Years ago in one of those corporate book clubs, my colleagues and I skimmed our way through the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. Amongst the other excellent points and topics of discussion in the book, a small section of the text, only about 7 short paragraphs long, stood out to me. Chapter 3, topic 22: "Engineering Daybooks"

It may have been my love for paper notebooks and fountain pens that made me perk up, but I was delighted at the authors' suggestion that software developers (modern ones like me, not the kind that programmed computers made from vacuum tubes) use physical pen and paper to record their daily work-lives. The idea was to write down every learning, idea, sketch, data point, and doodle.

They had a lot of good reasons to suggest the practice:

• When you write it down, you can look at it later and remember. Pretty obvious.
• It gives you an opportunity to jot down an unrelated idea so you can go back to it later and keep your train of thought uninterrupted. Pretty useful, actually.
• It acts as a rubber duck. Not literally - your notebook won't float and the pages will get soggy. For software developers, rubberducking is a technique to help someone stop and think about what their program is doing. This method of problem solving aims to help in activities like debugging by having the developer walk through their solution step by step, as if they were explaining it to someone or some duck. See: rubberducking

For me, though, I saw an opportunity to exercise my growing collection of aforementioned fountain pens and stacks of empty notebooks. The book urges you to try it for a month and see if it helps. I did, it helped, and it sent me on a years-long journey of maintaining engineering daybooks and honing a system that I'll tell you about now.

The inspirations for my system

In engineering disciplines mostly outside of software development, engineering notebooks and lab notebooks serve many important functions. Here are a few:

• For those in fields that value protection of intellectual property or regulatory rigor, carefully maintained notebooks that are permanently bound, paginated, tamper-proof, contain contemporaneous entries, and are signed and dated are court-admissible records.
• Detailed records of someone's actions can help others to reproduce the same scientific success, or glean useful information from the records of failed experiments.
• They can also act as part of institutional knowledge - the notebook is a record that survives the tenure of the person who wrote it.

Though most or all of these concerns may not be applicable to all of us, I have borrowed some of these practices and given them new purpose.

Somewhere along my journey, I learned about the Bullet Journal system. Though it's now morphed into an entire ecosystem of notebooks and pens that they're happy to sell you, it started off as a simple framework for organizing empty notebooks. Created by Ryder Carroll to organize his thoughts and help with his ADHD, the aim was to develop a way to handle calendars, to-do lists, notes, and journaling in one flexible system.

Just like I have stolen ideas from the rigid practices of engineering and lab notebooks, I've taken some ideas from the Bullet Journal system to lend flexibility to mine. Learn more about the Bullet Journal

What did I end up with?

Here's how I set up my notebooks. On the first pages of the book, I set aside an index or table of contents. Using the technique from the Bullet Journal, this area is a list of topics, followed by the pages that contain content on that topic. Whenever I revisit a topic in the book, its page number is added to the list of pages for that topic in the table. I can revisit the table and easily find pages relevant to a topic that I'm searching for.

On a following page, I dedicate a page for what I call "Long Term To-Do Items". These are things that I'd like to get done but have no associated time-frame. They might include things like a book I want to read, a language or technology to learn, or a reminder to go back and revise my keyboard's custom keybindings (I'm sure you're beginning to realize that I have too many hobbies).

Now we're getting into the heart of the matter: daily logging.

In many software development shops, teams use the Agile methodology, which commonly splits time into 2 week sprints. I have found it useful to break the daily logs into sprints as well, and it gives me some opportunity to add a few useful structures. In the notebook, each sprint gets a two-page spread. At the top of the pages, I add a header on one side that lists the sprint (they are normally assigned a number or identifier or some kind), and on the other side, the dates that the sprint covers. On the left page goes another to-do list, this time dedicated to items that I want to finish within this two week time frame. On the other side, I list any thoughts that come up during the course of the sprint that I want to share at sprint retrospective meetings (titled "Retrospective Thoughts"). When retro comes I can easily recall any of the points that I want to bring up.

On the following pages, each day gets a new page. I write the date at the top of the page, as well as a short date and sprint identifier on the corner. This makes it easy to find dates and sprints as I flip quickly through the pages.

As I go through the day, I record anything I want on the page. Think of this as a task manager, note-taking document, diary, whiteboard, therapist, and planner all in one. Some days will be sparse, with one or maybe no notes written down. Some days will go on long enough for me to spill into another page (to which I also add the date headers).

At the end of the day, I cross out the rest of the page with a single diagonal stroke, then sign my name and write the date on the line. This is a practice borrowed from lab notebooks, used to authenticate the entry. For me, it's my signal that my workday is over and it's time to close the book and step away from work and onto the rest of my life. The date header and signing actions are bookends - they signal the beginning and end of my workday and the engagement of my brain on work-related thoughts. Plus, I get to practice my signature for when I become rich and famous.

When I reach the end of a notebook, I write the date ranges on the cover and spine, and put the notebook on a shelf in my home office. Over time, I have amassed a small collection of notebooks that I expect will continue to grow over the course of my career. It's a nice reminder of where I've been and a look forward to where I might go in the future.

Migrating tasks

In the Bullet Journal system, task migration involves moving your unfinished tasks around the notebook. Here's how I do it:

• I use little square checkboxes for all of my to-do items. When I complete a task, I draw a tick through that box.
• If a task remains unfinished by the end of the day, I'll re-write that task at the start of the next day. On the old item, I draw a right-pointing arrow in the checkbox to indicate that it was moved forward in the book.

If I think that a task should belong in another list, I'll draw either:

• a left-pointing arrow to indicate that it moved backward in the book to the sprint to-do list.
• a curving arrow that points backwards to indicate that it was moved all the way to the front of the book's long term to-do list.

Adapting to multi-client work

When I began working as a consultant, I asked myself "how do I adapt this system to handle changing from one client to the next"? Not every client will use Agile, so my sprint pages might not make sense. Will my table of contents become full of irrelevant topics as soon as I change from one context to another?

I dealt with these issues by making a few small changes:

• I still keep a table of contents at the front of the book, but the topics contained within it are only those with broad scope (general learning, topics related to my company).
• When I start with a new client, I begin a new section by adding the same structures that exist at the front of the book, but on the next two available pages. That is, a new table of contents and long-term to-do list. This way, entries on either of those lists are specific to the client. Then, I add an entry to the table of contents for that client's start page. I signify these entries with a [Client] tag to let me know that it points to a new section.
• Any time-based divisions should still be relatively easy to handle, but you can go to a purely day-by-day pattern instead if needed.

Like many things, this system is constantly evolving to adapt to new situations that I find myself in. I think the freedom and flexibility of blank pages lends itself well to constant evolution, and I'm confident that it'll keep up with whatever I throw at it next.

Special Equipment

If I am beginning to convince you to consider doing something like this, I implore you to start with what you have. Any notebook or stack of papers will suffice as you get started, and you certainly don't need any fancy gear or pens. That being said, I have spent a long time trying to find the perfect setup for me, so I might as well give you a leg up.

Leuchtturm1917 120g Edition My favorite notebook so far. I like these because they have numbered pages, two bookmark ribbons, built-in table of contents pages in the front, and include stickers for archiving. The 120g paper is especially nice for fountain pens, but the 80g version is great as well. I prefer the dot grid version because they act like lines for regular text, but provide some freedom for when I need to sketch something out.

Book Darts These little metal page markers are great for giving me a visual and tactile reference for the table of contents at the top of the book, as well as the client pages. They are unobtrusive but still allow me to easily find a particular page. I use them on the top and side edges of the page. They come in different metals so you can differentiate to your heart's content!

If you really want to take a deep dive with me into the depths of nerddom and want to explore the world of fountain pens, my recommendations for entry-level pens are the Pilot Metropolitan and the Lamy Safari. Both have great built quality, are easy to use and maintain, and won't break the bank (at least when it comes to fountain pens). Grab some blotting paper while you're at it to keep that pesky wet ink from dirtying up the opposite page when you close your book.

Sometimes, digital makes sense

As much as I love my Leuchtturm notebooks, fountain pens, and little metal clips, I do concede that for many purposes, digital notes systems are better. My notebooks contain my more transient thoughts like tasks, diagrams, quick notes, or random thoughts. These don't need to be recorded for all of eternity, and usually don't need to be shared with anyone.

For information that needs to be collaboratively generated or shared with others, a digital system makes much more sense. Technical documentation should be easy to access and update, and searchable by anyone who needs it. User guides for software don't belong on paper anymore, and wikis are much easier to send in an email than a shelf full of encyclopedias.

Though a digital directory system can be replicated with paper (or was it the other way around?), it's hard to argue against the ease of managing digital files. You don't have to shuffle through hanging folders or look through boxes of tiny little index cards to find something. No one in their right mind would prefer to pull out an entire cabinet of manilla folders to re-categorize and re-label them, when it could be more easily done by selecting a whole chunk of files and drag-and-dropping them to a new place. Who wants to pull a stack of papers out of a 3-ring binder to sort them when you could just click "Sort by name" from a drop-down?

Like many things in life, you need the right tool for the right job. For my everyday thought process, that means clearing my mind, picking up a pen, and putting it to paper. It might mean something different for you, but I encourage you to consider taking a more physical and tactile approach to ground yourself in an age where most things are ethereal and cloud-based. Your system might not look the same as mine, and it probably won't, but figuring out what works for you is most of the fun.

Why this system works for me

So why do I insist on laboriously maintaining this note-taking apparatus when I could just jam my notes into Evernote, Obsidian, Notion, or any of the other great digital note-taking apps out there?

As much as it pains me to use the phrase "studies have shown", studies have shown that notes written by hand are much more likely to be remembered and comprehended than those that are typed out. The act of writing with a pen, pencil, or even digital stylus forces us to pause and distill ideas down to a phrase that can easily be jotted down, as opposed to those that are quickly and thoughtlessly transposed verbatim with a keyboard.

People in white lab coats armed with brain imaging devices have found that writing engages areas of the brain that connect visual and motor processing with memory formation. This kind of activity does not appear when typing, seemingly because each keypress is a uniform action unlike the varied motion of tracing letters and numbers with a pen. I'm not sure that this exercise of hand-eye coordination will help pen nerds like myself catch a football any better, but we'll take the win in whatever way we can.

For those of us who sit in a lot of meetings, I've found that having a notebook handy helps in a few ways. For in-person meetings, it's much more respectful to your fellow meeting-goers if you pick up your pen and jot something down on paper, as opposed to typing it on a laptop - an action that can make you seem distracted or uninterested. In remote meetings, I have found it much more productive to be holding a pen, rather than open myself to the world of potential distractions available to me with a keyboard and mouse in hand. Though my writing can be a little messy when I take notes during meetings, I can go back through them like meeting minutes and know that I have written down only the most pertinent information from those conversations.

As mentioned before, the bookending actions of writing date headers and signing the pages help to separate my workday from my home life, something that is crucial especially when you are working remotely.

Lastly, and maybe most topically these days, Microsoft hasn't found a way to incorporate Copilot into my pen and paper system. Yet.