• Why Keep a Personal Journal?
  1. Keeping a personal journal may be required by the company or your graduate advisor. In industry, especially engineering firms, companies require that every note be entered in a notebook.

     When I was employed at Taylor Instrument Company, the company required all engineers and scientists to record every note in special company lab manuals. The pages in the bound manuals were organized in pairs: one page white which was perforated and one page yellow. When one entered notes, one stuck a sheet of carbon paper between the white and yellow sheets to make a copy. One could tear out the white sheets for use in one's daily assignments. However, I was told removing a yellow page was grounds for dismissal from the company. Further, each page had to have a date and be initialized by the recorder. At the beginning, my supervisor also signed off on the pages.

     After the pages of a lab manual were used up, the manual (with all its yellow pages) was stored in a company vault. Hence, the company would have an accurate record in case of a patent litigation or a legal dispute with a customer.

  2. Keep a personal journal in case of patent litigation and other legal concerns. For example, suppose you did a neat project in college or graduate school and have been employed by a company for a year. You want to commercialize your college project but your supervisor claims your idea was developed on company time and, therefore, the company owns the rights to the project. With a carefully documented personal journal, you have proof that you can show to your supervisor and which would stand up in court.

  3. Keep a journal to capture what was done and when. No one can remember everything! Especially when the project extends over many months, it is very hard to keep all the facts in your head. Even more so, if you are time-sharing between several projects at the same time. Keep a personal journal for sanity!

  4. Keep a journal in order to quickly pick up where you left off on the project. We all are busy and doing many things. After a few days of involvement in other activities, you want to be able to continue on your project effectively. Without a journal, you may waste precious time trying to determine where you left off. Further, you don't want to waste time and effort rethinking or redoing parts of a project.

  5. Keep a journal to capture ideas. It is a human trait that some ideas last only fleetingly, i. e. a second or two. These flashes of insight must be written down immediately and no better place than in your journal.

  6. Keep a journal as a vehicle to understanding. Quoting from one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, Bantam Books, 1974, page 100.

     "For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you've been, where you're going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don't know and have to give up. In cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion starts it's a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are."

• Form of the Journal?

  Unless a standard form is dictated by the organization, your personal journal can be just a loose leaf or spiral notebook reserved for that purpose. Some researchers like a compact one (say, 6" by 9") which they carry at all times in order to scribble those flashes of insight when they occur. Since I like to insert Xerox copies of articles, I prefer a standard size three-ring notebook. The notebook may have dividers for different sections. Within a section, the pages should be inserted chronologically.

  The personal notebook should be treated as intellectual property, in case of litigation. Therefore, each page should have the date, page number and initials of recorder.

• What to Put in the Journal?
  1. Notes when doing a literature search. Keep a record of which keywords you tried. In case you ever have to do another search, you don't want to duplicate effort.

  2. Notes when reading articles. Try to relate the article to the current project.

  3. Write down your ideas, problems encountered, things you don't understand. Ask critical questions. A favorite quote from Bucknell's retired Biology Professor Hulda Magalhaes:

     "Answers are easy!
     It is asking the right questions which gains insight!"

  4. Write to yourself. Create a dialog with yourself. After explaining your ideas in a paragraph, ask "Do I really believe that?" "What are the flaws?" "What is the consequences?"

  5. Write down your ideas and thoughts to understand them more thoroughly. If you can't explain something in writing, you probably don't understand it.

  6. Spend ten minutes at the end of each day writing a summary of the progress of that day. Write down the problems encountered, the problems solved, tasks to be done. Force yourself to step back and view the project as a whole. Your goal should be to summarize the status of the project so you can pick up in a few days where you left off.

Most of us would agree with these guidelines. The hard part is having enough discipline to follow them.