A recurring theme for me in my writing is to talk about my writing. I think the reason the topic comes up is I go through a very visible cycle of writing and not writing. Other than periods of lack of motivation I cannot figure out the pattern. There are different ways that I write. The most public being this blog. I also privatly journal. I use an app called Day One. I have for years. I love it. Besides journalling about things I am finding that I use Day One too log where I have gone and what I have done. It easy since you can geo-tag entries and you can also attach photos to them. It paints a good picture of what I’ve done on a day. Even when I have been less consistent sometimes about actually writing about things I have done.
In the past three or four years I have also taken to writing actions in a paper notebook. The intention is to then complete things and check them off on the day. Anything else goes into my electronic task list. I have read that the tactile act of physically writing helps in memory. As much as I like the idea of physically writing it was something that I would only do every now and again. I would go a few days and then stop for long periods of time. Right around the time of the lockdown I started writing actions out on paper more consistently. I know that I started doing it daily after the lockdown. I did try to do it more frequently even before the lockdown. I remember packing my notebook in my book bag I took to go into the office in March.
Through April, May, and June my physical writing consisted of writing out action lists of things I remembered that I needed to do that may or may not have already been in my electronic to-do list. It was my way of clearing my mind of things I was thinking needed done. sometimes the actions were already in my to do list. As I would think of things I would write them down. If I would complete something I would check it off the list. If I didn’t finish it that day I put it on my Trello board (my electronic task list) to work on later I will mark a T where I would normally check the completed action. If I didn’t do the action and I didn’t put it on a Trello board I would simply mark it with an X. I thought it was simple enough.
I have for years had an aversion to paper. When I finished a day of writing in the notebook I would take a picture of it and save the file as a PDF. That way I have all of my actions/notes stored electronically. I still kept the physical notebooks however if I lost them or decided to part with them I had the PDF’s. Sometime along the way in May or June I started adding things I had done already to my daily list. Just as an FYI so I knew it happened. After I started doing that I realised if I have all these PDFs of what I did it is a good indication of what happened on that day. I started adding those PDFs to my Day One journal. The OCD in me later realised after a few weeks that my Day One journal would start getting very large in size. Each PDF file was about 250 kB. I already bloat my journal with photos of things that happen on the day. I wanted to avoid adding about 2 MB of size to the journal a week. My solution was to take the hand written notes and write them out into my daily Day One Journal entry. At first it felt like a good idea. Again the act of writing or typing is good for memory or so I have read. Inevitably I grew tired of it. That daily process evolved then into me dictating out what I had written into Dragon Anywhere. I would then paste the dictation into Day One. The thing with dictating was that it was very easy to do. What I had written was very simple and short since when writing I was trying to limit what I wrote to as little as possible yet still trigger my memory. It was hard to say so few words about the topic since dictating was so easy. I found myself starting to elaborate more on each line that I have written. After a few days that turned into a Complete Journal entry of what went on for the day all be it in bulleted format instead of paragraphs. It was still pretty complete. Instead of having to sit and write free form things I thought about for a daily recap I now had an agenda for me to discuss if I want to.
At the time I am writing this I have been journalling in that way for about two weeks. This week I found that I slacked off a little and had to go back to several days and go through the process. Luckily I was able to recall enough of what’s going on by what I wrote. It feels like that I could go several days and not lose that much detail. Any more than that and it’s probably not worth it. I am liking the new style of writing because I have the notebook with me everywhere and using it gives me that physical touch I don not get with just a phone. I can see myself ditching the paper notebook and doing the same thing in an electronic format. Yet for now I do like the old school approach.
I have been putting my daily writing into moleskine notebooks. I am on my third Harry Potter special edition notebooks. I can get about three months worth into a full notebook. The first two notebooks spanned over a year each. At the time I was not writing in them daily. The one I am on now I hope to fill completely from now until sometime in the autumn.
In the same time I have been journalling more I have neglected my blog entries. It is not a conscious decision. I just don’t give myself enough time to write. Since writing for me is dictating in an app I need a quiet place alone to do it. M has said several times that she is okay with me dictating with her around. I am self-conscious about doing it so I do not. The routine I have gotten myself into lets me take my written bullet point journal and dictate it into a Day One entry takes about 5 to 15 minutes depending on how much I decide to elaborate on what I wrote out. That makes it relatively easy to do every day as long as I remember.
The blog on the other hand requires me to think of what I want to talk about. Then I dictate it. From there I do proof read and edit the entries. I have to make a lot of manual typing since the dictation is nowhere near perfect. For a private journal entry its perfectly fine. For something to publish on the internet it does need work after dictating. Once done writing and editing an entry I need to label it and find a suitable photograph to go along with the post. Then it is figuring out what I will post next. I know that I sometimes write a lot and then not at all for long periods of time I limit my posts to once a week. The big question that comes up in my mind when writing something such as this post is how long the lead time between when I write something and when I publish it. In some cases that has been months.
As of the Autumn 2020 this is my process. Since I wrote this post in late summer my process has changed a bit. Since marking that update in the Autumn of 2020 I am still loosely following the same pattern. Before that changed I figured I should finally post this entry before it has its own birthday. I am glad that I am keeping with the routine!