I use GitHub Issues threads for this and it works amazingly well.
Any task I'm working on has a GitHub issue - in a public repo for my open source work, or a private repo for other tasks (including personal research).
As I figure things out, I add comments. These might have copy pasted fragments of code, links to things I found useful, quoted chunks of text, screenshots or references to other issues.
I often end up with dozens of comments on an issue, all from me. They provide a detailed record of my process and also mean that if I get interrupted or switch to something else I can quickly pick up where I left off.
I tried following this idea from simon (first via discord channels) about 8-9 months ago and now zulip, I used zulip "streams" as the "github issue" here. Worked very nicely for me.
I use it for everything and not only work journal, this creates a small problem.Since I dump both future references and worklogs, and I have ~50 channels, it's very easy to not get back to things and only get back to it when needed(which is the idea mentioned by OP). It seems like a feature than a bug at first but after capture, one round of review after some time interval really helps. It took a while but slowly seeing the benefits.
For that I plan to write some bot to re-organize the worklogs and the reference/other things dump to my own email at the end of the week and then I can create something like https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/ for myself(private) to go though at the end of the week. I think it would be perfect for me.
That's interesting, but aren't you concerned about using a proprietary service for this? I would hesitate to be at the mercy of a corporation for such a personal workflow.
I do worry about that. I've been meaning to setup an automated export of my issues to protect against that situation.
My protection for now is nepotism: I know enough people at GitHub that I'm confident I could use back channels to recover my account if I ever need to.
Any task I'm working on has a GitHub issue - in a public repo for my open source work, or a private repo for other tasks (including personal research).
As I figure things out, I add comments. These might have copy pasted fragments of code, links to things I found useful, quoted chunks of text, screenshots or references to other issues.
I often end up with dozens of comments on an issue, all from me. They provide a detailed record of my process and also mean that if I get interrupted or switch to something else I can quickly pick up where I left off.
Here's a public example of one of my more involved research threads: https://github.com/simonw/public-notes/issues/1
I also create a new issue every day to plan the work I intend to get done and keep random notes in. I wrote about how that works here: https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/daily-planner