The Research Logbook Method

The Research Logbook Method (RLM) is the practice Cuaderno implements. It distils habits common to prolific researchers — Faraday’s notebooks, Darwin’s dated entries, Hamming’s “important problems,” Knuth’s and Tao’s working logs — into seven concrete practices across two tracks. Each maps onto one or more note types the tool manages.

Two tracks

Research is two jobs at once. Inquiry is open-ended, driven by questions and evidence. Operations is delivery — deadlines, collaborators, promises. Most systems handle one and force the other into its shape. The RLM keeps them separate and lets them share a substrate: the daily log, the weekly review, and one set of projects that bridges the two.

Track 1 — Inquiry: how you investigate

1. A chronological log (Faraday). A single append-only stream of what you did, observed and thought, in the order it happened. Past entries are never edited; a change of mind is a new entry referencing the old one. It removes the “where do I put this?” decision, preserves the reasoning and not just the result, and keeps you honest against hindsight. Unified across contexts — the regularisation weight and the plumber go in the same day.
2. Evidence portfolios (Darwin). One folder per active question, accumulating whatever is relevant. The log interleaves many questions; the portfolio aggregates one. Name the folder practically, but phrase the question at the top of its index: “sparse models” names a topic, “does the sparse variant outperform the dense baseline out of distribution?” tells you when you are done. Don’t organise inside — accumulate, and file as things arise, while your reaction is still the most valuable part.
3. Important questions (Hamming). The few questions that would genuinely change your situation if answered. Not tasks — questions. They sit above projects: one question may spawn several over time and persists as they finish or get shelved. Two short lists, research and life, reviewed monthly: are these still the right questions?

Track 2 — Operations: how you deliver

A question and a project are not the same thing. A question is open-ended and may branch or turn out to be the wrong question. A project is bounded — a deliverable, a deadline, people counting on you. One question can span several projects; a project can draw on several portfolios; either can exist without the other. Keeping them apart stops deadline pressure polluting open-ended inquiry, and stops open-ended inquiry dissolving operational commitments.

4. Project maps (Knuth). A mutable one-pager per piece of finite work — the page you open after a two-week gap. It answers: where was I, what do I believe and what would change my mind, what are my next actions, what is time-sensitive, where is everything. Tasks live here, embedded in the project that gives them meaning. Maximum five active projects, at most three next actions each — fifteen tasks as a ceiling, not a backlog. A project map is not a history (the log is), not a long checkbox list (eighteen unchecked boxes reads as failure), and not a timeline.
5. Stewardships. Dashboards for perpetual responsibilities — health, finances, household — that never finish. The critical distinction: projects end, stewardships do not. If health and finances occupy project slots you permanently lose two of five to things that cannot complete. They run in the background with periodic commitments and get a scan at the weekly review, without competing for slots.
6. A commitments register. One flat, date-sorted list of everything with a hard external deadline, whichever project or stewardship it came from. This is not a to-do list, and the distinction matters: a to-do is something you decided to do, a commitment is something someone else is counting on. Mixed together, the commitments drown and you break promises you meant to keep.
7. Energy-matched scheduling (Tao, Wolfram). Tag work deep, medium or light and match it to your current cognitive state. Forcing deep work when your brain wants something mechanical is not discipline, it is waste — the alternative to deep work on a low day is usually paralysis, not virtue. The exception: if you never have deep days, that is environmental, and the fix is protecting blocks rather than trying harder.

The bridge

The log feeds both tracks: an observation becomes evidence in a portfolio, a realisation that something must be rerun before a deadline becomes a next action on a project map. The weekly review governs both — retrospective and forward scan. Projects reference the portfolios they draw on, and commitments decompose into milestones that surface as next actions at the right time.

The daily orientation is where the tracks meet: check what is urgent, glance at what is important, check your energy, and pick one thing.

Actions, not tasks

The RLM speaks of actions, not “tasks,” on purpose. The default form of an action is a single inline bullet on a project map — not a heavyweight per-item note. You only “promote” an action to its own note when it grows into an investigation spanning multiple days and evidence artefacts. This keeps the friction of capturing the next step near zero. See Actions.

Designed for ADHD working styles

The method is deliberately shaped to be sustainable when executive function is unreliable:

• Leads with what is there, not what is missing — no guilt engine, no red overdue counts.

• Permission to park or drop. Projects park, questions retire, actions and milestones drop, commitments get fulfilled or dropped — all first-class, and none of it is a failure state.

  “Reversible” is worth stating precisely, because it means less than it might sound like. Parking is genuinely two-way: a parked project activates again, and a retired question does too. Dropping is not — there is no un-drop verb for an action, a milestone or a commitment, and none is planned. It is re-decided rather than undone: if a dropped thing turns out to matter, make it again, and the record honestly shows two decisions rather than pretending the first never happened. That is the same reason a drop is logged as a drop and not as a completion.

  What a drop does preserve is the note. A dropped action or commitment keeps its file, its body and its created date, archived under _done/<year>/ — so the context you wrote survives even though the plan did not. A milestone is only a bullet, with no note behind it, so dropping one leaves just the log entry naming it — including when it had sub-bullets, which is the one place this guarantee does not yet hold (#574).

• Minimal maintenance. If keeping the system running costs more than a few minutes a day outside the weekly review, something is wrong.

• One obvious next step. cdno orient answers “what should I do now?” with a single suggestion, biased to your current energy.

The rhythm

The method runs on a few interlocking loops:

• Daily — orient in the morning, log and act through the day, a light close at the end. See The daily loop.
• Weekly — a short retrospective (wins, challenges, one improvement) and a single goal for next week. See Weekly review.
• Occasional — file evidence as you find it, triage the inbox, prune questions and projects.

How it maps to the tool

Read on: Note types.