To begin....

I'm going to treat this course in the same way I would have treated a risky experimental approach in the lab.

Take Notes!
Lots of them. I have found that I'm far more likely to spot patterns and make use of them if I write everything down:

• What am I doing?
  
• What am I trying to achieve?
  
• Why did I decide on this approach?
  
• What were the results?
  
• What might work better?
  
• When do you decide that the approach you're trying on hasn't a hope of working and you need to try something completely different?

You get the picture, I hope.

My lab books weren't always perfect, but the information was there when I needed it: everything to repeat the experiment without recourse to memory.

So for this course, the standard lab book layout will do as a start.