Ask HN: Do you have a project logbook?

Workflowy (<a href="https://workflowy.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workflowy.com&#x2F;</a>) is my goto for keeping lists, planning, and tracking my work&#x2F;project logs.<p>For work, I have a section structured as such: Work &gt; {CLIENT} &gt; {YEAR} &gt; {MONTH} &gt; {DAY, HOURS, SUMMARY}<p>e.g. A day&#x27;s entry might look like:<p>8&#x2F;13&#x2F;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&#x27;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 &quot;log file&quot; 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&#x2F;05&#x2F;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>&quot;What did I do last time I worked on that project or for that client?&quot; is more difficult. I&#x27;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&#x27;m using a desktop wiki : <a href="http://zim-wiki.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zim-wiki.org&#x2F;</a><p>I use it in a messy way, but it&#x27;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 &quot;todos&quot;. I put some keywords sometimes, to help to remember later or when i&#x27;m using the search tool.<p>There is a picture plugin, but it&#x27;s just keeping a link to the real picture, so it&#x27;s lost when you move it.<p>I know there is the same kind of tool for vim, but i didn&#x27;t try it.

I&#x27;ve just started playing around with Harvest (getharvest.com); it might be worth checking out if you&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dokuwiki.org&#x2F;install:dokuwiki_on_a_stick</a><p>Get synkron, configure it to mirror your wiki to a harddisk as backup and you&#x27;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.

Workflowy works great but sometimes it gets tricky (depending on how you&#x27;d like to format things).