Daily working log

Each day, I start a note titled with that day’s date; e.g. 2020-03-12. It captures ephemera throughout the day: reflections, scratch work, etc. It’s an intentional dumping ground, a release valve so that there’s always “a place to put that thing.”

In the Taxonomy of note types, this is the lowest-fidelity layer, ephemeral by design. But as scratch thoughts look like they might have legs, they get extracted into a note in my writing inbox (A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes). Sometimes I’ll use the daily working log as a drafting space, and I can extract sections roughly-as-is into Evergreen notes.

For me, the important bits are:

  1. This is a space where I can put anything and feel zero friction. (Close open loops)
  2. I feel a natural pressure to extract anything which wants to “outlive the day”—to move up the Taxonomy of note types.

Because the daily working log is also a live note, it also functions as a useful stub for Contextual backlinks: Backlinks can be used to implicitly define nodes in knowledge management systems.

Last updated 2023-07-13.