[jkingsman]

Keep lab notes! I keep detailed daily notes of what I've learned, code I've run, what my todo list is, etc. in markdown. Getting in the daily habit helps you not go "eh I don't need notes for this" and is a GODSEND come review time when you need to write a self eval.

When I onboarded at a larger (10k people) company, I asked my manager for people who did a similar role to me across the company and asked for a fifteen minute time slot on their calendar to ask about how they work, what they thought was vital for me to learn or would be an accelerant to my onboarding, any tips or tricks for working with the company or our tools, and other people they thought would have good answers for those questions, and then rinse and repeat for that new list of people. I ended up doing ten interviews in my first two weeks, published a little internal blog post about common themes and what I learned, and that helped shape a lot about how I worked. Not to mention that type of proactivity in and of itself impressed a lot of people; doing things for clout is dumb but making things you learn public and synthesizing them into a form that's accessible to others is an important hallmark of a senior in my opinion.

Ask SO many questions. Got opaque docs that are important? Ask for a quick meeting with the person who wrote them to make sure your understanding is crystal clear. Abandoning ego and being a knowledge sponge makes such a huge difference.

[jonnycoder]

Notes are extremely helpful, including those about coworkers you meet. Write down every detail during or after your meeting. Use a mind map program (miro works ok).

With the power of LLMs, notes will be even more helpful as we come up with more innovative ways to parse our daily lives.

[wojciii]

Notes are important for me.. I write a (private) timestamped diary which I can go back to and find out why I did something at a specific time when asked about it.

I work as a consultant so I need to do this when requested, but it gives me a quick way to remember details that I would otherwise forget and also quicky get to speed after a vacation or weekend by reading my notes and TODOs from the previous week.

[rolothrow]

On the topic of notes: are there any standard formats you prefer: I've been guilty in the past of ending up with a chaotic endless MD and I'd like a bit more process

[jmholla]

Not the OP, but I've ended up on a good note taking pattern that works for me. I create a new folder each week with the week number of my time of employment as the name. Then, all notes for that week get put in that folder. I don't know why, but this works for me. I think knowing there's a place for them that I know I can find them later lowers the activation energy I need to take notes. Also, I put the top-level folder in my `CDPATH`.

It's not a process, but I found this gives some structure to the chaos.

[soulofmischief]

I recommend Logseq if you're taking notes on a computer. Takes a moment to wrap your head around an outliner if you haven't used one, but after a short while notes will fly from your fingertips.

Being able to quickly jot things down and later revisit and expand them is crucial. Logseq also gives you a fresh journal for each day, and you can make and reference your own topic-specific pages as well.