I have kept a work journal in Notion since July 2021, five years now. I started it for two reasons: to have details on hand at self-review time, and to stop walking into 1-on-1s trying to remember what I meant to raise. A page for the month, a few lines for the day, sometimes nothing but a branch name so Monday-me could find what Friday-me had been doing. It asked very little of me, and for years that was fine.
This year my work became several applications at once, integrations between them, demo deadlines, and a steady stream of AI-assisted coding sessions that each produce more output than any meeting ever did. The days got denser, the context switches got faster, and the few-lines-a-day journal quietly got buried in copy-and-pasted noise.
I did not realize how much until I read the whole thing back, February through July. Six months of notes, three different note-taking systems. I only remember deciding to build one of them. The first two happened to me: my few lines a day turned into pasted Claude Code transcripts, and then into breadcrumbs, a half-finished thought with a claude --resume command under it, pointing at where the real context lived. I never decided to write either kind.
