Life logging with Evernote

One of my primary reasons for moving back to Evernote is that I've always wanted to keep a journal. I've never been good at it all, and it's come back to haunt me from time to time as I try to remember when a certain event happened. Before my journal, my e-mail served as my primary method of refreshing my memory, but that's limited to stuff I might have needed to say to someone. Major and minor events went unrecorded.

I've also been thinking about all of the data that I put "out there" each day that is captured only on Facebook or Twitter and might be difficult to find again in the future. Or, I might want to relate something that I posted on Facebook to something in my journal. Sure, Facebook's Timeline feature helps a great deal in finding older posts, but I'd like to have as complete a record of my day as possible in just one spot.

So, inspired by this TED video, I needed to figure out a way to create my own aggregator and use it to log my life...or as much as possible.





In terms of a basic app where I write what happens each day, Evernote is perfect. Each morning, I simply create a new note in my Journal notebook and type away. But, we're here today to talk about some of the other stuff I put in there.

Similar to in my previous post, the secret sauce that will tie the social network aspect into the journal is IFTTT.com. To recap, "If This, Then That" monitors the social networks you give it access to, and when something happens that matches criteria you setup, it'll trigger an action you specify. In this case, a lot of what I wanted to pull in is covered by the default triggers and actions. When I post a status, it's pulled directly into Evernote. When post a photo, same thing. Easy!

Twitter's a bit more difficult. I'll admit, not a big fan of Twitter. I use it because I have to, because so many others use it. But, as the first network I'd axe if I could, yup, Twitter. As a result of my disdain, I rarely ever check the Twitter, so I miss things. But, not anymore! I've setup actions so that if someone mentions me (or TEDxRochester) or sends me a message, I'm sent an e-mail. My own posts are injected into Evernote directly. Why do I have it go to e-mail? So I can see it, of course! I've then got a filter setup in Gmail to automatically forward those to my Evernote account. Two birds (it's Twitter. Tweets. Get it? Birds?), one stone.

The big drawback to this methodology is I get a very cluttered journal. My end goal is to have one note per day that I can go to. Evernote itself provides the mechanism in their Merge Note feature. Select two or more notes and you'll have a bunch of options come up. Simply choose Merge! Now, a hint: click on them in the order you want them in the merged note. I start by clicking my daily note, then my e-mails with my wife (more on that in another article) then the social network stuff notes before hitting Merge. That way, they end up in the note in that order. Done!

With these simple steps, I'm able to cull together a daily journal entry that covers a lot of what I do during the day, but it's not perfect. Still a number of things to pull in. Most importantly are the conversations between the most important person in my life, my wife! But, that's still a work in progress with lots of custom stuff to make it happen....

In the next installment, I'll tell you about the tags I put into posts and how I can use them to gain some basic statistical insight into my life. I'll also talk about some of the more esoteric data that makes its way into the life log.