I still find lots of value in keeping notes though! And sometimes miss it when I didn't keep notes.
This is still the case in certain fields like policing where, in the United Kingdom at least, an officer's pocket notebook is an important document, albeit with some police forces now moving to electronic solutions for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_notebook
By the time I retired I think I was the only one at my company using one. I had to special order to get a proper one with the quad ruling, numbered pages, and sewn binding.
I suspect that this may be due to different copyright mechanisms in different jurisdictions. e.g. in Germany employees have stronger protections that may allow them to still patent stuff developed in their free time, so companies might want to have a stronger papertrail to prove that outcomes tie back to something done during working hours.
This puzzles me. If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down? And if you're not sure you wrote the exact right steps down, how are you going to use the notebook for that purpose?
What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?
Exactly, so when she reviewed the notebook, she caught the error.
Even if she made a slip in the notebook, merely reviewing it helps jog the memory to revisit and replay what she did in the lab. It's the power of touchstones.
> What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?
The notebook doesn't always have to operate as a log. It can also operate as a plan of action.
One measure of a good notebook is if it contains sufficient information that you don't have to repeat work only because you can't figure out what you did. There are other good reasons for repeating things of course.
My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure."
There was a time when a notebook was also a legal document, and so there was a criterion of whether it would stand up in court as proof that you had invented something. Could a "person skilled in the art" replicate your work based on your notebook? My dad told me that his notebooks were regularly reviewed and witnessed.
The legal issues have changed, since the patent system has switched to the "first to file" rule. My employer got rid of its formal notebook policy when this change came through.
My problem with physical notebooks is that a great deal of my work is computational, and I automate things. In my case, the best form for recording my work is in fact a Jupyter notebook. On the other hand, I come from a family of chemists, and taking electronic notes in a "wet" chemistry lab is often impractical.