I have been doing this for years. Every morning, I create a new Markdown file with the day's date, copy the previous day's content into it, and edit it. Mine has (for now) the following sections: Morning checklist, Todo, Done, and Meeting Notes.
The morning checklist consists of things like checking email, checking Teams, skimming the team's handover queue, logging into various things, etc.
Todo is a stack of things I can/should tackle. Most important ones to the top. I limit it to 15 items, no matter what. But realistically, I typically only interact with about the top 5 99% of the time.
Done gets wiped every morning and I add things to it as I do them. Things like, "emailed Joe Schmo for 3rd time to ask for ETA", or "helped Fred troubleshoot the frobnitz." Little things that I would totally forget about but cumulatively end up taking a huge chunk of the day. I've never had a boss that expressed a concern, but I think of it as my primary defense if anyone accuses me of slacking off all day. (Maybe it's just to convince myself...)
Each meeting I go to gets its own section for the day. If the content was important enough to save into my second brain[1], I clean it up and transfer it over there at the end of the day, or the beginning of the next day at worst.
Any complex investigation or rabbit hole gets its own section as well. It's astonishingly difficult for me to actually reason about any complex system or design without writing it out and actually describing it to myself. I envy those who can just "see" it all at once in their mind's eye. If ends up being important enough to save, I will clean it up and share it with the team and/or dump it into my personal wiki.
The morning checklist consists of things like checking email, checking Teams, skimming the team's handover queue, logging into various things, etc.
Todo is a stack of things I can/should tackle. Most important ones to the top. I limit it to 15 items, no matter what. But realistically, I typically only interact with about the top 5 99% of the time.
Done gets wiped every morning and I add things to it as I do them. Things like, "emailed Joe Schmo for 3rd time to ask for ETA", or "helped Fred troubleshoot the frobnitz." Little things that I would totally forget about but cumulatively end up taking a huge chunk of the day. I've never had a boss that expressed a concern, but I think of it as my primary defense if anyone accuses me of slacking off all day. (Maybe it's just to convince myself...)
Each meeting I go to gets its own section for the day. If the content was important enough to save into my second brain[1], I clean it up and transfer it over there at the end of the day, or the beginning of the next day at worst.
Any complex investigation or rabbit hole gets its own section as well. It's astonishingly difficult for me to actually reason about any complex system or design without writing it out and actually describing it to myself. I envy those who can just "see" it all at once in their mind's eye. If ends up being important enough to save, I will clean it up and share it with the team and/or dump it into my personal wiki.
[1]: https://github.com/cu/silicon