(2017-09-10) Boyd Quip As A Daybook A Digital Work Journal

Stowe Boyd: Quip as a DayBook: A Digital Work Journal. Over the past year or so, I’ve used a varity of tools to implement what I now call a daybook, and formerly called Daybook journalling. (NoteBook) ((2016-10-17) Boyd Daybook Journaling Calendar Centric Work Management)

In this post I will outline how I use Quip as my daybook, and how that integrates with project and goal planning.

The image below is a screenshot of a Quip document, titled '2017-09’. This is the mocked-up daybook for the month of September.

Note that I keep this document in a Quip folder called 'Journal’ with the monthly dabooks, as well as individual journal files like '2019-09-06 call with Joe Jinx’.

The rest of the document is a series of weeks, each set off with a horizontal rule. In this case there are two weeks. The topmost week is '36 week: 4-10 September’, the most recent week. I approach Journaling like blogging: the most recent post should be at the top, which is one of the benefits of digital journaling. (WeeklyReview)

In each of the weeks are – surprise – a sequence of days, which like weeks have most recent on top.

At the start of each month, I create a new month daybook. I don’t layout the weeks and days all at one time. I do those weekly and daily

At the start of each week, I create a new week section, carry forward goals from the previous week and also add new goals

I have links in the month daybook to two projects, one named AdjectiveNoun (my default fictitious company name), and one called (confusing) Daybook, where I am mocking up a project to create this post

tasks and goals in projects also intrude into the day-to-day work of individual contributors. Because of that overlap I think of two sorts of tasks: project tasks versus daybook tasks. (ToDoList)

A project task might be something like 'post on Daybook Journaling’. But within in the daybook, this might be broken down to subtasks, like 'mockup a monthly daybook document’ and 'describe daybook use’. Also, because of the ins-and-outs of scheduling, I might created several 'work on the mockup monthly daybook document’ tasks on different days, and checked them off. Note that such checkmarks don’t mean the entire project task is done, but only that during that day I did in fact work on the project task for some period of time. It could take a series of daybook tasks that are tied to 'working on’ a project task before the project task is done. At that point, I would go to the project document and check the corresponding project task...