When I first did a chemistry class in high school, this was the first thing they taught us. At the time I thought it was the most boring pointless thing ever. Of course now I realise how important it is in academia and industry (to have evidence of the discovery process) and while I don't have to do this or follow it exactly, I do approximate to this and have found it very useful. It's also the only useful thing I took out of chemistry class as I was a terrible student :)
In addition to that, I now keep an open text editor tab with the following items and update it several times a day:
I discovered this independently. After years of trying and failing to organize my notes by project/folder I finally was inspired by my scientist wife's labbook entries and decided that to try an append only log (which happens to be an org file).
My current main labbook.org file has 20k lines and a header for each day. Super easy to just search for any content/tags. I use org todo tracking (which mostly just automates toggling between [TODO][DONE]) and the org babel features mean that I can also use it like a python/jupyter notebook with little code snippets and visual graphs. I use snippets of python, graphviz, shell most often but occasionally sqlite/duckdb/too.
I use org-mode with the journal plugin, but I'm soon going to switch to zk[0]. My technique is called interstitional journaling[1], and I keep track of my location (I travel a lot) and the date in the header of the file, which gets generated by org. You can set up an interstitional journal in anything though, Logseq[2] supports it out of the box.
I used to keep a clipboard with as sheets as I could hold and then drop the oldest into a cabinet.
Then I did the “hackers pda,” just a stack of index cards with a binder clip. And I would spike the oldest onto one of those restaurant order metal spikey things.
Now I just use obsidian. But I miss the tactile and visual artifacts.
Commonplace books, reading reflection, daily log, zettelkasten are all alternative techniques that achieve much the same as a log book, with various pros and cons to each. Building a Second Brain is also an interesting technique, but is more focused on knowledge documentation rather than logging and benefits massively from being digitised.
I'm a believer that logbooks, journals, diaries, notes, or whatever else you want to call it, are a personal thing and so it's about finding your own way of achieving what you want to achieve with those things. I've not found a single technique that works for me as it's described. That may be an issue with the author, the article, the concept or (more likely) me. But I try to adopt the ideas that I found work well and drop those that didn't.
I keep a bullet journal, although it's kind of somewhere between a bullet journal, commonplace book and daily log. Similar to the article, I tend to take lists of tasks each day; not as a todo list, but as a list of things I want to achieve. As I achieve them, they get ticked off. As I progress them, I write notes about what I'm doing or have done towards them, perhaps splitting them down into smaller tasks, etc.
There's also some personal tracker things from bujo I use, but they are generally just metadata around each daily log. Things like mental health, meal tracking, etc. But the most important thing is separating daily logs from single and double page spreads, and labeling them in a contents page for easy navigation.
If I come across something of interest, I treat it like a commonplace book to capture that interesting thing; recipes, project ideas, reference materials, arbitrary thoughts, and more. Similar to zettelkasten's fleeting notes concept, anything I want to revisit later I write down.
In my opinion, the power of this technique comes from how to link these things together - just writing them down isn't all that useful to me. So maintaining an accurate contents page to be able to quickly jump to a project or tracker spread makes navigation easier, while also maintaining an index for collating specific ideas mentioned sporadically across the entire logbook means I can trace an idea through the logbook (or multiple logbooks). These both mean I can actually go back and look at something specific, or quickly scan for topics that may relate to a new idea and leverage the work I put in when originally writing it.
But, this is just what works for me and doesn't necessarily mean anybody else would benefit from it. And I think this is the key thing naturally omitted by many note taking tutorials, blogs, etc. They're trying to sell you on the solution to end all your problems, when there's no guarantees that the technique even works let alone will work for you.
https://www.ruf.rice.edu/~bioslabs/tools/notebook/notebook.h...
When I first did a chemistry class in high school, this was the first thing they taught us. At the time I thought it was the most boring pointless thing ever. Of course now I realise how important it is in academia and industry (to have evidence of the discovery process) and while I don't have to do this or follow it exactly, I do approximate to this and have found it very useful. It's also the only useful thing I took out of chemistry class as I was a terrible student :)
In addition to that, I now keep an open text editor tab with the following items and update it several times a day:
An in-progress list
A todo list
A "blocked" list
A "done" list (sections for each week)
That works pretty well for me.