How do you not keep track of what you did yesterday (and this morning)?

"I don't remember what I did yesterday." is shorthand for either "I was switching between lots of small tasks" or "I feel like I didn't make much progress and don't want to admit it". Neither is bad but devs don't like to be called out so they gloss over the details. A good scrum master knows what each dev has on the sprint board and they can prompt for more info if necessary, but generally it's fine unless it's near the end of the sprint and there's a hard deadline.

I usually take notes on what I do, but if I’m forgetting what I did yesterday, it’s likely because my brain is so completely absorbed in the task of the last five minutes that I don’t mentally exist on this planet anymore. I could figure it out, but that would require turning my attention back to earth, and the problem I’m absorbed in is too fascinating to let go right now.

> I take 15 minutes before my meeting preparing for the standup

A daily standup should be a < 15 minute meeting most days, on a fairly large team. < 5 minutes a day on a small team.

It seems like a waste of time to me to spend any time on preparing for it, and if that means my update is "I don't really remember what I did yesterday because I jumped around a ton", so be it.

Frankly even now that I'm a team lead I find these meetings fairly useless and my only real takeaways most days is what people need help or more work.

Talking in front of a group can be a stressful situation depending on your emotional state.

It sounds like you've found a system that works for you, imagine not having that system, being sleep deprived, or simply focusing on the next thing instead of the last thing you did.

I know a lot of things about a lot of things, to the point where I know a lot of things I don't know a much about, but I usually end up forgetting what I did yesterday, how old I am, how old my daughter is, birthdays other than my daughter's and my own.

People are different, so empathy is key in communication, I'm not too good with empathy, but I try not expect others to behave as I would.

Because who wants to waste 15 minutes of being useless time prepping for a meeting that is again useless. Does every detail really matter? Do we really have to daily justify what we do? That breeds a lot of resentment. May I please go to the bathroom? Weekly Eng standups at most unless truely working on something in tight collaboration.

Because I don't prepare and it rarely matters

I use Qbserve [1] after seeing it mentioned in a previous thread.

Really helpful for seeing where time was spent over the course of the day/week. Collected data all stored locally too

[1] https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/

I keep a journal which includes bullets for what I've done as well as check-boxes for tasks I need to do in the future (Essentially the original format espoused by Bullet Journal). I fill only 15-20 lines on a typical day so it's not to onerous!

I highly recommend TimeSnapper ( https://timesnapper.com ) if you're a visual person, it lets you take occasional screenshots throughout the day and then play it back like a movie, super helpful for jogging my memory. I'm not associated with them, just a long time user - they used to have a free version which was pretty good but I paid for it when they introduced a Mac version. Also backtrack ( www.backtrack.team ) is pretty good for keeping notes in meetings.

When we didn't use JIRA or similar apps, I had a hard time remembering as well. But with JIRA I look at the ticket I'm working on (and the ticket is displayed on the screen) and say "I was working on Ticket XYZ". Of course, they can look at JIRA themselves and don't need me to say it. But that's what stand-ups are anyways—a status update when you can already see the status from JIRA. But that's a different topic.

My brain has some very bad mid term memory (on the hour/day scale). I always forget what I ate for breakfast/lunch. I always forget small tasks I worked on, or where I left my ticket state on.

I can figure it out though. I can replay events from a point I remember and get to it, but it's usually pointless for me to do so, and often better for me to come into tasks from a fresh perspective

I use ManicTime and email history, mostly.

> I take 15 minutes before my meeting preparing for the standup - to try to hunt down what I did yesterday

I would advise to take those 15 minutes at the end of your workday, and write it down. Then you’ll remember better the next day/week. Those 15 minutes are also an opportunity to plan what to work on the next day/week (and write that down as well).

I use the app Things and each day have a todo / note called "standup 2022-02-24".

I make a very quick note of each major thing I do, each thing that blocked me and things I know I need to do tomorrow, e.g:

- Y: created basic CI pipeline for application

- B: was blocked from working by having pointless meetings in the afternoon

- T: add security scanning to CI pipeline

I'm having a hard time imagining a stand-up where everyone on the team does not already know what you were doing yesterday. The board has your closed tasks and your current task. Your stand-up is to give progress on your task. What's going on that people don't know what task they have been working on?

If you are worried about a colleague being judgemental, it can be stressful to speak to them -- especially if you are somewhat embarassed. This stress decreases available working memory. This makes it genuinely harder to remember what you did the previous day.

I write everything down in my personal wiki, everything, absolutely everything, emails, chats, work I did, tasks. If it ain't written down I didn't do it or know it. Works like a charm for recalling what I did and also lends some perspective.

I have a slack reminder to write down what I did before I get off each day. Works great!

Voice memos. I feel like an old timey PI or wanna be author so it all works out.

i used to have this problem; it was due to me not doing a good enough job keeping a paper trail of what I was doing in tickets/git/my journal and having lots of stuff going on.

what is blocking you? where are you trying to go? why? This is what matters. what u did isn't that interesting anymore. too late to revert. just history.

I usually just go over what I did in my mind beforehand.

Paper notebook.

maybe don't delete the item?