It kinda struck me at the start of the week. I have always plan ahead. I have always write down what I want to do, set priorities, allocate resources and time to do them. But somehow, my target either falls short or I was exhausted before I even know what I had planned and did last month. I really need a diary to keep track.
I will prefer to go with a digital form of diary. Reasons are:
1. I work in an engineering firm, and if you hav been there before, you know just how much paperwork,documentation, designs, contracts etc there is. Yes, most of the things are done digitally, and store into a database, which is a must and very essential these days.
2. It’s easy to keep track. The lifespan of my digital diary is equivalent to the lifespan of the local hard disk which my local web server and files are running on. Data is small in size and hard disk space is cheap. If you’re afraid of lossing your data, it’s just so easy to backup the whole local wordpress database using phpmyadmin.
3. I tried writing in a diary and to be honest, I lost them, and sometimes I can’t read what I wrote last night when I was writting just 2 seconds before I fell asleep.
4. I spend lots of time developing and communicating using computers, so it’s convenient to have my diary with me. I can just backtrack my thoughts to like last week/month/year easily.
5. It improves productivity. So far, I’m keeping notes and since wordpress have categories, I use them wisely to allocate what a specific post means to me now and in the future. I can review what I’ve wrote last week and see how much was done and what needs to be done next week. WordPress has a built in search functionality, so if you want to find the genius idea that you thought of last month, just search for it!
Try it. You might just find that you will never ever going to:
1. Go back to so called diary softwares which runs on dodgy access database.
2. Writing your diary in *.txt or *.doc
3. Lose track of what you have thought of and written for the next ten years! I know I won’t.
Having said that, you can’t go entirely digital in certain stages. Especially in brainstorming, I find it easier to grab a paper and pen and just write and draw since there’s lots of drafts and certainly some of them will get thrown away.
Have fun 🙂
Kevin Paquet says
Seriously, it sounds odd to have a local version of WordPress on your PC, but after a bit of thinking, some might indeed find it useful. It would look better than Notepad or One Note, wouldn’t it?
But I really hope WordPress or some fancy plugin developer would come up with a plugin that would synchronize offline/online WordPress with each other so that you can publish posts on the go without the need of internet access. And then, have the post published/synchronized when internet is available.
Tom says
Hi,
Great article, forgive the shameless plug but I wrote a plugin for running wordpress like a diary in terms of privacy, thought you might find it handy.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/diarypress/
Great post, I wonder if many people over look wordpress as a private publishing platform.
Cheers,
T
Thomas says
I like the article and found what I have been wanting for my WP since I started to use it in the comments, the plugin by Tom! Wonderful, now my journal/diary is as I want it! Excellent fellows, Thank you!
Tom says
Hi Thomas,
Glad you found it useful.
Cheers,
Tom
Wordpress Diary says
If you want to keep your posts private, you should download a wordpress membership plugin.