Deconstructed Diary (Pt. 1)

I remember sitting in class when the girl who was next to me pulled out an immaculate diary. When she opened the leather it revealed a perfectly structured combination of highlighting and felt tip pen.

This was a diary that was so impressive that someone else on our table instantly commented on it, 'Wow! Where did you get that?' They started comparing strategies, talking about the best locations. It might as well have been in a foreign language. I let slip that I didn’t actually have anything to track my time. 'How do you survive?' they asked.

I paused. 'I don’t know.' I laughed.

For a long time I’ve just gone without a diary. I guess I like to focus on what I’m doing at the time I’m doing it, rather than thinking of all the things I'll be doing later on. I like taking the world one day at a time. As a result, my method of dealing with time has been a thousand to-do lists written on newspapers and scrap A4 pages.

That approach was fine until I started having events several weeks (or even months) after I heard about them. I was completely unequipped to remember and found myself missing things over and over again. I was starting to get paranoid that there was always something on that I had accidentally forgotten about.

I made a new years resolution about trying to stop this from happening, so I bought a diary for the first time in my life at the start of this year. I imagined myself having an immaculate diary with felt tip bordering just like the one I saw in class. I told myself that this was the year I was going to get super organised.

When I actually tried to use the diary I found it hard to make it structured. I found it hard to draw straight lines and stick to boxes. I found it hard to follow a contents page. I even found it hard to just open the diary up.

It just wasn’t how my mind worked. It felt rigid and made me claustrophobic. It felt like trying to cram my life into this tiny A3 box that I had no flexibility to control. It just wasn’t me.

I wanted to scribble things down in a pattern that only I could ever understand, with connections that made sense to me. A structure that I had complete freedom to move around and change.

I needed something different. I needed organisation for the inherently scatterbrained and disorganised. So I began to deconstruct the essential elements of the diary to make something that would work for me.

Continued in Part Two.