Over the weekend, I caught up on my archiving routine — part ritual, part minor hobby (at this point).
I did the usual:
- Transferred transcribed meeting recordings into my Obsidian vault.
- Filed away the markdown notes. Filed away the MP3s.
- Cleared off the glass top surface on my desk — the place where I stack daily and weekly receipts of time.
- Filed away the 3×5 cards.
However. There was something new.
Something I’ve wanted to do for a while — but hadn’t quite convinced myself it was necessary.
Until now.
I don’t know... Maybe?
Recently, I noticed a pattern. A few times, my partner would ask:
“Did we do that already?” “When was that again?”
And I couldn’t give a precise answer. Not without wrapping it in a bunch of “I think”s and “Maybe”s.
Now… I think that’s totally normal. That’s how it is for most folks. And that’s fine. (Seriously!!!)
But for me, it was a signal. A quiet spotlight on the seams of my note-taking system. A chance to reflect. On what matters. On what I’m trying to build. On how I can make it better.
I knew I had the answers to the questions we were asking. They just weren’t accessible. Not in my digital notes archive. They lived in my stack of 3×5 daily notes — handwritten, analog, unsearchable.
I had started this newer form of journaling around March 2, 2025. Since then, I’ve added to the stack every single day. Relentlessly.
Today, that stack is about 3 inches thick. Kind of wild to see — considering just five months ago, I looked at that empty 3×5 card holder and wondered how much space I’d even fill… after sliding in the very first note on day one.
Transcribing...
One morning, I finally did it.
I spent over an hour scanning the entire stack with my Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 (love this thing).
I converted the PDFs into JPGs with a macOS Automation I made.
I ran them through an OpenAI GPT-4o mini script I wrote — which transcribed them into markdown.
Then I archived those notes into Obsidian — and the images into Eagle.
134 cards, transcribed and archived. Over 10,000 words, across 100+ daily stories — now fully searchable in my DIY, AI-powered information retrieval system.
So if I want to check what happened on, say, July 16th, 2025?
(Oh right! That $700.00 giant Snorlax plushie. Forgot about that!)
OK… But, why?
Why?
Why did I spend over 22 collective hours over 5 months writing out little events and random thoughts each evening?
Why did I stop mid-conversation or mid-task to jot down something weird — like how a giant Snorlax cost $700.00?
Well… because I didn’t want to forget.
But why scan them?
Why spend another hour+ archiving what I already had?
Because I didn’t want us to forget. I didn’t want these mundane — maybe mildly interesting — moments to slip away… after experiencing one too many “I can’t remember”s.
Signal
It was a signal. A spotlight on the seam in my system. A prompt to close the loop.
This was tech debt, in analog form. So I cleared it.
I integrated it into my living documents.
I made my system whole (for now) — so I could answer the odd, lovely questions life throws at us, like:
“Hey… when did we see that giant Snorlax?”