I don& #39;t know what& #39;s on my to-do list for today because I haven& #39;t been able to think about work yet, but I haven& #39;t been able to think about work yet because I don& #39;t know what& #39;s on my to-do list https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="😠" title="Angry face" aria-label="Emoji: Angry face">

This felt like a problem for 20 minutes but then I remembered my strategy: Talk to myself into a text file for months as I plan, set up and execute new projects; whenever I can& #39;t get into the right headspace, read that text file over and remember where I was at and what& #39;s next.

These are the unfiltered, unstructured, stream-of-consciousness type files that I use to list competing ideas, or describe steps I& #39;m worried about, or express all the things I don& #39;t understand yet about the work I& #39;m doing.

Usually, I take these txt files as a starting point for the notes I send my supervisor for our meetings every 2 weeks. Those shared notes are usually texed, because I like to include graphs and tables and example sentences. Also, they have complete sentences and correct spelling.

It feels like 0 effort to me to take notes in that first, unstructured stage: As I said, it& #39;s basically me talking to myself and recording everything in case one of the things I say is a good idea. And then translating this into a clean file to share is also very little effort.

When it& #39;s my turn to give a talk in our colloquium, or when I prepare a paper to submit to a conference, I usually go from the clean notes and see if I need to add any details from the original notes. So I more or less have 3 tiers of continuous documentation of my work.