Work Notes
Every work day, I start my note-taking with a simple template.
## [meeting name] - note ## [meeting name] - note - note ## To Do - [ ] thing to do ## Notes - things I did - things to remember - random thoughts ## Launched - listing finished/shipped things
Having a regular template helps to be sure I'm capturing everything I should be.
The first thing I do in the morning is choose two or three high priority tasks I need to complete before end-of-day and add them here. Not every To Do; only the most important ones. Other stuff will naturally get done.
Notes from each meeting are grouped under a header. Important info. Links to shared docs. Ideas I have. New tasks to do. People to contact later. All those things.
Then a Notes group which I usually fill out at the end of the day. Here is where I journal what might not have been captured above in the meeting notes. Important sidebar conversations I had with colleagues. Tracking company news. Personal feelings on how the day went. Etc.
The Launched group is to track anything significant we finished designing or shipped to production. It's good to have this for reference. Especially for later reference. You can control-F search the doc to look back on when a thing was done.
Which reminds me that an important part of this is appending each day's notes to a Work-Journal.txt file. It's a record of everything and has been so so helpful when I need to know when I did something, or had a particular convo with someone. The journal goes back years, and is a rich document of what I've accomplished and learned over that time.
