Reconstructing the Past to Understand the Future

Part of the purpose of this blog is to create a personal workspace where I can lay out a number of ideas, and possibly revisit them in the future. This is my first concerted effort to post a collection of ideas into one central location. In years' past, all my "stuff" has been scattered everywhere, and I'm going to spend some time trying to consolidate everything.

My "record-keeping" history is a long story, and I'd rather not go into the nitty-gritty details. There are times when I've made countless backups of my e-mails, documents and such. Then other times when I really don't care much and end up wiping my computer clean on a whim. So unfortunately, much of what I have written is gone from the computer, although I have other resources, such as hard copy as well as my own memory (which is pretty good).

So my main goal now is to split certain time periods of my past, gather details, make outlines, etc. and try to reconstruct everything as well as possible. Why am I doing this? First of all, I believe it will help me understand my best direction for the future. There's a lot of experiences and mistakes which I've made, and I'd like to learn as much as I can from them. Because of that, I'd like to keep everything as fresh in my memory as possible. Second, it's actually as very easy thing to do. Just about everything is electronic so a few hours of cut/paste effort can go a really long way. Third, this gives me an opportunity to keep everything in one neat, clean pile so I can operate more efficiently.

My basic outline of the past comes in 3 or 4 parts, or eras. They are:

The "glory days", 1997 thru 2001
"Rebuilding", 2001 thru 2004
The "5 year plan", 2004 thru 2009
"LifeQuest, part 1", 2009 thru ???

I mentioned in a previous article that one of the main objectives I want to accomplish is to build a "relationship map" for each of these periods. Perhaps I'll elaborate more on this later, as my work begins.