[buro9]

I do that with Google Calendar.

I have multiple calendars (about 20), some log things to do with work, one logs all SMS messages and phone calls sent/received, another logs fitness/health.

At any time I can look at any day, and there is enough information in the calendar to tell me everything that happened that day and for me to recall the day clearly.

Most of this is recorded implicitly (IFTTT handles whatever doesn't have calendar intgreation), only a little is recorded manually. It used to be more manual, now it's more automatic.

I've been doing this for so long I'm not even sure when I started... let me look. Well, May 2006 I see densely filled out, but Google Calendar doesn't seem to like looking before that... I guess that Google must store info prior to that in a cold storage solution.

Even looking at 2006, wow. I see the day I met my first wife, the film I saw at the cinema a few days before, my weight, the bike ride I did, some work appointments and a trip to Gloucester, someone's leaving party at work, and that my finances were flush that month.

I remember the weather for almost every day in May 2006, and it makes me realise how much weather is also a signal to recall information. I think I'll add weather history for wherever I am too.

[rmvinfint]

This sounds incredible! could you detail the process?? I would love to set up a similar system. @raamvi

[buro9]

It's less a process and more an accumulation.

For Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zegoggles.... backs up all calls and SMS to Google Calendar and Gmail respectively. IFTTT can copy the SMS messages from Gmail to Google Calendar. I label the GMails, and copy them to a distinct calendar.

I run an IFTTT to detect calendar attachments on email and copy those to a distinct calendar.

I run a personal calendar for personal appointments, and then other calendars for friends appointments. Another calendar tracks gigs, films, exhibitions and theatre visits.

I run a different work calendar for every employer/venture I've had.

I run different calendars for process based work, i.e. I have a calendar that tracks visa applications and progress, and I have another calendar that tracks key dates regarding all financial obligations (start of agreements, agreement expiry, cliffs for option vesting, etc).

It's just a slow accumulation of information into buckets that I consider to have time-based views of them.

The Google Calendar agenda/search results is usually how I find things, but sometimes I do the whole "browse to this month and see what I was doing then".

[recalibrator]

So you merge all the separate calendars into one to get the complete story?

This is fascinating stuff. Have you read the book "Experience Curating" by chance?

[buro9]

Precisely that... I view all calendars at once for the holistic view, but even zoomed out I can see from the density of each calendar's colour roughly what was occurring when.

Inspiration came from two things:

1) Hearing about Stephen Wolfram documenting/logging every conversation.

2) Learning to meditate, and my first attempt at this was to label every thought I had and collate things together in my head

I figured I could log the stream of events that occurred in life, and label everything and collate things.

There are lots of subtle advantages. And it does seem that the book you mentioned ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Experience-Curating-Increase-Influen... ) is a very similar concept to what I'm doing. No, I hadn't read it or heard of other people (beyond Stephen Wolfram) doing anything like this.

I don't use spreadsheets though... I consider time as being the primary key for all information. From that point of view, the storage should be a time based system.

That stems from how I personally recall things. I recall consuming music as a chronology of life... play a song and I know what I listened to in the months before, months after, where I was, who with, how I felt, what I was up to. But time is the thing there, the expansion of the pinpoint into a line stretching forward and backward provides all the extra context. I log way more than I need to because it's so effortless to do so.

I should've added another of the small processes as I added a few bookmarks today and remembered that I hadn't mentioned this one. I use pinboard and bookmarks are pulled from the RSS and put into yet another calendar.