Brandice Says

On Keeping a Logbook

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It’s not a diary or a journal. It’s a book of lists. The lists are simple facts.

Why not just keep a diary?

For one thing, I’m lazy. It’s easier to just list the events of the day than to craft them into a prose narrative. Any time I’ve tried to keep a journal, I ran out of steam pretty quick.

But more importantly, keeping a simple list of who/what/where means I write down events that seem mundane at the time, but later on help paint a better portrait of the day, or even become more significant over time. By “sticking to the facts” I don’t pre-judge what was important or what wasn’t, I just write it down.

Best of all, limiting each day to one page and breaking it down into a list instead of prose makes it easier for me to scan through it later, and get a real feel for the passing of time as I flip the pages.

This is exactly why I love doing my Moleskine logbook. I love to go back and look at the full picture of what my week was like. It’s so low maintenance, and if I get a day or two behind with it, I can easily catch up by looking at my Twitter logs for little snippets of where I was. I really love this personal record keeping. :) It’s my favorite project that I started this year and I’m actually sticking with it this time around.