Tags: accountability, book, experiment, log, logbook, notes, record, Writing
Captain’s log, stardate 2456771.500000: A logbook was originally a book for recording readings from a ship’s log and used to determine the distance a ship traveled within a certain amount of time.
determining the distance a ship traveled within a certain amount of time…
Isn’t that a sweet metaphor for keeping any kind of log book?
Different kinds of log books include:
- Travel milage
- Dietary intake
- Daily exercise
- Research experiments
- Weather tracking
- Health Maintenance
This site describes keeping a logbook for self-improvement patterns and describes a logbook as: A notebook where you log and probably describe and explain your activities while performing it. Not an agenda.
A few more helpful sites on logbook maintenance:
Keeping a Logbook at Aerogel.org
The importance of keeping a good experimental logbook.
Keeping a logbook: a key to the practice of ethics
I use a no. 11 to list and describe 5 things I see and hear at the end of each day, no matter how exhausted I am. It’s a logbook of sorts, inhabited by recordings of both the striking and mundane, a place for an undemanding exercise in reflection. Although my 5-things booklet contains none of the rich textures and meandering explorations of journal entries, it permits more flexibility than a daybook. And the no. 11 is perfect for it.
Every effort at logging that I have seen enthusiastically begin ended quickly. Unless a log is a job requirement, or the logger is obsessive about such things, the dream of having a wealth of data cannot survive the effort required to fill in the blanks.
My journals act as a kind of unsearchable log.