Keeping an electronic diary as several huge advantages and I have kept one the years. The biggest advantage is that you can easily search back for things you wrote several years ago when you don’t know exactly which year which date. What I mean is that say for example you had a diary entry in 2005 about some funny event that happened and you need to go back and look for it then firstly you have to know which year it was and secondly roughly what month in order to rummage through your handwritten diaries to find the entry. This is rather like searching through a Kindle book compared to 15 through the pages of a paperback till you get to the passage that you want.
I’ve been using a personal information management system for few years now and have now started to use its diary facility. I found that not only is it handy to keep everything together like my meetings, appointments and to-do list with my diary but that also it’s easy to make the entries because I’ve already adapted to the discipline of an electronic PIM.
Let me give you an example: some years ago my young son asked me a very funny question about Russia. What he actually said was “how far is it to rush hour, daddy?” and I wanted to find this comment the other day to see how old he was when he said that. All I had to do was search on the word Russia and the diary result tell me immediately it was fifth of January 2010. To do that by searching through handwritten diaries would have been a nightmare because I had no idea when it was.
The other big advantage I found is that my handwriting is hopeless to the extent that sometimes I can’t even read what I’ve written and to be forced to put it in electronically has been a huge bonus. I guess it’s the same with all left-handers like myself, and handwriting seems to have been designed for right-handed people. Anyway that’s another rant that I will force myself to stop banging on about.
Anyway I use this personal information manager software now called EfficientPIM and my diary is really interesting to flick back through although sometimes I have to change it because it’s just too cringing to read!