AI Powered Work Journal Idea Feedback

Hi there!

I've been playing with an idea that I'd love a little feedback on.

I'm a software engineer at a big company and I am always looking for ideas to aid in my job. One of the primary challenges in any complex job is keeping track of details over time. I have to keep track of requirements, code reviews, code snippets, links, meeting notes, and a million other things. I know pretty much every other knowledge profession has to do this in some form or another. But one of the hardest things I have to keep track of is my trajectory. It is really easy to let a week go by and realize that I forgot what I did on Monday or Tuesday. I think it must have been valuable, right? Lets hope so. But the problem compounds the longer the time period you are thinking about. What did I do two weeks ago? A month ago? Its really easy to just lose that time. But there are times where it is really important to remember these things like when you have a one-on-one meeting with your boss every two weeks or a quarterly performance review. Wouldn't it be nice to look back and see what I was thinking about and doing over time? I could use this information to make sure I am making progress on a trajectory that will make an impact.

My current solution is to journal every day at the end of the day. I try to do this as religiously as possible but I don't always succeed. I tend to have jam packed days and lose track of what I was doing in the morning when I journal in the afternoon. All too often I will just forget to journal even if I have a calendar event for it. But when I do journal my best technique is to ask myself the same 5 questions every day:

1. What did you accomplish today?
2. What went well today?
3. What didn't go well today?
4. Who did you talk to today and what did you talk about?
5. What are you going to do tomorrow?

By answering these questions every day I get a solid record of my trajectory. When I start the next day I look back at the previous day and see what I did and what I wanted to accomplish yesterday. Building this record is invaluable to ensure that I am making progress towards my project and work goals over time. It is also a great resource to use for things like meetings with my boss or performance reviews. To make things easier I wrote a little script to do this. I just run it at the command line, answer the questions, and it writes a journal entry to a folder on my machine.

But there are problems with my technique:

1. It is easy to forget to journal or get distracted and just not do it
2. As I journal I struggle to remember things I did throughout the day
3. My journal is not searchable with metadata
4. I am not good at providing enough details or just give one word answers
5. It takes a lot of time and effort to summarize what is in my journal
6. Specifics that matter get lost
7. Meeting details get lost

My idea is to build a software solution around this work journaling technique to address these problems and build a great solution for this problem. What I've realized is that if was prompted to journal throughout the day after certain events or on a time interval I could collect a lot more relevant information. I regularly have days packed with meetings and by the end of the day I lose all the details of what we talked about and what the takeaways were. I could tailor the questions the app would ask based on the type of meeting it was or by asking semi random questions that prompt effective information gathering. I could allow the user to dial up or down the number of these prompts throughout the day or week and to select what questions they care about answering. I could then offer tools to review the generated journal at whatever interval the user cares about like searchablity, timeline review, and seaching by date. I can also build in some AI to automatically summarize these entries over time.

I've also become obsessed with voice dictation lately and think it would be a huge value add. I use it in my personal journal and end up with a lot more information and better entries. I can plan to include a dictation option for journaling in the app.

The main value propositions would be:

1. Automatic facilitation of a running work journal through intelligent questions
2. Intelligent prompting to journal based on calendar events or custom intervals
3. Metadata collection about journaling frequency, volume, and commitment scores
4. General enough to use for many different professions: sales, accounting, engineering, etc.
5. Review tools like automatic summarization, keyword search, entry search, timeline search
6. Automatic prompts to review the journal

I have all the skills to make this happen on my own. What I am looking to hear is whether this seems like a tractable idea that someone would eventually pay money for and to get some feedback to see if it would be useful to you!

Thanks!