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Keeping Journal logs organized

I take lots of notes when I program or think through designs. I used to write everything on legal pads. Now I handwrite my notes in Windows Journal on a Tablet PC.

How do I do it? I create a separate Journal document for each day that I work on a given project. I group the files created for each day by project name. Each project is stored in its own directory.

For example, I have one directory for ShareKMC, one for TabletSaver, and one for InkPlayer.

I use the name of the project as the name of the file and append the date in YYYYMMDD format to each filename. This way the files appear sorted alphabetically by date and it's an easy way for me to come up with unique names for the files.

In Journal you can handwrite the document title. The text is automatically recognized when the file is saved. Here's my Journal document for today for the InkPlayer project:

There are a couple guidelines I use to ensure that the handwriting recognizer works well:

1. Use cursive or mixed case. Don't print in all caps. The recognizer does poorly with upper case characters.
2. The recognition is dictionary based, so use words that the recognizer will know. For instance, the dictionary won't have "InkPlayer," but it does have "Ink Player"--so I've deliberately added a space between the two words. Works like a charm.
3. Write big, with medium speed. If I write too small or too fast, the recognition doesn't work as well.

OK. So now that I have all these files, how do I find anything? Easy. Journal can search handwritten text across multiple files. Here's a screenshot of the "Find Dialog."

In this example, I'm searching for the word "crash" in all the files stored in the "InkPlayer" folder. Three files were found to contain the word crash. I can select one of these files to go to its first occurrence of the word "crash."

Actually, I can count on one hand the number of times I've tried to search for something in Journal. But it's nice to know it's there. I usually just open a file and manually scan through the pages. Yeah, I'm visually oriented.

What I'd really like to be able to do is gather up my undone or marked tasks spread across multiple days worth of notes and create a new list from them. Microsoft OneNote does this. But OneNote is still under construction so I'm waiting for a more stable version. I hear that fixes (for grouping problems, slow rendering, etc) are on the way. I can't wait.

Posted by Loren at June 17, 2003 02:48 PM