The Importance of Personal Documentation
Write everything down. If there was one life lesson that I wish that I had learned earlier, it's this. Write everything down. My memory is Swiss cheese and has been for years. I can remember the oddest things about history, but couldn't tell you what I had for lunch yesterday. A trivial thing to remember, but my brain remembers what it wants to, and trashes everything else.
Unless you have a photographic memory (or whatever they call it these days), you're probably like me to some degree. There are things you remember, and things you forget.
In the last year or so, after talking to my friend Drew, I've started to write more stuff down. It started with documentation for Linux-y things, and has since expanded to my job and life. If it's at all important, I write it down. It's one of the reasons I've decided to blog more. This is just one thing I'm using to create a personal record of my thoughts and ideas. The other is actually writing in a journal each day. There I discuss the things I've done that day, the things I want to do for the next day, and general ramblings. It's helped me loads, since I can go back and look and review the previous weeks and months, see trends in what I've been doing, and even get a sense of my general mood and how that flows. (Woo, run-on sentence.)
This personal documentation will be a collection of my life as I get older. I just turned 40, and I'm trying to act as if I'm not old as dirt. 40 isn't that much older than 30, so I'm still young. If that's true, then I can still make changes. And one of the things I'm doing is writing everything down.
In 10 or 20 years, I think this will be a great thing for me. But, I think that it will help sooner than that, as I can perform personal reviews of the data to see trends, as I said, which should allow me to diagnose areas for life improvement. It will also help me remember shit. I think it's scientifically proven that you're more apt to remember something if you write it down.
There's also something about writing your day that calms and sooths your soul. When something good or bad happens, writing it down makes you think about it and put it in perspective. It forces you to slow down and remember the day instead of just moving onto the next one without any reflection at all.
That reflection is my goal. Well, one of my goals. The other is just to try to make sure I remember things better. Maybe my brain won't have so many holes in it.
This is day 8 of 30 in 30, my quest to write on this blog every day for a month.
