Why I keep a logbook instead of a diary

I stopped keeping a diary years ago. I keep a logbook instead.

The difference sounds small. It isn’t. A diary asks how do you feel?, and I found that question made me circle the same few rooms of myself until the carpet wore thin. A logbook asks something simpler and stranger: what did you observe?

The format

Every entry has the same shape. Date. Time. Location. Conditions. Then a single observation, written as plainly as I can manage, the way a night-shift operator might note a fault on a line.

02:40. Back verandah. Clear, still, 14°. A light moving low over the ridge, too slow for a plane. Stopped. Went out.

That’s it. No interpretation. No feelings, unless they arrive as data. Felt watched is allowed. Felt anxious about the future is not.

Why it works

Because strangeness lives in specifics. When you write only what you saw, exactly as you saw it, the unexplained things stand out like stars against a dark page. You start to notice patterns. The same light, on three nights in March. The dog barking at the same corner of the yard.

Most of these entries become nothing. Some become stories. A few, I’ve never been able to explain at all, and those I keep in a separate section at the back, under a heading I wrote years ago and have never changed.

Unresolved.

It’s the longest section in the book.