Daily Writing as Memory

I have a friend who blogs just about every day and I’m extremely jealous. No way do I have time to do that. Most of my blog posts take one or more days to finish. The photos usually end up taking the most time, because my photo life is a shambles right now. Let’s not talk about the state of my Lightroom catalog…

Finally I decided to just start recording a brain dump of my day. I write them in the DayOne app which I love because it’s well designed and syncs across all my devices instantly.

It’s been going great, and I’ve been able to write every day in the month of December. I knew about 10 minutes into the first entry, that no way was I going to be posting these daily missives on the internet, but it was nice to have a record of what the heck I did with my day.

Yesterday we were about to leave the house and I couldn’t find my wallet. It wasn’t on the kitchen table or in any of my bags. But I didn’t fell like I had left it anywhere either. What to do?

Before, I would have spent who knows how long mentally retracing my steps, trying to figure out what I did with it. This time, I opened DayOne and skimmed through the last couple of days.

Oh look, I ran to the video store to take back Nurse Jackie. As soon as I saw that, I remembered putting my wallet into the tiny camelbak that Jess loaned me to hold the video. I had put it back in the garage. I went and fished it out and there was my wallet.

Victory!

I love this new habit and plan to keep it up. I’m terrible at remembering names, and where I met people and when did things. Jess and I were watching the trailer for Interstellar the other day and she said she wanted to see it. I told her we’d already seen it, but in fact, I saw it with someone else and I can’t remember who I was with or where I saw it. (Feel free to pipe up if you’re reading this, mystery date).

I think writing will help me to remember things more organically, but it will also serve as backup when memory inevitably fails.

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