Since I don’t remember when, I’ve kept a paper logbook next to my computers. It’s my lab notebook, where I track what I work on each day, with tables of intermediate results and charts literally cut out of spreadsheet printouts and taped in. This way, when I go into meetings, I just carry my notebook, and I have immediate access to the process I went through in a given tuning session, etc. It’s most helpful when I’m coming back to something a week later: I can see what I’ve already tried, so I don’t wind up tuning in circles. It’s second-most helpful when someone suggests pretty obvious refinements that didn’t pan out: “Shouldn’t we try inverting the score here, then doing this?” is answered with “If we do it that way, the recall goes down by 10% but we get a 0.5% improvement in precision, here’s the data.” I love these notebooks (I keep nicer ones at home than I do at work, honestly), and find they’re really helpful for keeping me focused when working. I’d highly recommend
These notebooks are obviously enough chock-full of proprietary information, so I can’t take them with me when I leave. Therefore, they get handed off to some poor bastard who has to try and decipher my handwriting, process, etc. It’s mostly a symbolic thing: “My time here is done; I leave these with you because I trust you to carry on what I was doing.”
Today, I handed off my notebooks for Aardvark (3 of ‘em) to my coworker Mike. Tomorrow is my last day here; after that, I have a half-dozen little projects to chase down, as well as seeing how the world goes for a freelancing jack-of-all-trades.