I post a lot of notes on my blog, and I keep more snippets in my personal files so that I can learn from them and turn them into blog posts later. There's something still missing here, though, something I can tweak. Reading Louise DeSalvo's The Art of Slow Writing (2014), I recognized part of what was missing in her description of process journals. Here's a relevant excerpt:

p82. In Steinbeck's April 9, 1951, entry, written as he composed East of Eden, he evaluates his desk's new surface, determines how to keep his pencil drafts from smudging, figures when it's best to do his laundry, plans his week's work, determines to try to write somewhat more, assesses his energy level, discusses his fear of interruptions derailing his work, pledges maintaining his focus to complete the work by managing his work in his journal.

… Here we see Steinbeck deliberately managing his work before he begins the labor of writing. He evaluates his tools–his desk and pencils–shapes his day, sketches the new scene, deals with his emotions, summarizes and evaluates his progress, and figures how to move his work forward. And Steinbeck engaged in this process each day.

(Oh! I love writers Have Thought About Stuff. It's like the way programmers also tend to apply tools and systems to more than just programming… Come to think of it, I wonder how geeks of other persuasions end up applying their geekdoms to the rest of life!)

Anyway: a place to clear your thoughts, a deliberate reflection on processes and practices, and perhaps a way to browse through those entries in chronological order or based on context… My blog is a little like that, but there's so much more stuff than I publish on it and it will continue to be like that if I insist on keeping to my mostly-one-post-a-day limit and scheduling things in advance.

I've been keeping a small journal–just a few keywords per day, scribbled into a paper notebook shortly before going to bed–for the past three months. It's amazing how that's enough to help me get back to those days, remembering more details than I could without them.

Org Mode for Emacs has built-in support for quickly capturing notes and organizing them in an outline by date. I think I'll use that for at least quick memories, since those make sense in a timeline, and then I'll keep the larger notes in a topic-focused outline. Technically, I'm using a computer, so I should be able to organize things both ways: using tags and links to connect items by topic, and using Org's log view to view things by date.

It would be good to start with this kind of deliberate, constant improvement in a few areas of my life:

• Web development: I'd like to learn more about design, and also developing better code
• Writing: I can pay more attention to the questions I formulate and how I explore them
• Cooking: Hmm, more notes on how we make the recipes and what the cooking process is like?

If I make Fridays the days I focus on harvesting my notes from the previous week and plan some ideas for the next one, that would fit in nicely with reviewing this process journal and seeing what I can build on the next week. (I'm still going to post random snippets during the week, probably… =) )