You should keep careful notes on all your work. We recommend keeping these notes on your local machine. Some popular text editors among lab members are TextMate and Sublime Text 2.
We recommend including the following in your notes:
- Date started
- A quick description of what you are doing
- Absolute path to working directory
- Software version numbers
- All commands executed
There are many good ways to take notes. The most important thing is for your code to be reproducible and to be able to find the data that you generate.