Reading back

 

I always like to begin writing in a fresh notebook and diaries are special in that regard as a new year, whether calendar or academic, offers the promise of starting again.

Gathering up my store of diaries, I look back and see that I first started using the Collins Essential One day type (pictured above) in 2021. That diary format tied in nicely with a new year’s resolution to write around 300 words a day. I guess that I have nurtured and stuck to that habit as lots of words have been written over the years.

I had used Moleskin notebooks for a long time before that mainly to capture ideas and snippets of information. The Moleskins also doubled up with journal entries and travel logs. The issue I always had was how to track and call up the information my notebooks contained. I’ve made various attempts to index the contents with limited success. As well as my diary, I still use a notebook to record ideas and snippets but treat it as a kind of commonplace book. My latest one has a front section of contents in which I can list various subjects, topics and themes. The pages aren’t numbered so I am still on the lookout for a format that addresses that need as well.

More about Commonplace notebooks in a future post, meantime, back to the diary.

Diaries of course are for writing in. They are also for reading from. And I want to make a point about reading back over entries.

In his book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (Virgin books, 2014, p78) Greg McKeown recommends a technique in journal-keeping. After the habit of daily journaling has been established he suggests reading back over the past 90 days. The purpose is not to go into the minutiae of everything that has been written but rather to become aware of trends or patterns.

Do you know what? Having looked back over several quarters the suggestion works - definitely spotted some trends which are not for sharing here!

If calculating time periods are not your flavour of the month, then the day-to-view diary has some useful little numbers at the top of each page which you may find helpful. The month, date and day are there of course but so too are the week numbers as well as the number of days into the year and the number remaining. So ninety days from here brings us up to 31 March 2025 with 275 days remaining.

That’s the quarterly review date set.

I’ll be on the readback for those trends.