Software ships with release notes. People rarely do. I started keeping a changelog on myself three years ago and it has been the cheapest useful thing in my working life.
How it works
Once a month, twenty minutes, one file. Not a diary and not a retrospective — a list of things that are now true that were not true before. Changed, added, removed. The same three headings a release note uses, for the same reason: they force you to name a difference rather than describe a mood.
The entries are mostly dull. Learned the keyboard shortcuts for the thing I use daily. Stopped taking calls before eleven. Started saying the number first in proposals. Nobody would read this. That is fine, because nobody does.
I can tell you what I believed last March. I cannot tell you what I believed last March without the file, and I used to think I could.
Why it beats remembering
Memory edits for coherence. Ask me how I came to work the way I do and I will give you a clean story with three turning points, and the story will be mostly false — assembled backwards from where I ended up.
The file does not do that. It shows a change arriving in a dull, partial form, getting abandoned, coming back eight months later, and only then sticking. Reading it is a reliable way of discovering that something I now consider obvious took me two years and four attempts to accept.
The one rule that matters
Never edit an old entry. The temptation is constant, because past entries are frequently embarrassing and occasionally wrong. But an entry you have revised is just your current opinion wearing a date, and the whole value of the file is that it contains opinions you no longer hold.
Three years in, the most useful pages are the ones I would most like to delete. I take that as a sign it is working.
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