Now I have a family I often can't choose the end of my working day so it coincides with a natural break in my work. In those circumstances, when I know they're going to arrive back in less than 30 minutes, I stop working and do a brain dump of everything that's going on in my head into a plain text file. With that I can pick things up much faster the next morning. I've even started doing it during the day when both my wife and I are working from home and we're about to have lunch together. I'd seriously recommend it.
It somewhat reminds me of this Hemingway quote "You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again." I think there's an art to stopping at the right time, even if it's within constraints that aren't in your control.
Yeah, in the last few years I've started keeping a work log for projects. It's mostly a way to externalize and clarify thoughts. But I'll definitely use it for an end-of-session record of where I'm leaving off and where to pick up.
And where it's possible, I love unit tests for this. Starting off in the morning with a failing unit test from yesterday's close gets me right back into it.
It’s good to have something like org-journal set up so you can write down arbitrary stuff without having to decide where to put it or remember where you probably put it later (I think GTD calls this “capture”).
It somewhat reminds me of this Hemingway quote "You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again." I think there's an art to stopping at the right time, even if it's within constraints that aren't in your control.