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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.
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