Journal Keeping and Empiricism

In talking about the way I approach computer usage I found my self saying "you know it's all very empirical."

And I was immediately struck by both how true this, and how awkward it made me feel. As a former (recovering?) student of Women's Studies and a not-particularly-quantitative social scientist, I'm far too used to "empiricism" being deployed as the [ahem] epistemological whipping stick of enthroned ideologies/groups/etc.

But it's also true: empiricism is all about observation, and data collection, and analysis. It's about recording processes, and outcomes, and it's about gathering information--data--for later analysis. Not evil. And particularly as I work on figuring out how to help people use computers and technology more effectively, empiricism is something I can totally get behind. In fact, I think it's totally essential.

Now, from the title, surely you can see where this is going.

While I think there are aspects of our interactions and use of computers that we're not particularly good at keeping track of and analyzing (e.g. usability testing with regards to eye-tracking), there are some really crucial higher level areas where we are capable of understanding in ourselves: how we organize files, how we organize notes, fact files, how decide to customize software, how we output/publish/share our data, and so forth.

These sorts of concerns are relevant to all computer users and transcend the big debates, like command line vs. gui; modal vs. context aware, and the small debates, vi vs. emacs; windows vs. mac; open source vs. proprietary; markdown vs. textile.

It's "be universal" day on tychoish, apparently.

In any case, I think keeping a journal of a couple of key things can help us all figure out how to do things better. It's empiricism, on a small scale. The system you use to keep track of things doesn't matter too much: just as long as its easy for you to reflexively keep track of a few details every day and then review all this data at a later point. I'm partial to just keeping one journal, rather than project/context-specific systems, but that's personal presence more than anything.

I should say that I've started keeping a journal myself but I've admittedly not been particularly regular/rigorous about it. For my benefit and yours here's the list of things that I think would be particularly important to track:

• Word Count, or some other numerical measure of progress that's relevant to whatever your core practice is. Words make sense for prose writers, line counts for programmers, minutes of practice for musicians, etc. Whatever makes sense, and hopefully something fairly concrete.

• Contextual Variables: things affect our productivity and work in our lives. If there's something that happened that might make your/my word count unusually high or low, I imagine it'll be helpful to keep track of this. Numbers are helpful--particularly in the aggregate--but if you're reading through your journal day by day, and you have a day where you wrote much less than you did most other adjacent days, being able to say "ah, I had meetings/workshops all day that day, no wonder I didn't get anything done."

• Changes to your "system:" If you change things about the way you work, it's good to note when this occurs, particularly in retrospect so that you can evaluate the utility and efficacy of changes.

• Discoveries/Important thoughts. I suppose many people might use their public blogs for this forum, but I tend to write about a week out, and I often write posts out of order, so having a file that lets me track what I'm reading, and what the big issues on my mind are, is really helpful.

I'm sure you all have some journaling tips. I've been using the org-journal bits that jack wrote wrote, though I'm thinking that I might need to add a few snippets to take care of org-mode tags so that I can filter for some data. I know there's a similar bundle for ?TextMate that I used back in the day. And of course, this is nothing that wouldn't work beautifully in a private LiveJournal account, or private instance of WordPress. The details don't matter much, but if any of you keep journals for this kind of thing (or track your computer usage productivity) and have other better ideas, I'd love to hear how you all deal with this.

Onward and Upward!