I've started keeping a diary...

 I've started keeping a diary, an almost daily record of what I've done and when, bike rides, interesting things I saw online that I might follow up on, that sort of thing.

I've never really kept a personal diary before. Travel journals, yes, and work and project diaries, yes, but personal day to day diaries, no.

Which in retrospect is a pity, there's been a lot of interesting little snippets along the way that I should have noted down.

I'm structuring the diary like one of my work or project diaries - essentially a journal rather than a diary.

I've always found work and project diaries useful to keep a record of what was done when and indeed where we are up to, as well as in the days when I had to do such things, compile the dread annual activity statement.

Strangely I didn't keep a work diary for either of my projects with the National Trust, instead just relying on my utterly illegible work books, and the spreadsheets I created along the way.

My reasoning for not keeping a work diary were that they were both 'start at the beginning and keep on going until you reach the end' type projects.

In retrospect that was a mistake, especially in the case of Dow's, where there was a hiatus of nearly fifteen months  due to the various Covid lockdowns and closures. While I did document my decisions along the way in various blog posts, they don't give the level of detail a proper project diary gives.

In the absence of any real project plan or an external project manager, I found I had to make decisions along the way about how to do things, which I documented in various blog posts.

However, keeping a project diary would have been useful to record the various useful out of scope things that happened along the way and supplementary information and documentation that I generated.

At Lake View, that was less of an issue, as the project was more tightly defined, but again a project diary might have been worth keeping.

I did start keeping one towards the end of the project, simply because I was also spending time up at the Athenaeum, and I needed to keep a record of what I did for which project.

I've carried on keeping a project diary for my work at the Athenaeum, into which I add other bits and  pieces, like blogs posted and odd little ad hoc bits of research, like my work on the Friends of Russian Freedom.

Likewise I've been keeping a travel diary for years, at first just for our longer trips, but now for most trips, I find it useful to be able to put us in a place at a particular time.

So, now a personal diary. Today's the first day of it, so it's pretty boring so far but I'm hoping a written record of things, books I mean to buy, and other useful snippets might prove useful.

The other thing about the diary is that I'm keeping it in a hardback notebook -  a cheap Amazon basics notebook and writing it with my trusty Lamy nib pen.

The paper quality of the cheap Amazon notebook is not too bad - not quite as nice as ClaireFontaine or Moleskine, but smooth enough to write on with a nib pen without any blotches.

I do find writing in a notebook with a nib pen helps fix things in my memory more that simply just using Evernote or OneDrive to manage documents, or indeed to use jrnl on one of my computers to make a day by day record.

We'll see how this goes...