Why You Should Document Your Life

Documenting your life should not be reserved just for the big moments. Keeping a record of your days is a great way to living an intentional and meaningful life.

How to start documenting your life

The importance of documenting

How much of your life do you actually remember? Do you remember all of the concerts you have been to? How about all the coffee shops you’ve visited? Or different parks you’ve been too?

Many of us think of the big moments when we hear the word documenting like an overseas trip or our high school graduation. However, we seldom think that the everyday stuff we do is worth documenting, perhaps because it appears repetitive or because it’s not some great event like what we usually see online. But what if I told you that the simplicity of it is precisely why it’s worth documenting.

Lately I’ve been running into this concept of documenting your life in different types of media I consume. For example in Austin Kleon’s book Steal like an Artist he mentions how he keeps a logbook and a swipe file which I will explain in detail a little bit further down. I’ve also seen in Youtube videos a lot of creators preaching the idea of starting your personal youtube channel either public or private and filling it with vlogs about your day-to-day activities no matter how simple they might appear and I’ve read about how great writers and merchants of the past used to keep their own sort of notebooks where they wrote about their days and the new things they encountered each day, creating a mix of a journal and a commonplace book.

What all of these have in common is the idea of keeping records of your life. We can’t rely on our memory for perfect recollection down the line, we might be under the impression that we will be able to remember things but try to write down the meals you ate 2 days ago and you’ll see what I mean.

How to document

There are tons of ways you can go about documenting, you can select a single method or a combination of several. In the end it is entirely up to you and how you prefer to do things but I’ll leave you with a list of options to get you started.

Videos

Videos are an amazing way to document because you can get images and sounds in the same place. You could take a 15 second video of you most meaningful moment of the day. Or a short video of your meal and the people you are with. You can simply point your camera out of the window and record the sound of birds or cars passing by while simultaneously recording that day’s weather. You can even record a 1 minute clip of yourself giving a summary of your day to the camera. The possibilities are endless.

Journaling

Journaling is very different from video, however it is also a really relaxing way to document your life. There are tons of ways to go about it but a few of them are:

• Writing about 3 things that you did every day
• Writing an in-depth reflection of how you are feeling and what is going on in your life at that specific time
• Writing your goals for each day and a review at the end to check if you achieved them or not
• Doing a brain-dump of everything you have in mind

Pictures

Taking pictures is perhaps one of the easiest ways of documenting everything with the least amount of effort. You can snap a picture of something you see on your way to work or of your pet doing something funny and it will bring back those memories whenever you see the picture. Another great way to go about it is by deleting pictures. It might seem counterintuitive but deleting pictures is an awesome way of remembering your life. Going into your photo gallery and selecting the pictures that go and the ones that stay makes you look at them which evokes the feelings you had while taking them.

Logbook

This idea came from Austin’s book and consists of keeping a record of everything you do every day. It doesn’t need to be detailed, just the basics like “Went to the grocery store” or “Ate at new Chinese place”. Having a logbook helps you remember the big details by keeping track of the small ones. At the end you can also ask yourself “What is the best thing that happened today?” and have that as a daily highlight for your days.

Swipe file

This one is a mix and it’s also from Steal like an artist. The original idea is to keep one for creativity purposes where you keep everything that resonates or that you enjoy. This way when you want to create something you can look at your swipe file and grab things without the need to start from scratch, however it also doubles as a sort of content log. Whenever you save something you are taking a snapshot of something that resonated with you at that specific moment in your life which might help you remember the rest.

Conclusion

Documenting your life is an important part of living it. This way you will get to experience the feelings and emotions again whenever you go back to reading your journal entries or watching your videos. There are tons of ways to go about it and you can choose the one that best suits your lifestyle. Documenting should not only be reserved for the big moments in life, the small mundane ones are important too, sometimes even more so, so that in the future you will be able to go back and remember your life.