The Logging Problem

I’ve been reading Sarah Bakewell’s biography on Michel de Montaigne these past weeks and I’ve been struck by the sheer volume of diary entries and notes the man seems to have left behind. Not only did he write on the Essays most of his adult life, but also a slew of diaries and assorted notes.

I’ve tried to do the same, in a wide variety of planners, dairies and notebooks, but nothing has really stuck. While I find the notion of keeping a diary–or a commonplace book–very romantic, I’ve come to realize I’m just not the kind of person who finds the time to sit down every evening to write at length about the what goes on in my life. Also, producing a pen and Field Notes–or Moleskine–notebook whenever I have an interesting idea disrupts the flow to much. Writing about life as it unfolds makes me feel like a detached observer, when I really just want to immense myself in it. I actually had the same experience a few years ago when I photographed a lot and ran a photo blog. Looking at the world through a lens made me feel left out. I literally had thousands of photographs of my world, none with myself in it¹. So stopped carrying a camera everywhere and trying to write everything down, hoping that I will remember anyway.

As it turns out, trusting your memory is a mistake and every once in a while I sorely regret not having a written record of my doings. Was it I or my wife that stayed home with sick children that week in January? When did I buy those shoes? When did I last water the lawn? My iCal calendar only contains events planned in advance. I need a place to note all those on-the-fly stuff I do. But where?

I’ve come to realize my previous failures to keep a written account of my life probably is due to ambition. In the past I’ve tried to write longish diary entries, which I at best could keep up for a few months. A log is something different. While a diary chronicles your thoughts and emotions, a log is a brief and dry account of your comings and goings. It is a purely practical tool, which only answers questions about when something happened, not why. I simply don’t have the time to write a full diary entry every day, but I should have the time to jot down a log entry.

I’ve actually experimented a bit with this in the past, usually in a digital format. I once wrote an applescript that every midnight pulled today’s events from iCal, as well as today’s completed todos from Things, and wrote them to a plain text file in my Dropbox folder. I also had this loose idea of writing a script, which pulls emails to a specific address and turns them into text files in a specific folder. This way you could simply mail a log message from any computer or iDevice. It would probably be beautiful. A generic system of text files, forever searchable.

However, what a digital system gains in search-ability, it looses in presentation. Nothing really beats leafing through a notebook full of scribblings. Also, a digtal system needs maintenance, even if it only consists of text files in a folder. I don’t trust myself with carrying that folder with me into the future. Will it still be around in fifty years, after several hard drive crashes and the demise of Dropbox? I wrote a diary on a floppy disc some twenty years ago. Even if I did find that disc somewhere in my parents garage I would have no way of reading it. I haven’t owned a computer with a floppy disc driver for at least five years. Paper seems like a safer bet.

For now I’ve settled for a hand written log in a small Moleskine diary. There is only room for a few sentences a day, which forces be to be brief and removes the pressure of writing a god damn novella every night. I think this might work out for me.