Captain's Log

#productivity
Here's a short tip to stay on top of things.

In my job, I have to stay on top of a lot of things, many of which take months moving along, with only occasional involvement. Sometimes, topics need my attention for a bit, then they disappear from my radar for some time (in extreme cases, even years) before they come back.

What I strive to achieve is a state where I can go to any of these things - let's call them projects - and pick up where I left off at any time, and I want to do so with as little friction as possible. Ideally, I just open a document, or a page in my notebook, and I am right back in the middle of things.

To achieve this, I am using a timestamped, append-only Captain's Log.

This is directly inspired by my all-time favourite show, Star Trek. A common narration device in Star Trek is the Captain's Log, where the captain states the current stardate and a brief summary of what is going on. What is really going on here, of course, is the TV show talking directly to us, the audience, and clueing us in about what is going on. This differs from the typical "Previously on..." narrations in two crucial ways: Firstly, it's not unusual for a Captain's Log to also be narrated after a commercial break, to get everyone back on the same page. And secondly, it's typically very short, a sentence or two.

I use the same for my projects. It's timestamped insofar that I start with the current date first. Then comes the Captain's Log: A sentence or two which persists the key things which have been going on since the last Captain's Log. And it's append-only: When things change, I never update the old entries, I always only add the new entry to the bottom. If I have completely forgotten about a project, I read through the entries top to bottom to restore the context. And if I remember some, but not all, details - which is the default case - I start at the bottom and move upwards until I am confident that I am all caught up.

I do this once per week, every week, for all projects which I have on the radar. Besides tracking projects which are somewhat in progress or some sort of "done" (for example, completed or cancelled), I also treat some projects as "Off-Focus", which means: Stuff is ongoing somewhere by someone, but I do not need to care about this. This project might come back, but in all probability, it never does. Whenever I move a topic off-focus, my Captain's Log tends to become a bit longer so on the off-change the topic does come back, it's easier for me to dive back in.

I can't stress enough that the key to making this work is brevity. Writing a Captain's Log every week for 20+ projects would be cumbersome if each update would be more than one or two very short sentences, and going through past log entries would be horrible if that meant reading through huge walls of texts. The context necessary to understanding the log entry comes from all preceding entries.

Here are some real examples:

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