A few months ago we began using Notion to house all of our documentation, meeting notes, and everything else that isn't directly written to a repository. During this change I had the idea to start privately recording my work-related thoughts and activities, and so I created a database to store entries in my brand new Work Diary.
I structured this to be a single page for each week, with Heading 1 used to denote the date of the entry, and Heading 2 to denote the topic I'd be writing about. I wasn't expecting to use it that much, but before long I had used up all 1000 Notion blocks we were permitted on our initial trial, which forced us to upgrade our package (sorry!).
Before long, I had a detailed record about everything I'd done and planned for the week, as well as small pieces about new things I'd learned and any failed attempts I'd tried. I had no real plans to use this other than re-reading it later, but I found it incredibly useful in our weekly meetings to provide justifications for the approaches I'd used when implementing features, as well as recalling exactly what I'd done that week.
A diary is immensely useful for planning. When a bug or feature is assigned to me I find it especially helpful to create a subheading for it and simply begin writing anything. It can be a bit daunting to start a new task and this can lead to some procrastination, but writing an introduction or an action plan is a very convenient stepping stone leading to a productive start on implementation. I can break it up into smaller components and identify problem areas, and begin to think about practical ways to tackle them. Or, if the situation calls for it, I can investigate other packages that can be brought in to solve this in a robust and tested way, recording all documentation and research used.
Another great use is for simple reminders. If I have a minor task (something that doesn't quite qualify for a Jira Issue or an Action) then I am very likely to forget that it was asked before I can complete it. But now I can quickly jot it down in my diary as a to-do and later I can ask Notion AI to collate any outstanding to-dos and I'll immediately be reminded.
It's also great for learning new things. A few weeks ago I wanted to sink my teeth into Type Parameters in Go, as these provide a convenient way to handle unknown types while not losing the advantages of Go's strictly-typed nature. I was able to write a small piece about this with code snippets, quotes, and links to documentation, as well as a small analysis of the append function - all of which helped me fully understand this feature. Going further, I can take this and quickly whip up a Documentation Page in our Engineering Wiki, so that other developers in the team can benefit from it. Proper software documentation is something that we've neglected in the past due to the time sink, but Notion makes the experience quick and painless.
As a Software Developer with ADHD it can be very hard to stay organised and to keep myself on track, so being able to keep a record of my actions and plans allows me to jump back in much quicker than I would be able to otherwise, which is what primarily attracts me to my new Work Diary.