The Logbook – part 3.

I wrote a brief post about starting a logbook in January 2021 and then an update on April 2021. This is the latest update about my use of the logbook, the tools I use for it, and how I plan to use it this year.

The logbook is a mini daily planner that I use to log daily activities and anything you want or need. There aren’t any rules or templates. Write down what you want each day, and log your day as detailed or briefly as you wish.

My use of the logbook has been very casual. I don’t write on it daily, but I want to change that. However, it’s been helpful, especially when looking back and learning more about my almost daily life. The logbook helps me think and capture data about my everyday life.

This year, I have specific questions I want to answer daily using my logbook. For example:

  • How much money did I spend today?
  • How much water do I consume every day?
  • How many cups of coffee do I consume every day?
  • Ideas and random thoughts

I’ve been doing this for about two years, but casually. I plan on writing casually in my logbook, but questions like the above need to be answered daily, which is my goal.

Why is this important? Writing down this information forces you to think about this and avoid living your life on autopilot. Writing it down on paper is the easiest thing for me. The daily planner I use is small and flexible, and I can carry it with me every day and everywhere. In addition, writing down anything on paper helps you memorize it more than typing it on a keyboard.

Tools I use to capture data about my everyday life:

Good luck and happy logging!

magnifying glass on white paper

Debugging life

A simple idea on how we can log our lives to help us troubleshoot them later

In programming, we use the term debugging to describe the exercise of testing and digging into the code’s details and inner functions to find out the source of an issue. For example, debugging can occur by running the code and reading values in variables as the application runs, review database connections, analyze errors, review requests, and responses to and from an API, etc. Also, you can look at logs with details of application events such as errors to aid the debugging.

How do we use the same idea but instead of debugging software, we debug our lives? I like the idea of it. To try it, I am focusing even more on writing notes about my day, things that come to mind, and ideally whenever there is an event that makes me feel good, sad, angry, peaceful, etc. I want to remember these things, and one way of doing it is by writing them down.

When troubleshooting a software program, you need to reproduce an issue by running through the same steps multiple times to try and catch any information that might help you find the problem. As a software engineer, I can do this because we store information about events such as errors and other information about the application’s state before, during, and after an error occurs. This information is what allows us to debug the software.

In our lives, we cannot replay our day unless we are in the movie Groundhog Day (a great movie, by the way). But if we have information about our day, such as notes, calendar entries, etc. We can use that information to go back and help ourselves remember the events and our feelings on a specific day and time. Having this information might help us remember certain moments better and maybe even find out why we did something or feel a certain way today or in the future. That’s the life debugging part. It will help you replay a day in the past with the help of your notes. These notes might help you remember the why and how of something that happened in the past.

I don’t keep a formal diary or journal, but something that I have been doing for a while is writing notes about things I learn, things I do, and how I feel about them, and I do it in a concise form, just a few words or a sentence. It’s helpful and more effortless than keeping a diary. It’s a logbook. I use a Moleskine daily diary for this. It’s small but includes one page for each day of the year. I find it perfect for logging my day, it’s my logging system, and it works well.

Remembering things is very important, and the older I get, the more I realize that capturing some of the events in your life and how you feel most days is beneficial. Most of us expose ourselves to an incredible amount of distractions, there are many tasks in front of us every day, and unless you try to capture some of them in a permanent form, your mind won’t have the space or capacity to store them. So writing things down helps a lot.

I want to think that at some point, I’ll go back to my logbook and will read it to help me with something in the future. However, this might never happen. But by writing things down in a logbook, I seem to be more in touch with my feelings, and I’m able to recognize the good and bad things that happen many times during a day, every day. It helps me think.

Maybe one day, I’ll be able to upgrade my brain to a version that will include a feature to capture this information reliably without the need to write things down. Maybe it will even have more storage, so it’s easy to save everything in there and without any compression. But in the meantime, writing things down in this logbook is a hack that works for me, and this is how I do my life app work for me. What about you? How do you capture your day and important moments?

Books wrapped by headphones

The logbook – part 2

Back in January, I decided to start writing on a logbook. The idea was to make it easier for me to write down things I thought were important about my day. Think of it as a minimalist version of a diary or journal.

The fact is, I haven’t been keeping up with it as I wanted. The first two months, I did it every day, it worked. But then I left my logbook in my backpack, and I didn’t write on it for over a month!

Why haven’t I been keeping up with it? Well, it is a new thing, and I didn’t spend enough time on it to help it become a habit. I know this because I’ve read The Power of Habit book by Charles Duhigg but haven’t applied what I’ve learned about it. At least not yet.

Another one of my habits that has stopped being one is reading at least one book every month. I’ve been doing this for a while, but this habit stopped being one since the middle of last year. I need to get back on it. I enjoy reading books and everything that comes with it.

I stopped reading at least one book every month because I replaced this good habit with another one, streaming content and social media. That’s right, with everything that was happening last year, COVID-19, the elections, police brutality, etc., I found it easier to watch the news, social media, and streaming content than to read books. What a waste of my time.

I did not come to this realization on my own. I knew I was spending more time than ever on social media and streaming content. Still, I didn’t do anything about it until I read this post by Om, where he mentions a video by Max Joseph showing us beautiful bookstores and, more importantly, an easy-to-follow method to read more books.

Reading books is something I enjoy, but with so much content available these days, it’s hard not to get distracted by it. I am going back to my reading habit, I’ll start by reading for 30 minutes to an hour each day, and the logbook, well, I’ve been writing on it every day again for about a week now. It feels good.

Started using a logbook

This year I started writing a logbook to capture daily events, so far it’s been working well, it’s really easy for me to write daily events and other things and just do about a small page per day. I write down things like the food I ate, important events, meeting summaries, etc. Anything that I think I should record I add to this daily logbook.

Logbook: an official record of events during the voyage of a ship or aircraft

definition by Oxford Languages

The logbook is easy to maintain, I’m using this Moleskine 12 month daily planner, its small size makes it easy to carry. Also, the small size motivates me to write down on a page every day knowing that it will fill out quite quickly.

logbook image

This is not going to replace my journal or the planner I use for work, instead, it’s just an easy way to write down highlights of my day in a quickly and effortless manner. I have been doing this just for a week and it’s already paying off as writing down these specific daily events help me remember them better.

logbook image

I’ll report back and tell you how it’s going later after using the logbook for a few more months.