1) If the record is not electronic, there is no way to share it and typically no way to discover it. Manual search of paper documentation sucks.
Before Al Gore invented the interwebs, I kept lots of notes in notebooks. I almost never shared the notes and almost never referred to them after the development phase of the project ended.
I now use a wiki and "issues" in a tracking system (e.g. Redmine) to keep my "engineering notebooks". This has proven invaluable time and again.
2) The importance of decisions is mostly discovered in retrospect. :-( I find many holes in my notes when I do something a second time, even when I think I'm keeping good notes the first time. The good news is that my notes are pretty good after the second pass.
3) I don't know if it is laziness, inconvenience, or otherwise, but my experience is similar to the OP in that I tend to take fewer notes that I should and I have a hard time getting my coworkers to take half as many notes as I take. :-( Again, I find an electronic notebook open in a web browser on the desktop you are doing the work on is much more effective than paper and pen.
I started using Tomboy notes (and recently Gnote) to write short notes. They have a good, quick search built in to lookup old notes. They are easy to backup as well (copy .tomboy/ or .gnote/ subdirectory from home diretory).
1) If the record is not electronic, there is no way to share it and typically no way to discover it. Manual search of paper documentation sucks.
Before Al Gore invented the interwebs, I kept lots of notes in notebooks. I almost never shared the notes and almost never referred to them after the development phase of the project ended.
I now use a wiki and "issues" in a tracking system (e.g. Redmine) to keep my "engineering notebooks". This has proven invaluable time and again.
2) The importance of decisions is mostly discovered in retrospect. :-( I find many holes in my notes when I do something a second time, even when I think I'm keeping good notes the first time. The good news is that my notes are pretty good after the second pass.
3) I don't know if it is laziness, inconvenience, or otherwise, but my experience is similar to the OP in that I tend to take fewer notes that I should and I have a hard time getting my coworkers to take half as many notes as I take. :-( Again, I find an electronic notebook open in a web browser on the desktop you are doing the work on is much more effective than paper and pen.
Cut'n'paste >> pen >> sword.