The average entry is only 152 words but in total it adds up to 171,000 words, or about 3 full blown novels. (This is not, mind you, novel-quality material. This is hardly even message board-quality material.)
Until today I hadn’t done anything with the data other than use it on rare occasions to win arguments against people with faulty memories. The value in doing this every night is not the data that come out of it but just the act of collecting my thoughts and experiences at the end of another messy day. The data are just the mint on my pillow.
But if there’s a mint on my pillow, you better believe I’m going to ingest that sucker, i.e. get my geek on. My first move was to do a word count analysis:
The only observation worth mentioning about this chart is that the word count tended to be higher at times when I had more thoughts to think through (surprise, surprise).
Geek note: There is no word count function in Excel but there is a way around it with this formula (just sub out the red text with the cell you want a word count for): =IF(ISBLANK(B2),0,LEN(TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(B2,CHAR(10)," ")))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(B2),CHAR(10),"")," ",""))+1)
More interesting was an analysis of the trends and frequencies with which I mention people and creatures in my life. Here is a chart of the 27 humans and creatures that have figured most prominently into my end of day thoughts the past three years. Each tiny square represents a person (or dog) who was mentioned at least once that day – this includes family members, friends, colleagues, Khan the dog, and other people who worked their way into my life for whatever reason. The mentions are typically uninteresting things like “hung out with Person X today,” but sometimes they are juicier than that. I’ve omitted the legend so as to minimize I’ve-been-thinking-about-you weirdness, but some of you might still be able to figure out which line is you.
Maybe the most surprising thing about this to me, which you can’t easily discern from the chart, is how often I don’t mention people in the entries. On average, one day a week I don’t mention any of the 27 most prominent people or creatures. My ex, for example, was mentioned in barely half of all entries. I don’t know what that says about me, but it probably isn’t good.
The general feeling I get looking over the chart is unease and maybe a little regret. I have the feeling that some people I should have been thinking about more, and others maybe less. But if I didn’t spend my nighttime thoughts on irrational crushes instead of the people most important to me, then it wouldn't really be a diary, would it?
Geek note: In Excel, the way to count whether someone is mentioned in an entry is by this formula: =IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("khan",B2)),1, "")
