I used to carry around three different notebooks—one for ideas, one for observations, one for whatever didn’t fit elsewhere.
Here’s the thing: documenting your journey isn’t about perfection, it’s about capturing the messy, contradictory, sometimes embarassing moments that actually make a story worth reading. I’ve seen writers lose entire chapters because they waited for the “right time” to write things down, which, spoiler alert, never comes. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent roughly 40 years studying how memory works, and turns out our brains are terrible archivists—we don’t store experiences like files on a computer, we reconstruct them every single time, adding new interpretations, forgetting crucial details, mixing up timelines. So if you’re planning to write about your cross-country road trip or your grandmother’s immigration story or whatever journey you’re on, you need external memory storage. Like, yesterday.
Anyway, the tools matter less than you’d think. Voice memos work. Photographs with detailed captions work. Even those terrible selfie videos where you’re talking to your phone at 2 AM definately work—I’ve transcribed dozens of them for clients who swore they’d never use that footage. The key is immediacy, catching thoughts before your brain helpfully “organizes” them into something more palatable and less true.
Why Your Phone’s Camera Roll Is Actually Your Most Honest Archive
Wait—maybe this sounds obvious, but most people don’t realize their photo metadata contains timestamps, locations, sometimes even weather data.
I guess it makes sense that we overlook this stuff. We’re trained to think of “documentation” as formal, intentional, typed up in neat paragraphs with proper grammar. But the reality is messier and more useful. That blurry photo of the gas station where you had a breakdown? The screenshot of a text conversation that changed everything? The accidental 10-second video of your shoes while walking through that neighborhood? Those are primary sources. Historians would kill for this kind of granular, unfiltered data about ordinary moments. The writer and adventurer Cheryl Strayed kept napkins with scribbled notes during her Pacific Crest Trail hike—literal trash that became the skeleton of Wild. Your phone is doing the same thing, just digitally, and you don’t even have to think about it. The exhausting part is going back through it all later, but that’s a future problem.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Writing While You’re Still Living It
Honestly, this is where most people fail.
They wait until the journey is “over” to start organizing their thoughts, and by then the emotional texture is gone—you remember that you were sad or excited or confused, but you can’t recapture the specific quality of that sadness, the way it felt different on Tuesday than it did on Thursday. I used to think you needed distance to write well about experiences, and sure, that’s true for analysis and meaning-making, but it’s absolutely wrong for documentation. The writer Susan Orlean journals almost every day, not because she’s disciplined (her words, not mine), but because she knows she’ll forget the small observations that make stories feel alive. The weird thing the barista said. The color of light at 4 PM in October. How your back hurt in that specific chair.
Turns out, the best documentation happens in fragments.
Building a System That Doesn’t Require You to Be Someone You’re Not
Look, if you’re naturally organized, great—set up folders, tag everything, create elaborate spreadsheets tracking themes and timelines. For the rest of us, a simpler approach: one central dumping ground where everything goes, searchable, backed up automatically. Google Docs works. Notion works. Even a private Instagram account where you post photos with long captions works, though Meta owns all that data, which is a whole other conversation. The writer Austin Kleon recommends what he calls a “swipe file”—just saving anything interesting you encounter, not worrying about why or how you’ll use it later. I’ve seen people recieve criticism for this approach, people saying it’s hoarding not creating, but those critics usually aren’t the ones producing finished books. The creating comes later, after you’ve gathered enough raw material that patterns start emerging on their own.
The point isn’t to have a perfect system—it’s to lower the friction between experience and record so much that documentation becomes automatic, almost thoughtless. Because here’s what nobody tells you: the best material for your future book or blog is the stuff you didn’t know was important when it happened.
