A Good Diary

The Little Miss recently got her first diary. She was very excited about it. It came with a small key (certain to be lost) with which she can lock the diary after writing in it. I was pleased to see her get a diary. I wish I had started a diary at five years old. It would be fascinating to see what my five-year-old self wrote about.

Instead, I was 24 when I started a diary, and I kept it going pretty steadily for 10 years. I used red, hard-covered Standard Diaries, and I never wrote anything in them that I would be ashamed of if someone else happened to see it.

Diaries fascinate me. It seems that everyone I’ve read about kept a diary, from John Adams to George Patton and beyond. The historical value of diaries like these must be incredible. My reasons for keeping a diary were less with an eye toward history and more about wanting to be able to remember what I was doing on any given day. As a child, I can recall laying in bed thinking, “When I am older, will I remember this particular day?” I remember having the thoughts, but the days blur together.

My diaries listed what I happened to be reading, or writing; what stories I submitted, or what rejection letters I received in the mail. I noted when I spoke to people on the phone, or had an important meeting at work. Only occasionally did I venture beyond this. They served their purpose, however. I can open one up and get the details of some particular day in my life.

I no longer keep a diary, at least not in the traditional sense, although I’ve tried on-and-off when the mood strikes me. If I am going to spend time writing, I prefer to spent it writing here, or writing stories, or articles. Besides, the amount of data that is captured by our activity these days makes the kind of diary I kept obsolete.

I can, from various data sources, produce the following for just about any day in the past four or five years:

• How many words I wrote, and what those specific words were. (Google Docs and GitHub
• What code I wrote (GitHub)
• How far I walked and how many steps I took (FitBit)
• Who I interacted with (Email, Facebook, Twitter)
• What important things came in the mail (Evernote)
• What I was reading (my reading list, and browser history)
• What events took place (iCloud calendar)
• What items I checked off my to-do list (Todoist)
• Where I drove, how long it took, and how much I spent on gas (Automatic)
• What the weather was like (Dark Sky
• What photos and videos I captured (iCloud)

I’ve played around with digital diaries like Day One. I like Day One, but it seems to me that a modern diary would simply be an aggregator that took data from all of these different sources and compiled it into a daily entry–one to which I could append my own notes and thoughts, if I wanted to. The closest I’ve seen to something like that is Gyroscope.

I think the reason that I have failed to take up writing in a diary has a lot to do with all of the data that is already available. Sitting down and writing that I was stuck in traffic for half an hour on my way home feels silly and redundant when I know the data exists in Automatic Link, for instance. I can’t help but feel that I am somehow repeating information that has been recorded elsewhere.

That is one reason I like this blog so much. It isn’t really a diary, but it allows me to write about things that I think about without feeling redundant. And if someone invents an aggregator to collect all of the data already available, when I look back at today, I’ll see that I wrote about 600 words in the evening, just before taking the Little Man to Cub Scouts.

600 words is about 100 more than I aim for on these essays. I need to do better.