[stuntkite]

I do all the writing first thing when I sit down in the morning. Before I talk to anyone. I use a dot journal, kind of like a graph paper moleskin, but a dot grid. Date the left page and time. Do feelings. I’ll also note the weather, if it’s a special day or holiday and if people are around, who. Then I review the last few pages and I start musing. On the right page I title “<project name> todo:” and start making the list. As I roll over previous day unfinished tasks I x them out on previous day and see if they need to be reworded or broken out. Completed tasks get a check. The body of the left page is free space. Sometimes I’ll write out a conflict I am trying to process. Sometimes just list house chores. Sometimes I draw out process flow or network layouts. I try to empty my head of all the things I’m juggling so that before I say a word at “work” I am a clean slate without too much wonder.

I check things off and add new things during the day, but it’s usually not a lot of tasking unless there’s a crisis. A year in, crisis seems to be pretty rare now. No one else I work with does anything similar. It does frequently appear that I am ahead of risk by weeks before other people start clocking it. In the beginning the lists were all catch-up, and now they are sometimes about things coming in the next quarter.

I’ve been work journaling for years but I made this effort to formalize and structure at the beginning of the last year when moving into a startup with a lot of internal problems and some huge lifts. Jira was a lie and accountability was missing on all sides. I knew I wouldn’t survive without building my own consensus on truth.

I also did tutorials on architect handwriting to improve my clarity. It sounds silly, but my scribbles would vary a lot and now that structure really helps the process.

I think it’s had a net positive in all aspects of my life. It’s my favorite part of the day.

[zrobotics]

RE the architect handwriting tutorials: do you have any recommendations? I can barely read my own scribbles, and I've struggled with poor penmanship forever. I'd looked for courses/tutorials, but hadn't found anything that resonated.

[stuntkite]

I have a few friends that are draftsmen. I asked them and they said they just gave them a font and graded them on it with homework blueprints.

What I did was just googled architect fonts and downloaded a bunch of examples then used a field notes pocket dot journal[0] to practice.

I would just try to copy a font exactly, then do drills on problem letters. I probably drilled on four fonts I found that I liked. Focusing on accuracy monospacing and staying in the grid. A big thing I learned was that it was ok to slow down, it gives me more time to think about the thing, the clarity of the lettering seems to reflect the clarity of the idea. I think previous attempts to improve my handwriting had failed because I wanted to write as fast as I type. It's a different thing obviously, but I didn't really realize the benefits the slower pace has for processing things and concept recall.

I also bought some drafting tools. Angle rulers, protractor, etc. I decided to overdo a couple network layout projects and work on it in that context. The end product was so nice that I laminated a bunch and gave them to people and they’ve been a great reference!

Oh, there is also a tool called an architectural lettering guide[1] that can be helpful.

It took about three weeks to really kick in. Now I’ve got my own style and it changes a bit still and I experiment, but the core just adds to the rote process of the daily exercise. I can see by looking through the journal if I'm not fully on my game by how much drift there is.

I would probably drill for 10-20 minutes a day for the first week. After that, it was just here and there if I noticed something just wasn't working. Like when I decided Ps and Ys got flourishes, but only in some context. Also changing anything usually meant other letters would start regressing to my scrawl. It's weird how related the patterns are in your head.

Another thing that helped me was finding a pencil I liked. I ended up with a super fat 5.6mm HB firm lead on a woodworkers pencil[2]. It sharpens to a fine point and holds it forever and never breaks. Always using the same tool is really important to me now. I had to go through a bunch of stuff until I found a pencil I didn’t hate. It might not be the right one for you. I love them though and buy extras and hand them out to anyone that likes to write. My polling seems to agree that they are dope.

Here is a pretty good blog[3].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Set-Dotted-Notebook-Travel-Journal/dp...

[1] https://www.dickblick.com/products/alvin-ames-lettering-guid...

[1] https://www.woodcraft.com/products/woodcraft-woodworkers-pen...

[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/artdepartmental.com/2009/10/12/...

[MarvelousWololo]

Even though I was not able to understand 100% of it (non native speaker) it was a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing that!

[fencepost]

As a quick note, if you want the dot grid notebook (vs the smaller 3x5 memo books) from Field Notes, it's the Pitch Black Notebook: https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/pitch-black-note

[amenod]

Just wanted to say - thank you for sharing this! This sounds like an incredible idea and I can't wait to try it out.

I already seem to work better when I write down whatever development tasks I have on paper, but it has never occured to me that management tasks could be handled in a similar fashion.

[stuntkite]

No problem! It was hard for me moving from dev to management. I think a key difference in the tasks is that the majority of management tasks are personal and cannot be collaborative or even public. They involve peoples feelings and behavior. Sharing them to scrum the problem would shame people for no reason and cause a mutiny. As a manager, my task is to catch chaos and distill it to comforting direction. You can’t write good software if you are aware of the terror of the day to day. Daily terror should be invisible to my team so when real emergencies happen, it’s not stacked on a constant pressure of minor annoyance. Predictability in the day is so critical for engineers to produce amazing shit. Predictability allows for room to experiment.

I think that is why journaling is so effective. If you rely on dev tools and tracking for management tasks without journaling you have no outlet for the real work of the job, sifting human conflict and ambition into a rewarding work environment. Through that, building a cohesive historical narrative that can act in defense of my teammates when shifting goals make engineering look like it failed and giving a concrete foundation for process improvement.

[tra3]

That was so great. I've been journaling for a while now but can't seem to leverage it as much as you have.

I'm especially curious about how it helps you anticipate risks. If you have a way to illustrate this I'd most appreciate it.