Do you keep a daily diary? I have a couple questions for you:
- Length: Do you keep it really short? Or do you write longer form?
- Medium: Where do you write it? In a physical notebook? Or maybe online in a blog? Maybe some sort of software, or Google Drive.
The short diary in a Google doc
For many years I’ve tried to keep an extremely short diary. One line every day. From 2008 to 2019, I kept a one-line diary in a single Google doc. Read about this format in my 2017 blog post, “Starting up a one-line diary“.
Here’s what a two weeks of entries looks like from 2016:
The problem is that I didn’t fill out the diary every day. Here’s the number of entries I had for each year:
- 2008: 29 (8%)
- 2009: 17 (5%)
- 2010: 24 (7%)
- 2011: 0
- 2012: 0
- 2013: 0
- 2014: 0
- 2015: 89 (24%)
- 2016: 52 (14%)
- 2017: 175 (48%)
- 2018: 56 (15%)
- 2019: 15 (4%)
You can see that I was not consistent at all. Only one year did I get even close to filling out half the days.
The Google doc got a bit awkward in the structure. Do I keep it chronological, and add to the bottom? It would all be in order, but then every time I write something, that’s a lot of scrolling, scrolling scrolling.
Then I tried keeping the newest entries at the top. Reverse order never felt quite right for me. I liked the ease of having the dates already added to the list, but then every month I would have to add the newest dates. And that got to be too much to do. All the stuff is still there, but I never really updated it much. The single-line part sounds easy. But then sometimes I’d want to write more.
The longer-form diary in Evernote
Thus, i figured in 2020, I’ll make a new diary. Here in Evernote.
Why Evernote?
- Available offline
- I could write a lot or a little. Every entry is a new day.
- Could add photos? Not sure about this. But it’s possible.
- I’m already in Evernote for lots of things.
- Sortable. I can sort reverse or forward
So far I love it. I can write as much as a I want. And guess what!? I still get the single-line preview from the title field.
Here’s a screenshot of the list of entries I have so far:
Since I’m writing about every day, I am able to reuse some of the text. Today I wrote about my three-year-old daughter’s first movie we took her to. I composed it Evernote, and when I saw all that text, so I thought I’d email the text (and photos) to my family.
There might be days where I want to write only a single sentence. And that would be fine too!
I’ve had a blog since 2009. I actually started it to help improve my writing for Grad School. I really enjoyed it, but I too didn’t know if I should write a lot, a little, or somewhere in the middle. I finally found a happy medium of posting four times a month, and writing posts at various lengths. I did this for YEARS, but in late 2018 I received a Moleskin notebook for Christmas. That… Read more »
That’s so awesome that you capture more in your Moleskine. Sometimes you could just take a photo of a page in your Moleskine and post that on your blog. I have a friend who does something kinda like that—but with a typewriter. https://lthanlon.com I do miss having a physical copy of my blog on the shelf. I’ve thought about making an annual book of my blog posts, but that doesn’t feel the same as a… Read more »
I keep the sort of diary/commonplace book you’re talking about. Generally it lives in two places. The biggest portion lives on my website where I can generally quickly bookmark almost everything I read, listen to, watch, annotate, reply to, or deal with online in some fashion. Not all of my posts there are public, but they’re archived there privately for search. My secondary backup is on OneNote (I’d used Evernote in the past and I… Read more »