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:
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:
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:
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!