Work Journalling with RemNote
In my previous blog post I discussed the benefits of keeping a work journal to plan your day more effectively, retain and reference knowledge better, and reflect on your goals and actions.
Today I want to take you through how I keep my work journal using RemNote, my current favourite notetaking application.
The Daily Document
In RemNote, my workday revolves around the Daily Document. This is a feature in RemNote that does exactly what it says on the tin. I try to keep this open throughout the day, so I can maintain my focus for keeping my work journal throughout the days events.
To set this up, all you need to do is hover over the "+" next to "Documents", and select "Today's Document". (Or press ALT + D).
Preparing for Morning Stand-Up
In my current role as an Analytics Engineer, we follow the Agile way of working, which has us holding daily Sprint stand-ups. The purpose of these 15 minute meetings is for each developer in the team to communicate 3 things:
What did I work on yesterday?
What do I plan to work on today?
Are there any issues / challenges I need to raise to the team for support?
All I have to do is “##standup questions”
Therefore, in my Daily Document, I make use of RemNote's Automatically Add power-up Rem, which automates the generation of these questions. So all I have to do is type “##Standup Questions”, and the questions will pop up below.
Create your own "Automatically Add" Template
To create the "Standup Questions" template like above, it's really simple. Just follow these steps:
Navigate to Settings
Select the Editor Options tab
Enable the "Enable templates for knowledge" button
Then in the search bar, search for "Automatically add template"
From there, create your tag name, and the associated "slots" (typically questions)
For each question (or slot), type "/slot" which means they will by default, come up when you reference this tag
Task Focused Notes
After my morning stand-up, I will get started on my task for the day. Most of the time, this will mean opening up my python IDE, or cloud container, and start writing some code.
However, before I dive in, I start typing a rough plan of what actions I need to take and maybe who I might need to speak to.
Initially, I do this all within the Daily Document, but I will soon after move the Rem to sit under a folder of "project stories".
The amazing thing that happens when you "move" a Rem, is that it not only moves it to a new location, but it also creates a portal to it in its original location. This means you can edit in both locations. So your daily document still reflects your days efforts and notes, but the notes themselves can be organised in a much more structured, interrelated way, as opposed to just one daily stream. It is AMAZING!
1 to 1s (and other meetings)
Finally, we have other recurring meetings, like maybe you have a weekly 1-to-1 (at my company we call them “1010”s) with your manager. Generally, it is quite useful to have a stream of notes related to what you discussed with your manager.
I will typically follow the same approach as I do with task-focused notes above. I will start taking notes in my Daily Document, but I then move the Rem to a document titled something like "Manager Meetings". Make the parent Rem as today's date using the !! shortcut to select the date, and then take your notes underneath that.
Once again, we yield the power of portals. We can review everything we did in a day in our Daily Document, but we can also review our stream of 1-to-1 conversations, by navigating to that document.
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