Viability of Engineering Journals

I'm currently in a senior design project where one of the requirements includes "live journaling," or just writing down everything you are doing / thinking about WHILE you are doing something / thinking. While this gets live accounts, it greatly interrupts my workflow if I have to constantly to write stuff down. I understand the potential necessity of such journals because when a replacement comes, the replacement can read through the journal and potentially be quickly up to speed for the projects that are being worked on and consider novel approaches. I've reached a point where I'm thinking of ideas to automate this process, but I wonder if such journals are even a practice in industry, since it would be a waste of a project if I'm working on something that isn't used. At my previous internships, the most I've done to record my work was via documentation, but this was often from a perspective of a reflection and not live work. Looking forward to any insights!