The 'work log'

I continue to try to be more deliberate in how I work.

I continue to fail.

Why bother?

This desire has a few roots. I'd like to be as close to the canonical ideal of Johnny.Decimal -- the persona, not the man -- as possible. Every time I do something in my business and I'm not doing it JDex-first, a fairy loses its wings decimal loses some precision.

This isn't some idealistic dream. Things are worse when I forget to update my JDex. I run a business with a whole bunch of complexity and I do it from a 13" laptop from a hotel room desk. So when I forget to update some detail about how my mailing list is configured, say, then that bites me later. It's lost time, more work, and a frustration because I have the tools. I have no excuse. I invented the tools!

I am also prone to jumping between tasks during the day. This isn't good for an ADHD-ish brain, it isn't good for productivity, and it's exhausting.

So that's the goal. Picture my work habits as a colony of ants, each holding some morsel of goodness, dashing around seemingly at random, every tempting scent an invitation to turn off the current path.

I'd like to work more like an old dog heading towards its bowl. Plod towards the bowl. Eat what's in the bowl. Maybe lie down a moment. Good dog.

How?

I've already got a task manager, and I already know how to use it -- see my tiny-window-at-the-top-left technique from this video at around 03:00 (requires access to JDU/Task & Project Management).

And I've already got a JDex with an entry for everything I do. I've been playing with this idea of a 'work log' for a while, so I'm going to combine these two techniques along with timers and some checkpoints through the day.

None of this is rocket science. I just need to do it and form some good habits.

Work log

I still haven't found a good tool for this, so it's something I'm going to build into JDHQ. But for now here's what I'm doing in Obsidian, which runs my JDex for the business.

The goal is to 'check-in' and 'check-out' of IDs as I work on them. This keeps me on track; allows me to log a quick line or two about what I did; and provides visibility of everything I touched at the end of the day/week/month.

I'll outline it here but don't worry about the details. I'm still tweaking this and will do another post later.

I have a note up in my system standard zero, 00.15 Work logs, by the day. It serves purely as a target for backlinks, because in each entry that I touch through the day, I have a header Work logs and under there I create entries that look like this:

- [[00.15 Work logs, by the day#2026-02-26|2026-02-26 09:04]]
  - Checked in.

There's a bit of Markdown magic going on there.¹ Again, details for a future post. How this looks in note 00.15 is what matters.

I've filtered the backlinks on today's date, and there's what I'm doing now, and what I've done so far. Nice.

Statement of intent

I'm telling you all that I'm doing this so that I keep doing it. I'll report my findings each week, and summarise what I've been working on.

100% human. 0% AI. Always.