[Read of Interest] Epic Pepys diary rebroadcast to end

More than nine years ago, Phil Gyford started publishing The Diary of Samuel Pepys online as a time-shifted blog...perhaps the first of its kind. During that time, each entry in Pepys' diary was published 343 years after Pepys originally wrote them. In time, a popular Twitter account was added. The final entry was published on May 31, which is when Pepys suspended his diary in 1669 due to poor eyesight.


-- courtesy of kottke.

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How do you feel about maintaining a daily journal? Do you ever have the thought that you could ever live longer than your lifespan through the works that you do now, perhaps being celebrated some time far beyond in the future? I strive to do all that I can to become a decent human being, but I'm afraid I'll never at all be interesting enough for the future (hence, I do not scrawl my daily events into a notebook as a self-prescribed therapist & reminder of the past).

 

I maintain a daily journal.

It is an ongoing feedback of intentions, fulfilment, processed used, and catalogs the interventions with which I organise and develop tools to improve them.

It is the verbal equivalent of a bathroom mirror, and gives me an external perspective on the state of my inner health and appearence, as I, like you, Jetée, strive to do all that I can to become a decent human being.

It is also a "workshop journal" - in order to solve clients' problems, I often take them onboard in a 'sandbox' within my own system, in order to solve them first, to develop, for them, the most powerful and elegant interventions.

I keep it with no regard to posterity, any more than I would keep the notes I might make when sizing timber needed for carpentry.

 

I am not personally a journaler-- that's just not how I work things out internally. But I enjoy reading the published journals of others. And I love the Diary of Samuel Pepys. I can't believe I never heard about this dude. What a great idea!