Log Book Follow-up

Starting back in March I wrote a bunch of posts on logbooks: where do you keep your log book?, what do you keep in it? (and more of what you put in it). I can’t help it. The logbook is near and dear to my heart. I promised a follow-up posting. Finally… In summary (nothing in any particular order):

• What goes into a log book: pictures, code, text, screenscrapes, files, plots, handwriting, paper
• What do you use: Evernote, old style (bound notebook), loose paper, wiki/twiki, yojimbo, google wave, email (as in email a plot to yourself), tiddywiki, blogging software, text file, DEVON Think Personal, Journler (now defunct).

One thing I didn’t ask about but all of you contributed anyway was how the logbook got used (there is no right way – the logbook has to work for you, of course):

• Gave up – nothing but an inbox
• Just keep track of thinking
• Exploded: link services to track papers, paper for jotting down notes, email, etc. – a bit of everything
• Every last thing goes into the logbook, including bathroom breaks.

No one mentioned using a kindle/nook to read their logbook, btw. For software that gets used most like a logbook it looks to me like Evernote wins.

For me the most surprising method was email. And by surprising, I  mean smacking myself on the forehead because I’d not already thought of it. Here is the idea: just email your log book entries – with files and attachments, etc., to your logbook email account. Then use the power of search to recover whatever you want. And since you can stick it on Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo mail, you have almost no size restrictions – and it is available wherever you happen to have a internet connection. Further, since it is just email, it is trivial to write scripts to capture data and ship it off to the logbook.

Now, I’ll ramble a bit in way of conclusion…

Do you remember MIcrosoft’s failed phone, the Kin? It was basically a smart phone w/out the apps. But one of the cool things it did was called Kin Studio. The point was this – everything you did on the phone was uploaded to the cloud. All the text messages you sent or received, all the pictures you took, etc. Then on the web you could look back at any time at what you did and have a complete record. Now, that is a logbook.

Of course, there are some problems with this. Who wants to look at lots of messages that say “ok!” or “ttl” or similar? And the same problem would occur if we were able to develop the equivalent of the Kin studio for logbooks. It would be a disaster. Which I think gets to the crux of what many of you were wrestling with in the comments of those posts (and something I wrestle with all the time): what do you put in a logbook!? There is a part of me that would like to capture everything – the ultimate logbook. Given todays software and technology this wouldn’t be very hard to write!

In thinking about this I came up with a few observations of my own behavior over the last few years:

One way to look at this is: what do you look up in a logbook? I have to say – what I look up in my logbook has undergone some dramatic changes since I was a graduate student. Back then we didn’t have the web (really) or search engines. As a result writing down exactly what I needed to do to get some bit of code working was very important. Now it is almost certain I can find a code sample on the web in one or two searches. So that doesn’t need to go into the logbook anymore. Plots still go in – but 90% of them are wrong. You know – you make the plot, think you are done, move on to the next step and in the process discover a mistake – so you go back and have to remake everything. And put the updated version of the plot into your logbook. Soon it becomes a waste of time – so you just auto-generate a directory with all the plots. So it always has the latest-and-greatest version. Hopefully you remember to put some of those into your logbook when you are done… but often not (at least me).

What is the oldest logbook entry you’ve ever gone back to? For me it was the top discovery – but that was nostalgia, not because I needed some bit of data. I rarely go back more than a few months. And, frankly, in this day and age, if you do an analysis that is published in January, by July someone (perhaps you) have redone it with more data and a better technique in July. You need those January numbers to compare – but you get them from an analysis note, not from your logbook! In short, the analysis note has become the “official” logbook of the experiment.

I have to say that my logbook current serves two functions: meeting notes and thinking. Meeting minutes are often not recorded – so keep a record. Especially since I’m using an electronic notebook I can mark things with an “action” flag and go back later to find out exactly what I need to do as a result of that meeting. The second heaviest use for me is brainstorming. Normally one might scribble ideas on some loose paper, perhaps leave them around for a day or two, come back refine them, etc. I use my logbook for that rather than loose paper.

Now a days I definitely do not keep a log book in the traditional way. Certainly not in the way I was taught to use a logbook in my undergraduate physics classes! Here is a quote from an ex-student of mine (in the comments of one of the previous posts – and I can copy this because he already has a job!!):

I have a rather haphazard attitude toward these things–I have a logbook, but I use it to remember things and occasionally to sort out and prioritize my thoughts. So it’s fairly sparse, and it certainly would be of no help in a patent dispute! Often I keep my old working areas around on my computer, and I use them if I forget what I did in my previous work.

This is pretty typical of what I see in people around me in the field. Other commenters made reference to more careful use of logbooks. I wonder how much usage style varies by field (medicine, physics (particle vs. condensed matter, theory vs. experiment), engineering, industry vs. academic, etc.)?

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