About ten years ago, I started to track my life in a diary, recording when I got up, all my traveling, what I made for dinner, which pages I read and such. I started doing this because I felt time was flying. I have the feeling that it did a little to counter this feeling. But it also made me aware of the amount of procastination (web surfing), which at times has been kind of depressing. It did me give a good sense of time and how long it takes to get somewhere. It sometimes has been useful to recall what I did on a certain date. But that is all. I have thought about putting all data in database and make some graphs of it, but so far it feels like the effort does not weight up the benifits. One thing was also about what details to include and what to leave out, as there also some intimate details in there that I am note sure if I want to store in a digital database.
I also keep a personal website with some list of things I did and this has proven useful to serve as my backup memory.
I keep a diary for some projects that I work on. It's basically one large, never ending text file that I keep versioned in git. I like the simplicity of the scheme. It's rare that I need to go back and look at something that I've written earlier. But when I do need to do it, it's there, and easily available. I think I'm going to continue using this scheme for all projects through the rest of my career.
As for logging of structured data, I've sometimes thought of coming up with some kind of annotation scheme, so that, if I need, in my writing, to log a measurable quantity of some kind, I could just annotate it in a special way. And then, later on, if the need should arise, I could just extract the annotated data from the text document. I've not taken it any further, but I think it could be useful. A sort of a "hybrid approach" that would let me focus on the writing and the flow of thoughts, while also letting me log tidbits of structured data in between.
I also keep a personal website with some list of things I did and this has proven useful to serve as my backup memory.