Log Your Life for Daily Creativity

Lifelogging — keeping a continuous record of everything that happens to you you — is popular. It’s easy to snap photos in your cell phone as you go about your day. With Google Glass, it will be come even easier to record your life, moment by moment.

You may be wondering whether this is helpful for your writing.

From A Head for Detail, published in Fast Company magazine in 2006:

So are all those photos a waste of memory? Or can that kind of exhaustive visual record actually be worth something?

Alan Smeaton, a professor of computing at Dublin University, thinks it can. After hearing about Bell's project, Smeaton got Microsoft to lend him a few SenseCams and gave them to his students, who began wearing them all day long. They discovered an intriguing psychological effect: If, at the end of each workday, they spent a minute scrolling through the thousands of pictures the SenseCam had taken--a high-speed replay of their day--it had the effect of stimulating their shortterm memory.

I’ve conducted several life logging experiments, creating images at half-hourly intervals right throughout the day. While it’s not continuous image-taking, I didn’t have any ambitious goals. I just wanted to see whether it would help my writing.

It did, because it made me pay attention.

Pay attention, and see more clearly
One of my friends is an artist. She has a phenomenal memory. If she visits your home, she can tell you in detail about the objects and colors in a room, even if she’s just taken a quick glance.

My visual memory will never be as strong as my friend's. However, by taking photos, I've found that I do pay more attention, and remember more sensory details.

Exercise 14. Experiment with modified life logging.

Pick a day for this experiment. On your chosen day, set your phone's alarm to ring at half hourly intervals. When the phone chimes, take a photo.

Start as soon as you wake up, or when you're having breakfast.

Next day, look through the photos. How do you feel? Are you remembering more of the day?

Over the next couple of days. Pay attention to your writing. Has it improved? Is your sense memory more available to you?

Repeat this exercise as often as you like.