Taking History

How To Put Your Life In Order

A framework for making sense of life as it unfolds.

We have many tools to record our lives and few to reflect on what it means. This is one solution, developed over four years of fighting journals, apps, and medical records to answer practical, existential, and systemic questions. It works on paper, a spreadsheet, or in a database. It can become a knowledge graph or an essay collection. It’s useful for solving any problem that involves time.

To keep the question manageable, we’ll break it down to three parts:

How should you put your life in…

This post tackles the first one.

Clarity

We make sense of lives thrice: backwards, as it unfolds, and forwards. We can reduce each to a single question:

  • What happened?
  • What’s happening?
  • What’s next?

We ask different versions of these questions every day across contexts.

In everyday conversation:

  • How did it go? 
  • How’s it going? 
  • Where are you going? 

In moments of crisis:

  • Why is this happening?
  • What’s going on?
  • What does it mean?

And even in research:

  • Where did this come from?
  • How does it work?
  • How will it change over time?

As with any complex system, every new input has unexpected effects on the whole. Sometimes, one data point will change the entire narrative. Sometimes, it won’t matter at all.

Structure

To begin, we need an architecture that accommodates stories, the medium we use to make sense of our lives, but surfaces patterns. We want fluid movement between facts and interpretation. That immediately rules out timelines or any other type of list because, however they excel at creating order, they hide patterns and amplify certain biases. A list makes correlation look like causation, the future look determined and inevitable, and outcomes look more important than processes. Our structure needs to push against that.

We need something between structure and unstructure, datasets and diaries — a narrative dataset.

Let’s go with a table:

A four-column table with a date and three unnamed categories.

We now have the ability to see multiple timelines side-by-side, but we're faced with a new problem: How do we define and limit them?

Your answer to that question depends on a more fundamental one — What’s life? — but we're not going to get too scientific or philosophical about it. Let's go for something closer to the way we talk about it:

  • Events (things that happen)
  • Actions (things you make happen)
  • Interactions (relationships to people, places, tools, and information you form along the way)
Our table now has four, clearly-defined columns: date, events, actions, and interactions.

Jump into whatever column and time period interests you. Keep the entries concise and factual. If you’re in a spreadsheet, ignore order and formatting and move rows and columns around. If you want to do some free writing, keep it below the table or in a separate document.

💡
Use nouns for events and interactions; and verbs for actions. You may even want to limit yourself to 5-10 verbs based on the patterns of behavior you’re interested in, such as started, finished, found, read, or met.

Notice how you’re already gravitating toward one column over the others. At the moment, are you thinking of life in terms of what happens to you, what you make happen, or your relationships? 

You should have something like this:

A table with sample events, actions, and interactions.

Narratives

Let’s start surfacing interpretations — the stories you’re telling yourself.

Every narrative typically begins with a question word such as how, when, why, or what. How you got stuck. Why you picked your career. What you’re hoping to get from that program. Start with whichever one feels the most urgent and divide your entries accordingly.

💡
It’s easier to edit and move things around on a spreadsheet. But, if you prefer paper, you can always mark data points with symbols, colors, or stickers and write the narrative on a separate piece of paper.

You should have something like this:

A table divided into narratives.

Labels

How are you feeling? Energized or drained? 

We’re aiming for momentum, so if you’re getting lost in detail or regret, stick with what’s energizing. We’re not aiming to create a complete record in one sitting: we want whatever matters now.

💡
You may find it helps to switch the tense or focus. For instance, you could hit pause on the past and skip to the future. One way to do that is to switch the subject from yourself to someone else. So, instead of explaining “how” something happened, you could offer advice on “how to do something” based on experience.
A table divided by labels and narratives.

Rest

Take a break. 

Next time, we’ll talk about how to get out of your head and think about what your life means in a broader sense.