This is day two for my gopher phlogging. Like any new habit, it's
exciting and fun for the first couple days. But what about the
long term as days turn to weeks and weeks to months?
Well, I can't predict the future. But I do believe in the general
concept of habits and my ability to form them. I didn't used to.
Until 2011, I'd tried and failed to keep journal since childhood.
I did manage one 8-month run in a spiral-bound notebook sometime
in my late twenties. The duration remained my personal record for
a long time. Nothing came of the journal.
People say you should keep a journal for a lot of reasons:
* It's a place to keep track of ideas
* It helps you think/organize
* You can use them as therapy
* Keep track of how you use time and progress you've made
* Plan your life
* Use it as a commonplace book (a personal scrapbook of text)
* Learn to be grateful (see therapy above)
I think the reason they appealed to me was knowing that some famous
thinkers were well-known journal-keepers. Also, I liked the idea
of creating something personal slowly over time.
Aside:
While certainly not role-model material, I was always
fascinated with the imagery of the huge collection of journals
created by the fictional character John Doe in the 1995 film
Seven.
SOMERSET
Well, there are at least five thousand
notebooks in this room, and near as I can
tell, each notebook contains two hundred
and fifty pages.
-- the Seven film script
The journals (consistantly "notebooks" in the script) turn out
to be not very helpful: "No dates indicated, placed on the shelves
in no discernible order. It's just his mind poured out on paper.
I don't think it's going to give us any specifics."
But the _imagery_ and the _idea_ of that volume of personal
writing. That stuck in my head.
The Plan:
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So in 2011 I was really starting to feel that time was slipping
away from me. I had all these plans and I didn't seem to have
enough focus or willpower or grit or whatever to make any progress
on them.
After wasting an inordinate amount of time on "productivity porn,"
I finally decided to give the old journaling/logging thing another
go. The idea was to use a log as part of a "quantified self"
time-tracking experiment. I was heavily inspired by some people
who had colorful charts showing every minute of every day broken
down by category.
The time log:
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So I put a little notebook in my pocket and started writing down
every single context switch in my life and the time it occurred.
I kept with it for four years.
I transcribed everything into the computer and wrote several
generations of scripts to make charts and graphs from the data.
I played with tagging and different timestamp formats.
It took a lot of time (ironic, no?) and I never did reap any
specific benefit from doing it. I guess you need to start such an
endeavor with specific goals and some idea of how to reach those
goals (who knew!?). :-)
But from that habit came a powerful desire to keep doing that habit
out of the sheer desire to keep the habit going!
So after a lot of soul-searching (hey, this was four years of
logging every single minute I got into a car, fell alseep, or ate a
meal!), I decided to radically cut down on the data I was
collecting...
The current log:
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I still keep a notebook and mechanical pencil in my pocket at all
times. I still transcribe the previous day's entry into my
computer at the beginning of the next day.
But I don't record the time something occurred (with some
exceptions) and I try to limit myself to the highlights of the day.
I'm intentionally not mentioning specifics in this method because
that's something I want to write up in detail at a later date.
I think it would also be fun to take a picture of my collection of
62 (currently) little pocket notebooks and show what a typical
entry looks like.
What's come of it:
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I now have over seven years logged. I've recorded every major
event in that time. If I can figure out which keywords to search
for, I can find the event and tell you on which date it occurred
and what happened right before and after that event. That's pretty
neat.
I also have an extremely reliable place to put notes - what could
be handier than a notebook in your pocket?
I don't lose track of TODOs because I see them when I transcribe my
log the next day.
And perhaps just as importantly as those quasi-tangible benefits,
I've built up a slightly enhanced ability to create new habits!
It reminds me of when I first taught myself the C programming
language from the "White Book" (The C Programming Language by K&R).
That was a watershed moment in my life at which I finally realized
that I could teach myself anything I wanted to learn. (Before that,
as hard as it is now to remember, I had no idea that was possible
and was under the common delusion that some subjects were too hard
to learn on one's own.)
So keeping at this gopher logging business is something I _can_ do.
But like many other habits I've aquired and shed since the logging
one, only time will tell if this earns its place in my precious
schedule.
* * *
Sheesh, this got long fast. That always happens to me. I think
"I'm not sure I have much to say about this." and the next thing
you know I've written off on a dozen different tangents and I'm
struggling to keep it shorter.
Speaking of tangents, I just remembered a previous success I had
with a logging habit: a reading journal I've kept since a class
assignment in 1993. It's just a simple Title, Author, and Page
Count log, so it was easy to keep. So I suppose I wasn't suuuch a
failure all along. :-)
