When working on non-trivial tasks, I always keep a text document open to log my work (Word, SQL or Markdown depending on the context). I sometimes save the document when I'm done, but it invariably ends up in a project/client directory and seldom being read again.<p>I'm looking for a way of writing, archiving and searching my logs - a personal, taggable blog of what I did a specific day - so I can both go through my work chronologically ("What did I do that day or week?") or by project ("What did I do last time I worked on that project or for that client?"). It must necessarily be fast and very responsive, and embedding images by drag&drop or copy&paste would be great, but otherwise the needs are pretty basic.<p>What do you use to log your work, and how do you organize your logs?
Workflowy (<a href="https://workflowy.com/" rel="nofollow">https://workflowy.com/</a>) is my goto for keeping lists, planning, and tracking my work/project logs.<p>For work, I have a section structured as such:
Work > {CLIENT} > {YEAR} > {MONTH} > {DAY, HOURS, SUMMARY}<p>e.g. A day's entry might look like:<p>8/13/2014, 6.75h, One-liner summary of the big ticket accomplishments today
* 11 - 12,30, 1 - 6,15
* [x] #ASAP Task 1 description
* [x] Task 2 description
* [x] Task 3 description
* [x] Meeting with @client @coworker1
* Notes from meeting...
* More notes...<p>I track my hours worked in shorthand and format {DAY, HOURS, SUMMARY} because I dump and parse the data at the end of the month to generate my invoices.<p>SQL, Markdown, or code snippets is a little trickier, but you can hang multi-line text as a sub-node using SHIFT+ENTER. In general, Workflowy offers a ton of great keyboard shortcuts and pretty decent search capability. Media attachments would need to be as URLs AFAIK.<p>I've been using it for 2-3 years and if they ever decided to close shop, I would seriously try spinning up a similar service.
I have a "log file" for each week, broken down by day where I keep track of my TODOs and check them off. I put little notes next to the todos that describe what exactly I did, but not in much detail. But I can easily go back to 12/05/2011 and see exactly what I did that day. I usually plan one week in advance, but I only put task details there once I actually figure them out.<p>"What did I do last time I worked on that project or for that client?" is more difficult. I'm a fan of using blossom.io + Slack (slack.com) for large projects or startups. Usually there is only one such project I am working on. If you have lots of different project then these tools may cause too much overhead...
I'm using a desktop wiki : <a href="http://zim-wiki.org/" rel="nofollow">http://zim-wiki.org/</a><p>I use it in a messy way, but it's what i want : take a note quickly.<p>I create a page by day with the calendar and there is a full text search tool for when I need to find and old note
I also like the task plugin : you put a todo mark in any page and you have an icon to regroup all the "todos". I put some keywords sometimes, to help to remember later or when i'm using the search tool.<p>There is a picture plugin, but it's just keeping a link to the real picture, so it's lost when you move it.<p>I know there is the same kind of tool for vim, but i didn't try it.
I've just started playing around with Harvest (getharvest.com); it might be worth checking out if you're already using some kind of task-manager (because they integrate with tools like Asana). Makes it easy to see what you did, which projects it was for, and to bill the client accordingly.
Wiki on a USB stick :D
<a href="https://www.dokuwiki.org/install:dokuwiki_on_a_stick" rel="nofollow">https://www.dokuwiki.org/install:dokuwiki_on_a_stick</a><p>Get synkron, configure it to mirror your wiki to a harddisk as backup and you're set.
At my job we have a JIRA server running. It is a big enterprise piece of software, but you can log stories and tasks pretty well. If it were up to me I would use something else, albeit I am not sure what that is.
When I was on my own, I used Google Doc to keep track of daily logs in a loose way. I am getting a team so I switch to asana. It has been for 3-days I am fine with that.