Today marks the 49th anniversary of my journal.

Writing in it from an early age became a productive habit – I went the first 7 years without missing a single day – and helped make me a more organized person. The daily “mini-chore” of writing helped in capturing to-do’s but also just in being more observant. Obviously, skills that have served me well later in my career. The finished product also serves as a detailed reference – I can pull up any entry and remember (and pretty frequently retrieve mental images of) who was there, what happened, and when.

My writing methods also evolved. I started with handwritten entries in tiny calendar books from my parents’ collegiate alumni association. In high school, I graduated to simple, lined-page journal books. I paused writing most of my freshman year at Indiana but resumed the handwritten again shortly. After graduating to Chicago, I transitioned to a typewriter for more formal documentation, and by 1991, I had my first home computer and for many years, preserved entries digitally.

Something interesting happened during the pandemic — I rediscovered handwritten entries.

I repurchased an old fountain pen model I’d once owned, and went all in on a quality notebook and even grabbed a leather cover.

Completely impractical and high-maintenance, fountain pens offer some novel resistance to the digital world. There’s something great about using a nice nib floating on ink and the analog process forcing you to more deliberate thought. (You can’t simply backspace and continue.)

What I’m seeking now and always in my sometimes hasty practice of What I Did Today is to lay down more a little bit more vivid description, to move beyond the simple “grocery list” of daily events.

While it’s satisfying to record major milestones and achievements, the real fun of the journal lives in capturing the smaller moments: what somebody wore, a random remark now preserved, or a funny incident that would have otherwise faded from memory.

Looking back across nearly 50 years and more than 10,000 entries I’m grateful to have this “chronicle” to consult.