Self Isolation Tip: Start a Diary

I’ve been self-isolating now for a couple of days and so I now feel that I have acquired sufficient experience to be able to give out a few tips to you, dear reader. After all, it is only a matter of time before you have to do it too.

My biggest tip so far is to do something that I’ve been doing for a while anyway. When I stopped having a “proper” day job a few years ago I found that it was hard to focus on things that I was working on. So now I have a diary that I fill in every day. Some of the items are under headings for particular projects, but others are just things that I want to keep track of having done. If I have a bunch of things that need to be done I put them on the day as a series of bullet points and then tick them off when complete. I then carry any left overs onto the following day.

I find that this gives a nice structure to what I’m doing and means that I can see what I’ve achieved going forwards. I’m sure there are some good programs for this (what I really want is one that I can use to tag items to make it easy to search for entries on a particular topic) but for now I’m just using a Microsoft Word document. I keep the master copy on OneDrive so that I can update and view it on any platform, including the phone.

I’ve found it very useful in real life too. I don’t have to try and remember when I ordered those tickets or whatnot, I just look up the event in the diary. And of course when historians want to find out just when the great Rob Miles did all his mighty deeds they will have just one place to look…