting ( ? What was I doing.md) so I can integrate it with that system easily, accessing the note from the command line and from LaunchBar. What I’m doing is keeping a single nvALT note (and corresponding text file) with brief descriptions of my current goings-on. QuickQuestion and nvALT provided the easiest answer. Lately, I’ve found I wanted something simpler and even more accessible for this purpose. I’ve been using VoodooPad for a long time, in combination with Ian Beck’s Scratchpad scripts and an tag. I like apps like Fresh and Blast for this, but something more manually-curated has always suited me better. If you’ve already forgotten about your Wheaties, read on. You may have a different reaction, especially if you’re the type of person who remembers what they had for breakfast. This post outlines a method that I’ve found very useful. It’s probably a result of choices I made in my younger years, but whatever the cause, I’m always looking for tools to make this easier.
Sometimes it even happens when I’m intent on completing a todo item and let something distract me for just a few minutes.
By the time my lunch break rolls around and I want to hack a little more, I have to search through git logs and Spotlight’s Recent Files just to figure out what I was working with and where I was at with it. As I’ve mentioned here before (see QuickQuestion), I’m a total mess when it comes to remembering what I was tinkering with late at night or early in the morning.
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