Over two years ago I wrote this blog post about a productivity experiment I was conducting. The idea was simple: take short notes throughout the day about the things I was working on, what I was thinking about, places I went, people I talked to, what I had for dinner, etc. Then, at the end of the day, copy those notes into my DayOne Journal so that I could review them during my weekly and monthly GTD reviews. I mixed business and personal notes so that I didn’t have to worry about recording things in several places and I kept each entry very short (maybe a sentence or two) so that it didn’t take up a lot of my time.
I found that copying and pasting the entries every night became tedious, so I created a simple app that allowed me to record notes via Slack and save them into a database. On August 11, 2015 I wrote my first entry into this new system. Now, over two years later, I have 13,317 micro-journal entries that document the last 787 days of my life.