Our Story | I get these feelings that I don't have much time / always rushing, always late

My nose has been buried in bank statements lately.

We’ve been closing out 2005 in order to try to get a handle on how our spending might look for 2006 and how soon we’ll be able to achieve some goals. Stuff like paying of all our debts, buying a house, and maybe even (gulp) starting a family. It’s funny to look back over a year or two of financial history. Birthdays, new car, doctor visits, job changes: they’re all there large as life in the numbers. It gets me thinking about all the data — in a previous generation, I would have said “paper” — we generate with our lives.

Emails we sent, notes we scribbled, blogs we published, documents we wrote, financials we recorded, appointments we kept, videos we made, contacts we made, songs we listened to, places we went and the pictures we took there will all one day be indexed and integrated into a singular user interface for you to query, categorize and pivot any way you want. Consider the Google Desktop search and its growing list of indexing plugins. Forget This Day in History, my kids will be able to see This Day in Ken Walker.

Not that any of this is new: people dig through the the archives to learn about other people all the time. It’ll just be a lot faster than it used to, shuffling through mountains of paper, stashed into shoeboxes. Instead, what will likely be left of me when I’m gone is an electronic storage device, about the size of a USB key, with my life’s history on it — indexed and tagged with all kinds of metadata.

But it will probably still be in a shoebox.