A physical notebook - usually a Cambridge 8.5"x11.75" legal pad - these legal pads open upwards, a feature I liked because then the spine never fights with your hand when the spine is on (the same side as your primary hand). Having to put your wrist over the spine to write on a page is annoying, and sometimes cold. Sturdy notebook. good quality paper, and when I'm using a notebook every dayish for a year or more, quality matters.

I picked up this practice when I worked, during college, at ITA, Inc.. I don't remember if I was given the practice exactly, told to "Do This", or if it was an evolution of the basic need to Keep Track Of What You're Working On, So The Client Knows What You Did During That Time. This was in the OS 9 era, so if you made a mistake and had your program crash, your machine might be in an unstable state. Keeping this form of documentation in BBEdit or directly in the hours database just didn't work.

On this topic, David Luebbert says:

When I started to work with Charles Simonyi, he taught me to keep a steno notebook at my side. Anytime I found a design issue, some problem in the code, made a change in the code, made a to-do-list or had an idea that could improve the product, I would write that down on the right side of the steno sheets with an empty check box next to each item.

Further in the article David goes on to talk about how this interconnects with Instant Outlining (an oldish idea made new again.)

Well, the sidenote grew, and now I'll spend at least a page to a page and a half on the topic. Plus, the idea works around several annoying problems with my primary approach.

Sort of spontaneous though. I like when that happens.

(Oh, and, looking at my referrer logs, I have some sort of entity reading my past entries. Human or 'bot, 'Hail from the h4ck3r!)