The cumulative diary

A few years ago, my wife Mish bought a diary. In most respects, it’s a completely ordinary diary; it provides a place to make some notes about each day of the year. It’s a little thicker than most, in that it has space for five years’ worth of personal history, and it has a peculiar layout which proves to be absolutely transformational.

Rather than arranging the five years sequentially, each page is committed to a single date and is divided into five spaces, one for each year. So, after a year, you’ve written in every page of the book, and on January the 1st you find yourself back on page one, writing a new year’s day message immediately below the entry from the year before.

The genius of this design is that the ritual of writing a diary now has an additional layer of joy associated with it as one is reminded of the activities of the years prior. Many nights before bed in the Phink house are accompanied by the phrase “guess what we were doing on this day last year?”. I’ve been especially lucky because I’m able to bask in the joy of the process, without the price of being so deeply committed to the process. (Mish has been exceptionally disciplined and has not missed recording a day’s events since she began a few years ago).

Being exposed to the process so closely, I recently realised why I’m foolish not to be doing the same.

Peter Cook once said “We’re often disappointed by what we can achieve in a day, and surprised by what we can achieve in a year”. Humans aren’t naturally suited to understanding the compounding positive effects of small increments of progress over time (one of the key insights from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits).

Mish’s diary provides a constantly helpful reminder of this compounding effect. Even better, it directly connects the long term impacts (changes achieved over the course of a year or more) to the proximate cause of those improvements (the small changes we make day-by-day). It’s become clear to me that if you were to design an exercise specifically to improve your ability to sustain small, incremental progress day-to-day, the cumulative diary would be it.

Inspired by Mish's habit, a few days ago, I adapted the idea into a process that I think will work for me. As an almost-entirely electronic person, I know that carrying a physical diary around is going to work for me, so I’m using the calendar app on my phone. Each night at 9:30pm I have a reminder set and my task is simply to create a calendar event entitled “On this day”, set to recur annually. In the notes, I write “2020”, and then a series of dot points about what I did that day.

Generally, I’m copying from the list of stuff I prepared that morning (I often write a list of 3-5 things I’d like to tackle that day), and I simply delete the ones that didn’t get done, and add in any others that did.

Even though I’m only a few days in, I’m already noticing a burst of motivation to get stuff done, because I want the satisfaction of recording it in the diary that night. Additionally, I’m even more excited by the promise of seeing the long term effects of compounded small improvements over time.

Of course, that’s not a given. That’s an outcome that I have to earn, as Mish has been earning, by committing to this process over the long haul. This habit is itself an example of one which doesn’t deliver a great deal of value in the short term… its power comes from the compounding effects it produces over the course of years.

Hopefully I’ll write another blog on the topic in a few years’ time to update the story, but I thought it worthy of sharing now so that should it prove to be correct—and I strongly suspect that it will—you can start now with me, and enjoy the benefits too.