It’s December 2012. I’m in my fifth year at university. My friend and I are discussing how memory works and how we forget things. To solidify his theory on how much we forget, my friend asks: “Michał, what were you doing two weeks ago?” I think to myself it will be easy to answer, but I draw a blank. I have no idea.
From that moment in time, I promised myself to write down what I do with my life every day. Fourteen years later I still write a few sentences about each day (except for 10-day silent retreats). I appreciate being able to look up what I did on any given day.
I found that narrowing the scope from a day to moments between tasks can help me become more aware of how I spend my time.
Interstitial in simple terms describes something in the middle of gaps or spaces in between. Interstitial journaling (coined by Tony Stubblebine) is a way of documenting your daily work in the form of a journal for your actions, thoughts, and focus. Here, these gaps are moments when you write your thoughts.
Simple example:
09:15 finished morning coffee, so I'm opening a draft
09:40 got derailed by rabbit hole to find different ways of calendar notation, seems like writing may be hard today, back to the article
10:30 read a bunch of articles that might go into discover weekly section, like those three added right now
10:50 answering emails, worth going back to Mr. Smith about conf, I thought of...
12:20 talked with Opus to prep provision scripts for VPNMy basic rules: write down anything you want, keep it simple, do not edit afterwards, customise to whatever format works for you.
In practice, these interstitial notes are kept in my daily note (in Obsidian.md). It helps me summarise what happened. In-the-moment notes capture much more than a recap of the whole day does, because I note my slips and moods as they happen. I found that it adds a personal layer to automatic tracking via ActivityWatch, an open-source tracker, which shows graphs of where my time goes.
Some call it a productivity method that replaces the to-do list. For me, it’s just an extension of daily journaling, which helps me with “thinking on paper”. I didn’t know it had a name, and now I also know what “interstitial” means.
What were you doing two weeks ago?
Thanks for reading,
— Michał
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