I’ve been getting better at using Org Capture to keep a work journal (as in, actually remembering to write in it). It was especially useful during Crestron Masters to keep everything organized. Org is a very powerful tool, and I’ve found that working with the parts that are easy to understand, it’s easy to slowly build from there. For me, that’s logging journal entries.
I stumbled onto Org by reading Sacha Chua‘s blog. She has an excellent post on taking notes more efficiently in Org. I’ve set myself up with 3 files to organize my thoughts:
- journal.org – This is where I jot down quick ideas or reflect on something. I typically post links to tasks here as I’m working on them.
- tasks.org – This is where I track progress on project work. Anything that could potentially have a TODO placed next to it goes here, then I link it into my journal so I remember the context for adding it.
- notes.org – This is where I organize study notes on different subjects. It’s also where I’ll write down passwords or secrets if I’m using any type of 3rd party service.
So far this seems to be working well. It would be great if I could write everything in Org and export as needed. This might work well with my developer site, but I don’t know how I would be able to pull in posts and format them correctly in WordPress. There might be plugins that can handle that?
Org has helped me write more (one of my goals for 2020). I’ve been writing in my journal a few times every day since April 16th, 2021, and I’m already up to 16K words (plus another 7K in my notes). Org lets me tag entries too so I can quickly return to them. For example, I put masters on everything from Crestron Masters this year:
So if you’re looking for a good note-taking system, I’d recommend Org Mode in Emacs.
Kiel the Coder 