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Comment by tmountain | Hacker News Reader

I just moved to a new country for the first time, and I've been doing a micro journal every day. Basically, I write 3-5 sentences capturing the most meaningful moments of the day. I've been doing this for two months now, and I've already found some benefits--both in gaining equilibrium and dialing up key details in sequence when necessary (i.e., when exactly did I start that home renovation project?). I'm lucky to be young enough that my cognition is still sound, but I can see benefits in this practice as I age.

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My wife and I have been keeping a daily journal since our first child was born in 2014 - about 100 - 200 words a day. (And before that i’d been doing it just for myself since 2006.) Besides just having it to go back to and read, something I’m really excited about is llm context windows getting large enough that I can feed the whole thing in (it’s about 1.5 million words) and ask questions. grep only goes so far.

The best part will be the LLM hallucinations of things that never happened, and then it gaslighting you. ;)

With RAG (so when you give it source text), hallucinations are greatly reduced (not completely, but greatly).

I think you will like this short story by Ted Chaing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

I've been keeping a food diary since Nov 2014. It started off as a reminder to myself to eat better and fewer calories. I don't want to break the chain I even recorded my meals during over a week of no power after hurricane Fiona.

Here's my supper on day 1 if anyone is curious lol (note format is: day, month, year)

Saturday 01/11/2014 Beans, Baked, molasses and pork

Saturday 01/11/2014 Rice, Basmati, 1 cup

Saturday 01/11/2014 Pop, Orange cream, 355ml

Also my exercise inadvertently became a memory tool for me as well. Since being diagnosed with hypothyroid I noticed that my short-memory was not great. So this is a way to force myself to remember things I did today. Stuff I'd normally dismiss as unneeded info and clear it from my mind.

I did this for a few years. I started off listing component volumes and mass etc. Towards the end I was just noting “good” or “bad” (like how I thought I went) on a calendar, then not even consistently.

I learned that this is how much of my approach to life works: Zeal followed by a gradual decline into indifference.

Do you retain after effects on behavior from the zeal phase?

You can already do that now. Run a sliding window over it, collecting anything relevant to your question. Then, summarize the summaries. (Or run vector search. But everybody does that, so it’s boring. :))

I've been doing this since 2016 and I'm frustrated on the regular that I never did it before. It's incredibly useful to know when things happened.

Yes, I do something similar for when I travel, work around my house and garden, natural events (e.g. first sightings of bats in the spring, first blossoms appear, a specific tree all bare of leaves in the autumn).

It gives a good sense of what is changing over the years and what stays the same.

when i got my first portable laptop (a sony picturebook) i started a travel diary in a similar manner. initially only when i was away from home, but when i moved countries being away from home became a permanent state, so i kept writing almost every day. until it became a habit. i don't review past entries, but like you i sometimes use the diary to research certain facts.

interestingly, when i write i always have some kind of audience in mind, my wife, other family members. some friends (the later being inspired by a friend who actually started a semi-public journal he shares with close friends, a circle that i feel privileged to have been invited to. however, i have not actually shared my own diary with anyone yet)

Other than it helping you as a source when you need to recall facts, have you noticed this habit changing you or how you experience going through your day?

that is a very good question, my initial response was going to be no, but while trying to explain that answer i realized it's not quite true.

it does not directly change my habits, but it does give me a better understanding of myself. for example one thing i learned is that it bothers me if i didn't accomplish at least something each day, to the point that i can't go to sleep. the reflection helps me notice smaller accomplishments, so i can sleep easier.

part of the benefit is a form of general reflection on the day, even on things that i don't write down. it does help me with is noticing when i get stuck in a rut, where one day after another is the same. like if for the fifth day in a row i wrote: get kids ready for school. work. make dinner. watch tv. it helps me notice these kind of pattern, and also, see how long this was going on. then i can refocus and look what else interesting is happening that i may not have noticed before. so either it changes how i feel about each day or it helps me add activities that break the routine.

it also helps me track things that i do want to change. say i set a goal of going for a walk for one hour each day, then this detail, which i ignore most of the time, now gets added to the diary. the diary doesn't so much cause me to change my habits, but rather is available as a tool that i can use to support an intended change of habits. but i don't do this systematically. it's more like an afterthought when other ways to reach the goal fail and i am bothered enough to do something about it.

it also helps me realize when i get behind on work. when you are at home busy with kids, sometimes a week can pass by without me realizing it. the daily reflection can act as an intervention. and the diary helps me understand that i didn't waste the week doing nothing.

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