Engineer’s Notebook

This is not any kind of notebook. This is something special. I did not know about it till the weekend until I read about. We Indians are always poor at recording and documenting things. I always wondered what is it that should actually be documented and what are the things that has to be left out. Should merely the working ways be documented or failures also? When should the documentation be actually done? If I document the experiment after I have done it I would always end up writing only the things that worked as there would be so much to write and I would have forgotten most of it. Even trying to document all of it was boring to death. I would wonder how great scientists who were always creative could spend time doing the monotonic documentation. It seems the Engineer’s notebook is the way to go. It surely does not cut down on the effort but it makes it more fun and more accurate.

So here is how it goes in summary. It is a log of everything that an engineer does everyday. Every calculation, every step and every observation gets logged in it. When the day begins the enginner writes the date and time on top. He also gives the work a heading. After that follows triads of Going to Do, Doing and RANT. These are the subheading in the left side of the margin. Going to do is where he plans what he is intending to do next, Doing is where he details everything that he is doing. This includes observations, pictures and lots of calculations. If the calculations go wrong, then not to worry, he simply cuts it with a single line and starts over again. But it is made sure that even the wrong calculation is readable. This helps in not repeating the mistake. This is followed by RANT. RANT stand for Reflect, Analise and NexT  step. This is where he pauses to collect his actions. He makes observations of what he can conclude or what he thinks should be next steps or what he thinks he can improve upon. Most of the time one of these will become his next Going to Do.

This is concluded by a signature at the bottom of the page and if possible a supervisors signature next to his with the data and time of signing of. Though I have just summarized the  notebook very trivially, details may be obtained from this wiki link. Enjoy Logging!!! and never lose a thought!!!