Shivhari Shankar

System of recording

I try to record and maintain decent logs of things I do in my life. There are two reasons for this:

1. It helps augment your brain - resources and information about your life are stored in a retrivable way makes your anxiety lesser. We tend to forget and unless you log things, it will fade away.

2. We create narratives of our lives - that is how our brains work. However, it is important to have objective data about yourself to make sure that you can correlate narratives with actual data. If you dont record, there is nothing to correlate your narratives with.

Things I record:

  • A journal entry of each day of my life
  • List of bank accounts and transactions I keep all the transactions from each of my bank accounts in an excel as banking websites have terrible interfaces to query against. Helps in expense tracking and esp during income tax filing.
  • Habit tracking for habits I do regularly I highly recommend using Habit Hub for tracking habits. Its where I track my meditation, when I spoke to my parents, my exercise and if I wrote my journal.
  • List of all my travels outside the city Along with who I met and where I went - really helps in questions like: "I wonder when I took that trip to Thailand"
  • Notes of conversations with people Esp if the conversation has been intellectually stimulating and covered a wide variety of topics.
  • Important articles / videos that I have seen Really helpful if you want to recommend someone to something and if you suddenly remember about it but dont presicely remember the name or exact information.
  • List of shortcuts that I use Across multiple apps I really try and use shortcuts as much as possible - they really do cut down time and lead to an optimized workflow.
  • List of who my friends are
  • List of friends who I meet and when This is mostly for people who dont live in the same city as me or people I meet infrequently.
  • Pomodoros of work done I use this app to track my work sessions. I typically work in 10min pomodoro sessions and track my work patterns over time.
  • List of countries I've visited