Reading a book about myself
Journaling is one of those things I kept running into. It shows up in books, it shows up in interviews with people whose heads I would like to borrow for an afternoon, and it is always framed the same way: write it down, at the end of the day, in a notebook.
So I tried it. Properly, more than once, with the notebook and everything.
It did not stick, and the reason is not that I was lazy about it. It is that after about a week I was writing the same page I had written the day before. Days are average. That is not a complaint, it is just what days are. Most of them are the one before with a small variation, and when you sit down every night to account for one of them you end up saying the same thing in slightly different words until the whole exercise feels like a chore you are performing rather than something you are getting anything from. I would read back a week of it and learn nothing, because nothing in it had moved far enough to be visible.
And the thing I have come to believe about any habit is that if you did not stick to it, it is meaningless. Not meaningless as in bad. Meaningless as in it produced nothing, because it never ran long enough to. A perfect system you abandon in three weeks loses to a sloppy one you are still doing a year later. So when journaling failed for me I stopped treating it as a discipline problem I needed to fix and started treating it as a format problem.
What I do now is journaling. It just does not look anything like a notebook.
What I actually do
Once a week, on a Sunday night, I open my Mac, open QuickTime, hit record, and talk to myself for somewhere between half an hour and an hour. Then I stop the recording, save the file, name it with a number, and nobody ever watches it except me.
That is the whole thing. I want to be boring about the details because the details are the practice, and when I say "I journal by video" people picture something much more produced than what is actually happening.
There is no editing. I have never cut anything out of one. There are no retakes. Plenty of times I have started a sentence, lost it completely, sat there for ten seconds, and just kept going, and that stays in, because the alternative is performing and performing is the one thing that would kill it. The camera is the webcam built into the laptop. The lighting is whatever the room has. I have moved to a different seat because the light was coming from the wrong side, and I have moved rooms because the washing machine was going, and that is the full extent of the production. Once I recorded part of one walking around because I needed to move.
They are numbered rather than dated, which sounds like a small thing and is actually the load-bearing part. The number is what tells me whether I have missed one. I keep them all in one place, a small piece of software I wrote for myself, so nothing depends on me remembering.
How it began is less impressive than it sounds. I had gotten rid of my phone, which meant the Mac was the only device I owned that could record anything, and I had an evening with nothing in it. I was going through Mac settings out of boredom and noticed I had never once opened QuickTime. So I opened it and pressed record to see what it did. The first artifact in the whole archive is about two minutes of me checking whether it was picking up my voice at all, and the last thing I say on it is that I do not know if it is even recording. Then I stopped it, checked, started again, and talked for twenty minutes. That was the entire plan. There was no plan.
They got longer after that. Thirty minutes, then forty, then a few that ran close to an hour. These days they sit somewhere around thirty five on average, though one was barely fifteen because I was exhausted and had nothing, and one ran nearly sixty because I could not stop.
Watching last week before recording this week
Here is the part that turns it from a pile of files into something that actually does work, and it took me about five weeks to stumble on it.
Before I record a new one, I watch the previous one all the way through.
The first time I did that, it was the first time I had ever watched one back, and it changed what the practice was for. Because sitting there is the guy from last Sunday saying what he was going to do this week, in his own voice, with his own face, and I am on the other side of it already knowing how it went. Some of it he did. Some of it he did not. There is no arguing with it, and there is nobody to perform for, so the honest version is the only one available.
What I am actually checking is simple: what did I say mattered last week, and did I do it. That is the whole audit. But it catches a specific failure that nothing else in my life catches, which is the thing that quietly disappears. Say I got excited about a project and talked about it for ten minutes. A week later I watch that back and the truth is I worked on it for two days and stopped. Now I have to say something. Am I continuing it or dropping it, and either way, why. Sometimes I drop it and the reason is good. Sometimes I hear myself giving a weak reason and I know it is weak while it is coming out of my mouth, which is its own kind of useful.
Without that, the project just fades. Nobody ever asks about it. You do not decide to abandon it, you forget you ever had it, and then a month later you have a vague sense that you meant to do something.
There is a second thing the rewatch catches, which is the problem that keeps showing up. When the same complaint appears across four or five weeks in a row you cannot pretend it is a bad week anymore. It is a thing you are living with. Seeing it repeat is usually what finally makes me go and close it.
So the weekly cost is not the recording, it is both halves. Half an hour of watching and half an hour of talking. Under an hour a week, and I have gotten more out of that hour than out of almost anything else I do.
I found out how much the watching matters by accident, on the day I got it wrong in the other direction. I sat down, talked honestly to myself for something like thirty or forty minutes, got to the end, and realised I had never clicked record. All of it gone. And I was not angry. I expected to be furious, because a couple of years earlier losing two minutes of footage on something I was making would have had me genuinely pissed off. This time I felt almost nothing, and it took me a second to work out why. The recording is a byproduct. What sitting down actually does is force me to take a half-formed thought and go all the way into it out loud until it is clear, and I had already done that. The file was just the receipt. I was calm enough about it that I recorded a second video immediately after, about having forgotten to record the first one.
Going further back
The weekly loop is the engine. The part I did not see coming is what happens when you go back months.
I do this without any system to it. I have watched old ones while doing the dishes. I have picked one at random when I could not sleep and watched an hour of myself instead of sleeping, smiling the whole way through, which I am aware is a strange thing to admit. More recently I started going through the whole run in order from the first one, to watch my own thinking change, which is the closest thing I have to reading a book about myself.
Two things happen every time, and they are worth more to me than anything the weekly audit produces.
The first is that problems shrink. I watch myself describe something that felt enormous at the time, genuinely the shape of my whole life that month, and from here it is just not. Usually I cannot even reconstruct why it had that much weight. You do not get that from memory, because memory quietly edits the size of things after the fact. The recording does not. There is the actual size of it, on the actual day, in my actual voice, and comparing that to where it sits now does something for my sense of proportion that no amount of telling myself to keep perspective has ever done.
The second is better. Sometimes I hear myself name something I wanted and did not have, and I am watching it already knowing that I have it now. And I never noticed it arrive. There was no moment. It showed up quietly while I was busy with the next thing, and the only reason I get to feel anything about it at all is that a version of me from eight months ago left a record of wanting it. That is the closest I come to celebrating anything, and it is always months late.
Along the way something inverted that I did not plan. Looking at older versions of myself used to make me feel worse. It was a comparison and I always came out behind it. Now the usual feeling watching an old one is something close to being proud of the guy in it. Not in a smug way. More like the feeling of watching a friend handle something harder than you remembered it being. There is one where the version of me on screen says something so directly useful that it functioned as advice, and he had no idea he was giving it. My past self still teaches my present self, which is a ridiculous sentence and also just true.
The strongest case I have for any of this is a stretch where I drifted back into something I had deliberately removed from my life, and after a few weeks I had genuinely forgotten why I had removed it. I could not reconstruct the reasoning. What pulled me out was the weekly ritual putting an old one in front of me, and the guy on screen explaining it to me from before I forgot. My past self saved my future self, and he did it without knowing that was the job.
And there is one more thing, which I only noticed recently. I can remember the year I started this almost all the way through. Ask me about the years before it and I can give you a handful of scenes and a lot of fog. Somewhere in the recording and the rewatching, my life stopped being something I was losing track of as it happened.
Why nobody watches them
The one condition I will not trade is that these are for me.
I want to be honest about how that actually went, because I did not get it right at the start and it is the most interesting thing I have learned from the whole practice. For the first several months I was talking to an audience. Not a real one, there has never been a real one. I would open by saying hello guys, to nobody, in an empty room, and address the whole thing outward as if someone were on the other side. It is a habit I still have not fully broken.
At some point I watched a few back and heard it, and heard what it was doing. I was explaining rather than thinking. I was rounding off the parts that did not flatter me. The pressure of an audience does not need an audience to exist, it just needs you to imagine one, and once it is there you lose the honesty without ever deciding to. That is why the private version is the only one that works. If the guy from six months ago was managing an impression, there is nothing to go back to, and the entire value of the archive is that he was telling the truth.
What I did about it was not to stop saying guys. I still say it. What I did was change who I meant. Now I open by saying hello to me in the future, and that one substitution fixed it, because I actually do talk differently when I know exactly who is on the other side and that he will be able to tell if I am lying.
The camera also does something I did not expect, which is that it wants you to restart. Every time I fumble a sentence there is a thought that says do it again, do it properly. I have learned to ignore it completely. The fumbling is the texture, and a smooth version of me is a less useful document than the real one.
I am not good at this in the way that word usually implies. I have missed weeks, five or so across the run. There was a stretch where I missed two in a row and came back to record one numbered several behind where it should have been, and I decided to keep the honest number rather than pretend. I lose track of which one I am on constantly and have to check the files. Plenty of them happen on a Monday because Sunday got away from me. There was a week I genuinely did not want to record and did it anyway, and it was one of the better ones.
None of that has mattered much. It is under an hour a week, it survived every other system I have had breaking, and it is the closest thing I have to an anchor.
But I want to be clear about what I am actually saying, because it is not that you should do this. The video part is mine. It works for me because I think better out loud than on paper, because I get something from seeing my own face that text would never give me, and because a week is the right unit for a life that mostly changes slowly. None of that is a general truth. It is just the shape my version came out.
What I would say is that the idea underneath journaling is worth something, and the standard form of it is only one implementation. A notebook every night is what the advice always describes, and if that had worked for me I would be doing it. It did not, and for a while I read that as me failing at journaling. It was not. It was the format not fitting, and there was nothing stopping me from building a different one out of whatever I had lying around, which in my case was a bored evening and a laptop I had never opened QuickTime on.
So if you tried it and it did not take, I do not think that tells you much about you. Try a version that fits your life closely enough that you will still be doing it in a year. That is the only part that actually matters, because if you do not stick to it, it is meaningless.