a notebook just for recording things i have done
I keep two notebooks: one is a journal that is centered more around my internal thoughts and emotions, while the other is more of a timeline of things I've done lately. Today, I want to show off the latter! I ordered this from a website called Papier.
That blue spot on the cover is censoring my full name. In this notebook, I have a color-coded key for organizing my entries, seen in the righthand image. Elaborating further on the key:
- Things I have read (e-books or physical) are highlighted in green
- Things I have watched (movies or TV shows typically) are highlighted in purple
- Things I have played (this has only been video games so far, but if I played tabletop RPGs it would fall under this) are highlighted in blue
- Things I have listened to (audiobooks, albums, or podcasts if they're broken up into seasons) are highlighted in pale pink
- Things I have created (usually craft projects or new recipes I've tried) are highlighted in a more vibrant pinkish-purple (magenta?)
- Things I have experienced (concerts, trips to cool places, special events such as an outing with friends) are highlighted in yellow
I have this notebook organized by month, then by day. Let me show you what May is looking like so far.
On the top of the lefthand page, I've marked it as the start of May 2026. The numbers that follow are the date (within May) that things occurred. So on the 1st, I finished reading The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon. I did a little indentation for the next line then followed it with my thoughts on the book itself. On the 2nd, I finished playing a game called Forbidden Solitaire. I shared the platform I played it on, how long the game took, and how I felt about it.
I keep a running note on my notes app of dates and entries that still need to be added, and usually I'll sit down and knock a bunch of these entries out every other week. I started this notebook because I wanted an easy way to answer the question of, "What did I do last month?" I can flip through my notebook and see that last month, I went to two concerts, listened to some new music that I enjoyed, and didn't read many books but I did listen to quite a few audiobooks.
I've been doing this since last summer and I've still got a long ways to go before filling up this notebook - I suspect it will take me another ten years to actually fill all of the pages. But it'll be so cool at that time to look back and see how I felt about different things, what months I had a lot more yellow highlights for experiences, what recipes I really enjoyed and copied down to try again in the future.
I wish I had a better name for this notebook! It doesn't quite feel like a journal, and it isn't a commonplace book either - it's more of a timeline. (I also wish I knew of a way to resize photos for my posts, because I see how big that last image is. Thank you for tolerating my comically large photos.)