vino VS .emacs.d

If you're looking for a fairly complicated quasi-relational example in emacs, you might check out the Vino wine database (https://github.com/d12frosted/vino), which is built on vulpea, which is a database-backed emacs package. The author recently launched another project on top of that, https://barberry.io/, which has a lot of the features you'd find in a complicated Notion workflow. But if Notion works for you, don't switch -- use whatever tools work best for you.

If you're trying to do this in org, take a look at vulpea. It's roughly the same engine that powers the current version of org-roam. It's useful for automating org files; a good example application of this is the vino wine database: https://github.com/d12frosted/vino

I've been using org mode to maintain a personal work log for around ten years.

General structure is a file per month, a toplevel outline heading per day, and a global hotkey that takes me to 'today' with a single button. I use a private git repository to archive it to a secure place and replicate across different machines if needed. (Not common.)

Code here:

https://github.com/mschaef/.emacs.d/blob/master/lisp/orglog....

It's worked well, but generally speaking the key to logging is less the code/system and much more the discipline to write every day. I'm hit or miss on that front, but still find it useful to both formalize my thoughts on things into english and also occasionally go back to look at previous things I've done. (Oh, and it makes developing lists of accomplishments for annual reviews an easy thing.)