Once in a while I come across someone who says that blogging (or any other form of diary) is useless to him/her because of his/hers good memory. This argument sounds somewhat funny to me. You see, I thought that my memory was good too. I could remember all important things in my life and trace them back to, well, as far as I could remember.
That was before I started to blog. Now I have close to 3,000 posts that constantly remind me how bad my memory is and how easy it is to forget those little precious moments in life.
I still try to remember as much as I can. But I don’t rely on my memory as much as I used to, because it was proven to be rather faulty. Instead I blog about things that are important to me, or things that can remind me of important things that I want to remember. So far it works very good.
Also, since I mentioned it – indirect blogging works for me very well too. There are some things that I don’t want the public to know, but that I don’t want to forget either. I tried using private posts for these, but it just wasn’t fun. So, instead, I switched to indirect blogging. That is I write about private and secret things in public, but I do so in such a way that only I can figure out the second meaning. (Hint: if you come across a post that makes no sense at all, maybe it’s just one of those indirect posts that I wrote for myself.)
well, your memory better serve you for the indirect posts… ;-)
Well for me what happens is apart from reminding me of things, I also find it very surprising, at times astonishing – to read what I’ve written years ago. But only after I’ve forgotten about having written, to read before forgetting it is usually kind of boring :-) Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised – “wow how did I manage to write all that” and sometimes I wonder “hmm can’t believe I said that – I really needed to grow up a lot!”
As for private posts, you probably know this already but you might also consider using the viewlevel plugin.
Sanjay,
Thanks for the link to the plugin. Looks interesting! I’ll check it out.
The forgetting part is so true too – I also like to go back and read random entries just to see what I was up to. And my reactions are similar to yours – from “What an idiot!” to “Wow! This guy is cool!” :)