> Keep a record of "stupid errors that took me more than 1 hour to solve"
I’ve been doing this for the last three years, but electronically, and it’s amazing. In my home folder there’s a giant text file that’s like my personal log file. It gets a new line at least once an hour, when cron pops up a box and I type in what I’m working on. And for those times when I’m working on stuff that’s perplexing, I write to it as a stream of consciousness — “tried this, didn’t work” “wonder if it could be due to xyz” “yep, that was it.”
I’ve used it a few dozen times to either look up how I solved a weird problem, or why I decided to do something a certain way. I’ve even built pie charts of how I spent my time in the last quarter by sampling it Monte Carlo style.
I’ve been doing this for the last three years, but electronically, and it’s amazing. In my home folder there’s a giant text file that’s like my personal log file. It gets a new line at least once an hour, when cron pops up a box and I type in what I’m working on. And for those times when I’m working on stuff that’s perplexing, I write to it as a stream of consciousness — “tried this, didn’t work” “wonder if it could be due to xyz” “yep, that was it.”
I’ve used it a few dozen times to either look up how I solved a weird problem, or why I decided to do something a certain way. I’ve even built pie charts of how I spent my time in the last quarter by sampling it Monte Carlo style.