Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Work Journaling

Intro

I've used a technique I call Work Journaling since 2005 to capture weekly doc work and notes, for keeping myself honest and my projects on track, and as a handy resource for centralizing information that is relevant to my work.

Personal story

As I started my career as a technical writer (TW), I thought everything would be a breeze: coworkers would ask me for writing assistance and I would wave my (digital) pen and the project would be magically done. At the end of my first month as a TW, my manager asked me for a summary of the work I completed. "Well, I did some stuff on project X and started things on Y." My manager wasn't too happy with that summary. He advised me to take better notes on the work I started and completed in the next month. So I did. I created a folder on my Linux machine, named a text file June-2005.txt, and wrote my first note: "Completed project Y on 6/3/2005. 3 hours." I did this every time I started and completed a project. Happy, I submitted what looked like a grocery list to my manager at the end of the month. He commented that this was an improvement but I was still missing details. So I added more details and the day before the end of the month, I summarized my accomplishments down to 2-3 lines. Still better but if you asked me what I did a few months back, who I worked with, what resources I sourced from, I couldn't even guess. At this point, my weekly text file was just enough to hopefully jog my memory but the real show stopper was when it came to writing up a quarterly summary. I poured through my text files in a desperate attempt to identify what I accomplished, what was impactful, and useful to the people requesting documentation. Every month or so for the first year, I iterated on this person system until it included several levels of detail (what, who, where, when, resources, links, etc.) all categorized by projects or teams. I had found a workflow that suited my needs and style of project tracking.

Journal Levels

I recently learned that my work journal is another form of a bullet journal but only my version was all digital. I developed several patterns for using my work journal and they are basically expressed like this:
  • Minimal - sporadically noting your work
  • Semi organized - uses some form of structure, includes dates, and more frequent work notes
  • High organized - requires a daily habit of including work accomplished, includes who you worked with, why you worked on a project, where your work can be found, links to important resources and project tickets, a section for a weekly summary, and a section for current high and low priority projects
These levels all depend on your end goal with keeping a work journal. Are you trying to keep yourself on track? Write better regular summaries? Remind yourself of what you did before you left for a long vacation? All the above?

Journaling Strategy

A typical TW has several locations to find stats, metrics, project tickets, project-related resources, and multiple platforms where content may be sourced. Utilizing a work journal as a personal information hub and as an extension of project tracking, I have found that work journaling is a much better resource to centralize all your project needs in one platform and system. This habit of keeping a work journal has kept me on track with my projects, their due dates, who I can go to for help, keep me honest, and others accountable.

What should a work journal include? Lets review the five W's:
  • What
  • Why
  • Where
  • Who
  • When

What

When designing your own template for work journaling, decide on what you need to capture in your notes. How detailed should your notes be? Sometimes a single sentence is enough to capture a week's worth of work for a single project and other times, you may need to write a paragraph to help your future self sort things out when it comes to summary time. You can also keep meeting notes in your journal as well but they shouldn't be included in your weekly summary unless they have some bearing on your project work. Finally, I'm a big fan of linking everything from my work journal. Wiki pages, Jira tickets, work announcements (that affect my work), and other resources that are relevant to my current projects.
Another positive aspect of using a work journal is leaving yourself with information your future self will appreciate as I found most company's internal search and content platform organization can vary greatly and thus be unreliable form of recreating important summaries at critical times.

Why

Another aspect of keeping a work journal is answering the question of "why am I doing X?" Are you handing off a project to someone else? Need extra reminders? Tracking progress on a long-term project? Reaching a milestone summary point? Going on vacation? Why is writing this down important to me and/or the project?
If you're keeping a work journal for the sake of writing, you might be overthinking the process and end up wasting time.

Several years ago, I had a project put on hold. Everyone dropped what they were doing and moved onto different projects. Six or months later, the project was reactivated and I had left myself with enough context in my journal to get myself back on track. In fact, in the first meeting back on this project, the project owner didn’t recall where we had left off and I volunteered a summary of my notes. Within minutes, everyone on the team had a refreshed memory and the project successfully kicked off from there.

Where

Where you keep your journal is important. Keeping it localized to a workstation is good but keeping your notes on a platform that is cloud based so you can access it from any company-enabled workstation is best. Putting your journal in an open wiki isn't a good idea as the content is discoverable by the search engine thus polluting the search results for you and everyone else in the company that has access to this wiki. If your wiki platform has a feature to keep a personal space (like Confluence does), you can use that wiki space as long as the default settings don't expose personal spaces to the search results by default.
Using Google Docs is another option too that I've come to enjoy. Creating a folder for each year with a single document for each week hasn't steered me wrong yet.

Who

Your journal should include who you worked with and who you met with so that you can go back and thank them at the end of a big project or to remind yourself who to ask questions to when you need their assistance.
Consider the audience for your summaries. Does your manager need a regular status update? If so, tailor your summaries for your manager and not the projects. 
Is your journal just for you? If it is, you can simply keep a log of the work you completed, resources, and time spent (minimal approach) as long as it helps you keep on track and keep yourself honest.

Note: Work journals should be devoid of opinions about work or people. Keep the journal focused on the facts of the work. At the end of the day since this journal will likely be kept on a company server, this content is the property of the company. Don’t write something that you’ll later regret.

When

When you update your work journal is completely up to you. Those who adapted to a system like this like to do it throughout a day, at the end of a day, or at the end of a week. I'm more of the "as needed" type. As I wrap up a stage of a project during my work day, I add a little note to myself on what I accomplished, who was involved (if anyone other than myself), and other notes as necessary.
Others keep the meeting notes in a work journal, whenever they start, update, or end a project, or whenever they feel like they captured some important information. Some TWs drop a note or two in their journal and come back at the end of the day to add details so they can pick back up the next work day.
A good way to wind down your work week is to write up your weekly summary. This shouldn't be an exhaustive exercise but rather a quick review of all your project work and summarized down to a few bullet points per project.

When I first started keeping a work journal, I would write notes at the end of the day. The problem here was that I didn’t have a good habit of reminding myself to do this. The next day, I would sometimes struggle to remember what I did the previous day. At this point, I needed to help myself to reinforce this habit by including a bit of time at the end of the day by putting the time on my calendar.

Summaries

Summaries are important to your long term success of any project or on your career path as a TW. I found keeping a weekly journal, summarizing the daily information down to a few concise project points helped me write monthly summaries which in turn informed my long-term summaries (usually quarterly, bi-annual, or annual summaries). This is where the true magic of keeping a work journal comes to live: writing long-term summaries.

Weekly summaries

As mentioned earlier, I like to wind my work week down by setting aside 15-30 minutes to collect all my thoughts, condense all my weekly accomplishments, and plan for next week. At this point, I found that by doing this weekly exercise, I am better able to look at the bigger project picture and be able to filter out the noisy bits of my work week. 

The following is an example of a brief and simplified but accurate example of a weekly work journal:

June 26th 2023
The summary section is what would get shared with my manager and other interested parties.

Tip: When tailoring your summaries, keep in mind who will consume them on a regular basis. Keep them short and concise.

Monthly summaries

At the end of every month, I summarize all my weekly summarized into a condensed high-level project review. Tip: if you keep track of project or personal metrics, now is the time to include them into your journal.
There are various methods for condensing your weekly summaries into a monthly summary. The best that I found goes something like this:
  1. Review each week's summaries for their primary topics and organize that into a list for your monthly summary to categorize all your work.
  2. Scrub each weekly summary for highlights and goals met.
  3. Condense redundant information into one line. For example, if you spent the entire month researching and writing content, summarize this activity with just one line.
  4. Include any key collaborator names that are important to making progress on your projects.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you have exhausted all possible high level topics.

Long period summaries

Similar to monthly summaries, at the end of each quarter, half, or year, go through your monthly summaries and condense again. Boil down to the key projects but unlike the monthly summaries, add the why statement to each item. For example, let's say for the month of June, you completed a doc project and your summary line looks like this: "Collaborated with John to finalize the X feature." At the long period summary, if this was an important point, add why it was important or what the outcome was after it was completed. For example, I would revise this bullet point to read like this: "Collaborated with John to finalize the X feature which was mission critical to this release cycle as the Client needed this document on launch day and the document received 100 pages views in the first week."

Templating

Everyone has their own workflow and your work journal should fit your needs. You may choose a minimalist approach to journaling or go for maximum detail. Either way, you may want to create a template and customize to fit those needs which you can use again and again to start a fresh journal each week. Some use templating features of their chosen platform and others copy and paste the previous week's journal and strip out the unnecessary bits.

Your weekly template can be organized any way you see fit but if chronological order of things are important, consider the following structure:
  • Priority checklist (using checkboxes instead of bullets)
  • Weekly summary
  • Notes by day organized by category, project work, or by day
A monthly summary template may vary from month to month but the general structure usually follows that which you use in your weekly template. I like to keep all my monthly summaries in one document separated by month which then captures all the details for each project. Consider this format:
  • Month
    • Project X
      • High level detail 1
      • …
    • Project Y
      • High level detail 1
      • …
  • …
When I started condensing down to monthly summaries, my manager would limit me to 2-3 bullet points per project. Since then, I found that the level of detail may work or may not work depending on the scope and importance of the project. I still try to condense down to the good bits but I put a personal limit of 5 bullet points. Anything beyond that is probably too much detail for your consuming audience. The main point here is to condense as much as you can without sacrificing the important details.

Time Commitment

After presenting this concept of work journaling, the first question I usually get is "how much time do you spend writing all these journals?" I have a personal idea of how much time it takes me but for the first time user of this method, it will vary widely. When I first started journaling, I would spend about 15 minutes a week writing a minimalist journal. Once I moved up to a moderate detail level journal, my time spent doubled. As my habit grew stronger and stronger, time spent stayed around the 30 minute mark and my level of detail went up. I could pull out metrics, who, what, where my files were, ticket links, and when I worked on something in a quick search. At the end of each week, I would schedule myself 30 minutes to wrap up my journal, summarize, and review what I had planned for the next week.
Writing a monthly summary varies too. Depending on project activity levels, writing a monthly summary could take one to one and a half hours once a month. For long term summaries, again it would vary but for me writing a bi-annual summary, it would take me 2-3 hours once every six months. The better developed habit you have for organizing and keeping your journal would affect how quickly you can write your summaries.
In the end, having these summaries have been a great success for me as I have been able to pull out a project's status on a moment's notice, share with key stakeholders what was accomplished in any given time period, and also add lines to my resume on my key responsibilities.
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