Personally, I tend to create a master note for each project like this I dig into, and dump as much information into it as I can. This helps me keep track of what I’ve looked at and avoid retracing my steps too much, and in the end would be a good basis for a blog post.
I used to be able to write about things like this from memory, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to rely quite a bit more on journaling and using “2nd brain” tools like Obsidian.
One of the most useful habits I ever started is using Obsidian’s daily journal feature to jot things down every day:
- Things I’m working on that day
- How I’m feeling
- Ideas that pop up about projects
- References to useful sites / code snippets / various explorations
It’s one of the few tools I’ve found that lets me dump truly just about everything into it, and by the end of a project, I either have a nice collection of draft paragraphs to clean up in a blog post, or a nice future reference for myself when I want to do something similar in the future. And because of the automatic note-to-note connections that Obsidian builds, the daily journal always links back to the more concrete topic notes I’ve touched that day.
> writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard
It was only hard until I had established the habit. Now I can’t imagine not doing it because of the productivity gains that come with it. I get further on things because everything I do leaves behind a tangible bit of progress (in the form of a note) that I can pick back up later.
I used to be able to write about things like this from memory, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to rely quite a bit more on journaling and using “2nd brain” tools like Obsidian.
One of the most useful habits I ever started is using Obsidian’s daily journal feature to jot things down every day:
- Things I’m working on that day
- How I’m feeling
- Ideas that pop up about projects
- References to useful sites / code snippets / various explorations
It’s one of the few tools I’ve found that lets me dump truly just about everything into it, and by the end of a project, I either have a nice collection of draft paragraphs to clean up in a blog post, or a nice future reference for myself when I want to do something similar in the future. And because of the automatic note-to-note connections that Obsidian builds, the daily journal always links back to the more concrete topic notes I’ve touched that day.
> writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard
It was only hard until I had established the habit. Now I can’t imagine not doing it because of the productivity gains that come with it. I get further on things because everything I do leaves behind a tangible bit of progress (in the form of a note) that I can pick back up later.