Finding things in a diary
Why Indexing?
I've been keeping a diary now almost daily since 2017. A few days are missing, but to the best of my knowledge the are no missing days since mid-2022.
I don't (generally) write about current affairs, news, politics etc. unless it has particular and direct relevance to my own life. I want to capture the stuff that would be lost to history, stuff that I might want to remember at some point in the future, stuff about my day-to-day life. News and current affairs and politics and world events are already well-recorded by the media and a whole host of bloggers and journal writers. Nobody is documenting the specifics of my life, except me. And nobody is generally interested in any of the details, except me.
But what's the point of writing it down if I can't find it again later?
Ideally I'd like to be able to answer any question like "When did we get the new car?" or "When did I start playing the recorder again?"
an example
I was swimming with a friend and his 9 year old daughter on Sunday, something I've been doing on an off for a few years. We started swimming with his two little girls - now 9 and 13 - some years ago. How many years ago....? Can't be sure. The older 13-year old "E" is now a teenager and therefore much too cool to come out on a Sunday morning with her old man. So it's just 3 of us. Me, "T" and his younger daughter "B"
The question was raised by younger sibling "What age was E when she swam a length underwater first?"
The younger daughter is now 9 and wants to match her older sibling.
I couldn't remember. Her dad couldn't remember.
In fact between us we couldn't even remember when we'd started this regular Sunday morning swim.
Was is pre-covid? post-covid? Two years, three years...?
"I'm sure that Samuel Pepys here will find it in his dairy"
Hmm... but will I? I've tried to keep an index - in a separate book - just a topic and page-number for reference to allow things to be found. But did I have this particular thing in my index?
In the end it wasn't in my index-book, but I did find it in my dairy itself. It took some searching. I write around 4 diary books per year - each covers roughly 3 months. I had to do a binary search to pin point the date we started the regular swims (Sunday 9th January 2022) and then a slow search forward looking to see if I'd noted down "E swam a length under water"... And I did find that entry, too, on Sunday 1st May 2022.
I can answer the question..... posed by a 9 year old.
It's an example of little consequence - if I'd been unable to find it we'd have just said "she was about your age" and left it at that. But the ability to be certain of something - anything - after any number of years. That's more powerful, when it applies to something more important to you.
My Current Index
My index looks like
index of the C-topics
It gets more and more complicated and messy as new things are added - you can't always leave enough space when adding entries to be sure there's room for something new later on, so it becomes harder to add new entries, and harder to quickly find them when they aren't in a logical order on the page.
Thoughts on better indexing
I thought about starting again - use the current index as a starting point and get a new blank A5 notebook, and re-create the same layout - but now with so many entries to work with I could make a better stab at laying it out in a better manner - more space between entries to allow new ones to fit. But the same problem will still occur, in time. I'll run out of space to add new topics in the correct places and then they'll get added willy-nilly all over the place.
I'd thought about, and even tried a small experiment, using a 5x3 card index. Each "topic" can have its own card. Space to record many diary entries for each topic on its own card. New topics get a new card that can be slipped into the correct alphabetical position. If a topic needs to be split into sub-topics it's a simple matter to take the existing card, and make new ones that follow any sub-divisions I think are necessary. Then just copy across the existing diary references to the new card(s) and insert them in their proper place(s) in the index box. No worries about squeezing things into a full page in a book, just shuffle a few cards and job's done.
So I'm now rebuilding my index in a 5x3 card index box. I've got everything from my book-form index done on 5x3 card. I'm now able to add any new things wherever they need to go. This includes indexing things I've written about in older diaries, but have so far neglected to add to the index.
I plan on slowly working through the old diaries and indexing anything I feel has been overlooked. And in addition anything I look up in the future will get added to the index (if it's not already there). The swimming examples above are just the sort of thing I mean. If I have to search through the diaries for something once, then I'll index it to make sure I don't have to do it again.
