[dcminter]

The "lab book" form might be of interest. Here's an example guide to keeping one:

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.

[shanemhansen]

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.

It's really the only system that's worked for me.