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+Journalling and other ways of keeping track of things that have happened
+========================================================================
+
+A calendar tells you what should happen in the future.
+A journal or diary tells you what you did in the past.
+You can combine them, and treat past calendar items as a sort of journal,
+but a calendar tends not to be a good format for writing down what you
+did or thought in any detail.
+
+The main benefit of a journal is to have a place to record your thoughts,
+and those actions that you may need to remember in the future.
+The level of detail you use depends on your circumstances, time, and energy.
+For example, if you do scientific research, you'll have a lab journal or
+similar book in which you write down all your experiments and conclusions
+and thoughts related to them.
+
+Lars uses a set of text file (markdown files) for capturing the thought
+processes when developing software.
+He thinks out loud by writing down his thinking process,
+and tries to do this with the minimum of self-censorship.
+The journal is not meant for others to read,
+and this gives a lot of freedom to be as stupid and wrong and silly and
+opinionated (and rude) as possible.
+(Even so, he [published parts of his 
+journal](http://liw.fi/obnam/journal-dump/) for the amusement of
+the Internet.)
+
+Journalling can require a bit of effort,
+but it can also be very helpful.
+The process of expressing thought processes in writing makes them more
+explicit, and often more clear.
+Anything that's hard to express tends to be unclear in the head, too.
+Later, a journal can be helpful to answer things like
+"what was I thinking?".
+
+The act of journalling should be as easy as possible.
+There should be minimal steps required to start writing,
+and the only requirement for the actual text should be that it's expressing
+what you're thinking as you write it.
+A plain text file works wonderfully; a simple word processing document
+would work too, if you prefer that kind of writing tool.
+
+Apart from journalling, you may want to have some automatic logging
+of events in your life. Anything that you want to keep track of, if
+it can be logged automatically, is easy. Anything that requires manual
+effort is likely to not work quite so well.