Total Recall Book Cover

I really, really didn’t need another project. But after reading Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmel’s Total Recall, I was compelled to start a lifelogging practice. Primarily, there are three reasons.

Too Much of Life is Too Valuable Not to Capture

Like most parents, I am horrified and ashamed about how little of my children’s lives I have captured either on film or on video. Bell recounts the story of a researcher in Scotland who wore the LifeSense camera as a study for a year. Later he refused to take it off, primarily because he captured too many moments that were valuable to him and would not have been captured otherwise, like the very first moment he met his girlfriend. How many of those moments do you wish you had captured? I am not suggesting that I am going to go to such lengths as to wear a camera, but why not lots of pictures at family dinners and occasional video clips?

The Ubiquitous Capture Device

Thanks to David Allen’s Getting Things Done, I am never without a device with which to capture ideas. For me, it is the iPhone 3GS. I chose the iPhone in part because, as an Apple user, I have access to Omnifocus, the best task manager available. But the ability to capture everything you may want to is made much easier by having a camera, a video camera, a GPS, and voice recorder in a single device. There is no reason not to capture the pictures, videos, locations, and voice recordings when the ability to do so fits in a shirt pocket and is always with you.

Digital Is Free (almost)

One of the appeals of lifelogging is the synergy of going digital. Your pictures are digital, your videos are digital, and most of the paper we receive every day can either be requested in a “born digital” format or easily converted with a scanner. You can scan bills and documents, or ask that they be emailed as a PDF instead of being mailed as paper.

Going digital gets rid of the clutter in your life, and is easy to catalog and store. I have ripped all my CD’s using iTunes, and I am in the middle of transferring 100’s of DVD’s using Handbrake. Digital is cheap, but it isn’t exactly free. You do have to back up your digital life. This includes have an offsite backup. The least expensive option I have found is Amazon’s S3 service, which is about $.15 per GB per month. The drawbacks here are that Amazon’s S3 service will not take files over 5GB, and that your costs will continue to increase as you become more and more digital.

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