It is all very “Adrian Mole” keeping a diary, but it is something that I have tried to do for years and years. It only takes a couple of days of not being bothered and then you simply give up, and it is a shame as I find it not only interesting to read back to see what you did at a particular time, but also handy at times too. There then are two types of diary, one that records your thoughts and feelings, and one that records your activities; maybe you can combine the two. I find nothing more interesting than reading books of people’s diaries, possibly someone who was a no-one and yet got their life diary published and so off you go and read about their everyday, possibly boring, life. Writing such a diary can be enjoyable too, sitting up last thing at night going through what you have done during the day, your feelings and possibly your thoughts on the future.
The whole problem is though is that you might find yourself spending more time writing about your life than actually living it! It would be great to find an hour each day to jot everything down and it would make such interesting reading afterwards too, but I don’t have time to do that and, more importantly, I don’t have the discipline and motivation to keep it up! However, I would still find it handy and interesting if I could someway record at least things I have done and include "memory triggers". Triggers that mean nothing to nobody apart from yourself. You might jot down "lunch at pub" which doesn’t really say that much, but it might trigger your memory to go back to that moment and you remember how it was sunny, how you had a sausage roll and pint of Sussex. Possibly a bit boring again to anyone else, but for you that trigger has taken you back in your mind to that moment.
So the whole idea then is triggers for the emotional side of things, and simply recording what you have done for the practical side of things. I came across the idea of the "One Sentence Journal" (OSJ) from one or two websites and that seemed to fit everything that I was looking for. The idea with the OSJ is that you just sum up the whole day with one sentence, giving you 365 sentences per year and a whole load of memory triggers included. I kind of adapted that a bit to my own use and keep the one sentence idea but maybe have a "one sentence" a number of times during the day as I do different things. The whole day then is recorded as a number of single sentences which is more than enough to record the day, includes plenty of memory triggers, and is quick and simple to do (ie you will tend to keep doing it).
I started this then using a simple text file which did the job fine and being simple text meant that any computer system and application would be able to read it (completely future proof!). This however came against the problem I was having all the time which was I had to be on a computer in order to quickly add something to it. I kind of stopped adding things outside of work and slowly I couldn’t be bothered to find the file and add things to it at work too.
What I needed I thought was something that would accept my input and then in the background do the rest, ie add it to a text file somewhere, date it and really leave me to get on with things while it did it all. For this then I wrote a number of Bash scripts on my Linux system to do everything I needed. It accepted text and then filed it in the correct place for me. Fantastic, but still fully digital and meant I had to log into a Linux shell to use it (unless at sometime I could have had got round to putting a web front end to it maybe).
I then came across Twitter which seemed to suit the idea of OSJ completely and infact I noticed some people did use it for that. Never wanting to trust any online service (what happens if/when Twitter goes down and losses its data?!) I wrote another Bash script to grab my Twitter entries using the Twitter API and then feeding that into the existing scripts I had written. So, everytime I added something on twitter, it soon arrived in the correct text file on my computer for me at anytime to look at.
Using twitter solved one problem as I no longer needed to be in front of a computer to add things as I could use the SMS feature of Twitter to submit things. However, never a great mobile phone fan, I soon tired of trying to type things out on a phone number pad! Also, I couldn’t really record things fully as I knew my Twitter feed was available for everyone and also probably being picked up by Google. I couldn’t mention names, companies, projects and really it seemed like I was having to write in code which possibly I would forget years in the future. I did set my Twitter account to be private, but I still thought that Twitter continues to store my data and maybe one day it could easily share it with the world if it liked, who knows?!
So….. I looked at my Moleskine and thought here is something I have with my all the time along with a pen. Why don’t I simply jot things down in there seeing as that is what it is for. If I want to store it digitally one day then I can simply scan the pages in which would be no problem (with my new super duper scanner I had bought!).
My OSJ pages then contain a date for each day. Starting with the format of YYYYmmdd (just habbit as someone who scripts and programs bits and pieces!) it was hard to read, so then used a more human readable date, lining off the end of the each week so I can quickly see the weeks. I tend to fit one week of these per page so it becomes easy to read back. For each entry I have the time and then the OSJ bit.
It is quick and simple, you write and then forget. It makes interesting reading and is handy to remember what and when you did something. It is pretty boring for a third party to read, but for me it is fill with memory triggers.
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First thing Monday morning is when I go through things:
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Ages ago I noticed a bit of a “feature” on Skype and initially thought how cool it was. It was when I was using skype for work both in the office on my office laptop and at home on my Apple Powerbook. I would have conversations at home with other people and when I got into work the next day and looked at chat history I noticed all the previous night’s chat saved there. Cool feature maybe, it makes your chat history available where ever you are (erm… just where does it save that history though?).
