Research journal

The record of the work as it happened. Entries are written the day they describe and are never edited afterwards. If an entry turns out to be wrong, a later entry says so; correcting the past in place destroys the only property that makes this record worth keeping.

Structure

YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD.mdx. Year and month directories, because a doctorate produces enough entries that a flat directory stops being navigable in the second year.

What an entry contains

Four things, in this order.

1. Done. What was actually worked on, not what was planned.
2. Happened. Results, failures, conversations, anything external.
3. Thinking. Where the current understanding moved.
4. Next. The single next action, not a list of intentions.

Ten minutes at the end of the day. An entry that takes an hour will not be written tomorrow.

Why this beats memory

A year later, the question “when did we know that the first approach would not work?” has an exact answer, and the answer is usually months earlier than anyone remembers.