{"id":4707,"date":"2024-01-25T07:43:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T07:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/?p=4707"},"modified":"2024-01-24T19:53:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-24T19:53:26","slug":"my-personal-vault-or-what-i-learnt-from-a-decade-of-progress-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marendeepwell.com\/?p=4707","title":{"rendered":"My personal vault. Or what I learnt from a decade of progress tracking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I made a fun discovery today: It’s now been over ten years since I started this list of things I have done<\/a>. Wow! I had no idea it had been that long, and seeing those entries from 2013 made me pause and reflect on the habit of keeping the list, a decade in the making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why did I start tracking progress in this way?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My archive page is a lot like a personal vault. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page you’ll see that at the start I added some entries a bit like you would on a CV. I added dates of degrees I completed and images of things like my doctoral thesis from 2008:<\/p>\n\n\n

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Initially, I added these things as I was moving blogs, and I didn’t want to loose track of what I was up to. I was just in the finishing years of my graduate studies, and started working full-time and I had no real idea of what was going to happen next. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a while, in the first few years of working at ALT, I didn’t really keep a record of anything until I started blogging publicly again in 2010 on WordPress, rather than my old Google Blogger sites. But then from 2013 onwards I started keeping a running list of projects I completed, conference papers, media stuff and so on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back to 2013, this entry makes me smile: June: Radio 4, Today Programme . Not particularly helpful for anyone other than myself, but it does bring back the morning I spent nervously sitting next to a very intimidating John Humphreys in the BBC radio studios in London. Similarly, in 2014 I went to the European Parliament in Brussels… noted in a similarly cryptic entry, but equally memorable for me. And although the 2015 link to an appearance on Parliament TV still works, many of the older links have rotted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we progress through the years the list of things I recorded each year becomes both longer and more comprehensive, particularly as I started to add links to blog posts on my own domain that contain a lot more information about a specific event or project. 2020’s entry is a bit shorter, but it looks remarkably ‘normal’ given everything that happened that year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do I use it for?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So, how is this useful? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the practice of making the list and adding new entries to it is useful to me in itself. I could probably use a tool to compile this kind of information for me, but there’s great value for me in the act of processing what I have done and reflecting on it as I make the list. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, adding new items to the 2024 section of the list earlier today made me realise just how busy a year I have had so far, and we are only three weeks into it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n