Why I like keeping a work log

The hardest part of switching between projects is often remembering where I left off. A few days later, I might remember that I tried something and that it worked. The part I actually need is what I changed and why I stopped there.

A good log entry can be two sentences. “Lowering the batch size stopped the crash. I still need to see how much slower it runs.” That’s enough to pick up the work without repeating the experiment or rereading a long chat. When I have several things going at once, I find it easier to leave a line like that before switching projects than to reconstruct the whole day later.

AI makes that habit more useful. I can ask it to pull decisions out of a week of notes or remind me which problems are still open. It can also sift through a web full of AI-generated material and use my notes to connect what it finds to the problem I’m actually working on. The closer I write an entry to when something happened, the easier it is to get the details right.

After a while, some entries are useful beyond the day I wrote them. If I run into the same kind of crash on a different project, I might pull those entries into a short note about what to look for and link back to the original experiments. Over time, a folder of work logs can grow into a personal knowledge base. Obsidian is a good fit for that because it lets me link notes that live as ordinary files on my computer. Most entries can stay right where I wrote them. Obsidian’s guide to linking notes · How Obsidian stores notes