We often need consistency and time to build up habits that stick.

I do everything including my own personal side projects in a work journal with time tracking for everything, but I had to work up to it being a natural part of my workflow.

Here's my suggested path to gaining these habits:

1. Initially just try to make sure you are taking SOME notes at the start or end of every day

  - it doesn't matter where they are or how they are formatted just always take some notes at the start or end of your day

2. Once you have gotten into the habit of taking daily notes, start figuring what kinds of things you need notes for most often and take those before or during those activities

  - for example if you often find yourself having to look back at work tickets to retrieve some important information, start adding that information to your notes

3. By the time you are taking daily notes and adding things you know you need notes for you probably have a lot of notes so start worrying about structure and formatting

  - for example maybe you decide text files with homegrown markup aren't going to scale and you look into something like Obsidian with Markdown or Emacs with Org-mode

4. Repeat iterations of using your chosen note taking methods daily, building good habits, and improving your note taking system for you

  - if it feels like something is taking more time than it is worth change how you are doing it so it takes less time or just stop doing it

I have my journal available within my editor, so it's easily accessible. I find that once I've seen how useful past-notes have been its very apparent I need to update.

I keep a standard set of headers for each new entry:

    * DD/MM/YYYY
    ** Admin
    ** Meetings
    ** Tickets/Stories/Work
    ** Problems

I copy/paste that header to the end of the file, and just fill out stuff as I go. I used to have my editor auto-open the diary on startup, but took that away in the end.

I had the same problem because it was serving no purpose.

What really worked for me is to make it a primary tool of work. Rather than sometimes writing what I did today, whenever I work on something somewhat involved, I immediately write my approach about it ("I need to do X so I started Y").

Accept that that is how it works for you. Like, maybe you do different types of work and subconsciously find it useful only for some of them. That's OK.

Consider it a tool you sometimes use, and think of using journaling as an option when you're frustrated with something.

I keep a daily log but tend do skip updating it at the most intense times, ie. when it would be the most helpful to take notes...

My forcing function was external. I was getting randomized by a lot of tasks and I felt I wasn't getting anything done. So I started to break down my day into 30 minute chunks. This got the feedback loop of seeing things get done going.

I also started to take notes about projects, other teams' working, notes from internal documentation etc. This has allowed me to retrieve some things super quickly to the point my teammates have been amazed. Another way to get the dopamine hit going.

Long story short: my brain is a primate, it needs dopamine hits, find a way to make your intended behavior give you dopamine hits.

Gustave Flaubert said, "be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Perhaps we who strive to be regular and orderly in our work should accept a little chaos in our life.

On the other hand, perhaps we simply need better external anchors for our habits. I have been journaling on-and-off for years. Environments change, people change, and my schedule changes. What got me back into it this time was joining a Shut Up and Write™ meetup. That broke the seal, and I've been sporadically journaling to de-frag in the weeks since.

I think you need to go past this common thinking to "just focus on consistency/habits/discipline". You need to get clear about how/why you decide in the present moment. I assume this takes varying amount of time/effort for different people.

I think one needs to unravel our inner state and psychology ... we cannot simply turn on and off. But then, once we understand our inner state/psychology it makes it easier to turn on/off.

For me it's all about reducing the friction.

I have a cron job that opens my note app - a few times every day. The app is focused in the foreground, opened on the top of a journaling note, pre-filled with the today's date. All that's left for me is to write.

Every day starts with a new day note that automatically generates a checklist for me.

One of the checklist items may be to journal.

The randomness is so that I actually follow through on the checklist and don’t gloss over it.