Keep a Daily Musical Diary
What’s A Daily Musical Diary?
Keeping a daily musical diary is a lot like keeping a written diary, except that instead of penning entries, you select songs that reflect your feelings, thoughts, and activities for the day, and put them in an Itunes playlist. To create a daily musical diary that records all the details of your life, all you need to do is find five or ten minutes at the end of the day to collect your thoughts, and collect some songs on Itunes that reflect your experiences. You can choose songs that you heard through the day, songs that got stuck in your head, or songs that have themes appropriate to your day’s activities. This kind of daily musical diary is a lot of fun to make, and taking some time each evening to think about how you spent your day gives you a sense of accomplishment that will make you feel great.
I Don’t Have Time For That!
If you’re the kind of person who’d like to keep a journal every day but never has the time, you don’t have to tell yourself that you’ll find or make the time at the end of the day. Instead, try making a daily musical diary in the form of an Itunes playlist as you go. Just listen to whatever you’d normally listen to through the course of your day, and when a new song starts, add it to a playlist named for the date. You can make a playlist like this when you’re sitting at your computer, or you can create an “on-the-go” playlist on your Ipod and then import it when you get home. In either case, at the end of the day, you’ll have a musical diary entry that records your day’s experiences and moods. And because you’ve made your daily musical diary entry bit by bit as you went along, you didn’t have to find any “spare time” to do it in!
What Do I Do With All These Playlists?
If you keep a daily musical diary, it’s fun to do a “weekly round-up” playlist where you sort through your daily musical diary entries and pick out the most appropriate songs to remember the week. Then, at the end of the month, you can pick the cream of the crop from your weekly lists, and at the end of the year you can skim the best songs from your monthly lists! This will create a musical diary that you can “read” at a number of levels, so that you can remember a single day, or a whole year, at an auditory glance.