What movies did you watch during that COVID year of 2020? What were your best moments of 2018? Exactly which day did you have that fender-bender accident last year, and what was the weather like that day?
Wouldn’t it be neat if you could quickly and definitively answer each of these questions?
A problem I’ve been trying to solve is how best to make records of our life events. Memory is unreliable.
The simplest solution that has withstood the test of time is to keep a diary or journal. However, that doesn’t solve the problem of being able to search through the journals quickly.
We could keep a digital diary, but then we run into the problem of execution. What is the best format for a digital diary that we will keep updated and continue for our entire lives?
I’ve explored using apps or spreadsheets, but I have trouble keeping a daily habit of updating them. Instead, the solution that stuck so far is using the Google cloud:
- Every photo I take automatically uploads into Google Photos, where I have about 40,000 pictures taken over the past 25 years.
- I have a “Journal” folder with a document for each day of the year (labeled, for example, “11-25” for November 25). I have a habit of opening the day’s document each day to review it and add information to it, with the knowledge that the next time I open it will be in a year.
- I keep various record files with useful information like travel itineraries or book notes.
- I label many files beginning with the format yyyymmdd (example: 20241125 for November 25, 2024). That way, when I sort by name, the files will be sorted by date.
I’ve taken these measures as a patchwork solution for maintaining easily searchable life records. For this project, I’d like to explore a more streamlined solution, perhaps by developing an app or a software-as-a-service website.
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