6 Lessons From 21 Months of Logging

[ed. Same thing. Except 12 years.]

Since the end of 2021, I’ve uploaded ~3 logs a day, with the average one being 50-100 words. These are small thoughts, usually epiphanies jotted into my phone in a rush, touched up and published the next morning onto a pinned Substack page.

I’ve started a lot of weird experiments, but this one stuck.

I’ll even admit that I consider my logging practice to be more important than my practice of publishing essays.

Here’s why:

1. Practice your prose — Logging lets you practice shaping ideas into sentences, without having to worry about the puzzle of essay writing. Structuring and refining thousands of words is a different skill. With logging, all you have to do is write one great paragraph. The reduced scope is liberating. It’s writing without headache. I publish 3x more words through logs than essays.
2. You see the world differently — Logging forces me to snap out of auto-pilot and pay attention. Once you build a habit of recording your observations, it gets you to look at things more closely and from different perspectives. Any ordinary day is filled with revelations, but only if you care to notice. After I capture something, it clears out my thought loop, and gives me a fresh slate to see new things. It’s a feedback loop: the more you log, the more you notice.
3. It's a lo-fi second brain — My old note-taking systems were impersonal and mechanical. I’d hoard quotes from books or articles, and then manually organize them into some private structure that was impossible to maintain. Logging inverts the typical note-taking habits in three big ways.

• Original — These are your original reflections. Through logging, you build a mosaic-portrait of your life. It doubles as an archive of your memories and a bank of personal sources to draw from.

• Loose — No organization required. I have over 200,000 words jammed into 21 monthly text files. Categorizing, linking, and grouping is forbidden. It’s just reverse chronological. All my past thoughts are searchable, and I’m building Margin Muse so that relevant logs pop into my margins as I write.

• In public — Sharing my logs in public forces me to write in coherent sentences. Private note-taking systems tend to devolve into chicken scratch.

1. Freedom to go off-brand — Logging is anti-strategic. I don't have the self-consciousness of a tweet or the perfectionism of an essay. I assume most people don’t binge-read my logs, so I have no pressure to perform or narrow my scope like an entrepreneur would. It’s pure capture and expression.
2. Momentum — So many of my essays and tweets start out as logs. I often scan the past few days to sense the themes that are emerging. These are the ideas ready to be written. If ever I get stuck on an essay, it’s often because it felt urgent, but had no presence in my latest logs. Instead of starting from a blank page, you can copy in some recent logs and thread them together (this is my exact strategy for loglogog). It comes out easily.
3. It works even when you're busy — I was slammed in April and May and had no bandwidth to write essays. I still logged. I wrote 13,000 words. Logging is resilient. You don't need to make time for it. It's ambient. It's simply about making the habit to write down the thoughts you’re already having.

by Michael Dean, Dean's List |  Read more:

[ed. Sounds familiar. These are great observations. Logging=blogging.]