Table of contents

• Brainstorming
• Inspiration
• Meta
• Script Chapter 1: How I make every day special
• Intro
• Day titling — Remembering
• Vision boarding — Anticipating/Experiencing self
• Script Chapter 2: Day Title Idea Bank
• Intro
• Idea Bank
• Outro
• Shots

Resources

• Stock Footage & Video Effects 🔗 / VideoHive /
• Thumbnail Analyser 🔗 / Thumbs Up /
• Headline Analyser 🔗 / CoSchedule /
• A-Roll Review 🔗 / Frame.io /

• Olēka: The Awareness of How Few Days Are Memorable
• “What was perceptual becomes conceptual”
• Time dilation: seeking novelty: making time last/seem longer; not speed through life

Thumbnails

Test with thumbsup.tv

Hook

Value Prop

Hey team, a thought experiment for you: You’ve got a friend who’s psychic. They come up to you one day and they’re all like dude I just had a vision that in exactly 1 month from now, you’re gonna bump your head and get anterograde amnesia for a whole year. You’re all like, dude what the heck does that even mean? And they’re like, It means that every day for 365 days, when you wake up in the morning you’re gonna forget what happened the day before.

What would you do? How daunting does the prospect of that year sound? Being cursed to live each day knowing that you’re going to forget it in the morning.

The thing is… I think that for a lot of us this is already a frequent reality. I mean, do you remember what you did yesterday? How about last week Tuesday? Or one year ago to the day? Feel free to refer back to your past calendars if you think that might help. But I’m guessing that chances are, unless you had some special event scheduled for those days, there won’t be much, if anything, about them that stands out in your memory.

Remembering vs Experiencing Self

They were probably totally average days. At some point in them we surely laughed, had an interesting idea, or felt grateful for something. In the moment, we experienced qualities that would define a perfectly good day. But we don’t remember those moments today.

The concept of a “forgettable life worth living” doesn’t feel quite right to me. Maybe it has merits, but I think that a lot of us think about our futures as anticipated memories. We make bucket lists, new year’s resolutions, event calendars, and even todo lists… all for the purpose of planning out memorable days.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman draws a really interesting distinction between two lenses through which we view our lives: the experiencing self and the remembering self. Where our experiencing self is our fleeting consciousness at any given moment and our remembering self is our enduring storyteller. And there’s a bunch of evidence proving that the way we experience our life in the moment doesn’t necessarily correlate to the way we reflect on those same experiences. Provide example Which got me wondering what strategies we can use to design our life to satisfy both our remembering and our experiencing selves.

Defining special for yourself

When was the last special day you had? What was it about it that stands out in your mind? I think that a lot of us resonate with the notions of making each day count, and living life intentionally, and being an active participant in our own lives. I’m guessing here, but I’d imagine that when recollecting our most special days a lot of us think back to those which were novel in some way. The ones where we deviated from our normal routines or where the world surprised us in some unexpected way.

I mean, I know right… how to make each day special… novelty… mind blowing. But in my opinion, knowing that novelty is the key for ensuring special days is only as useful as the strategies we use to actually capture and bottle up that novelty for our memories to take advantage of later. And the two strategies that I use are Day Titling for my remembering self and my spin on Vision Boarding for my experiencing self.

Choronoception Cure

I have the worst sense of time when it comes to anything longer than a day. You ask me what time is it right now, chances are I’ll guess pretty close to the temporal bullseye. But if you ask me what I did in last week, 3 months ago, or in 2019… blank, nothing, cannot compute. I realised that I’m better at recalling my memories by using contextual cues, as opposed to temporal ones.

The day I…

So since January 2020, I’ve been labelling every single day with its own unique title based on the biggest highlight that happened to me that day. Side note… I was partially inspired by the episode titles for the show Friends, where they pretty much all start with something along the lines of The one with or The one where. So I template all of my daily titles with “The day I…”.

The goal is to use titles as mnemonic devices for dates, because chances are most of us would be better at remembering our stories rather than the dates they happened on. For example, if I flip through my calendar back to October 1, 2021, it’s a lot easier for me to teleport back to that day if I associate it the title of “The day I tried VR for the first time”.

Attention Training Hypothesis

When it comes to my remembering self, I’m operating off of the hypothesis that by summarising each day into a single title, I’ll be able to recollect my experiences more readily and vividly. And this for me has become the most important key for ensuring that every day is special. I like to think that if I can train my perspective to track down some novel quality in every day that I live, then I’ll be able to create memory portals leading directly to those novel events and maybe even their surrounding contexts.

Setup

Use the word penseive

Setting up a day titling habit can be as easy as keeping a journal with a list of dates and their highlights. But if you’re in the mood to satiate your inner data loving deviant, I like to use Notion to store all of my entries. At the end of every day I look back and ask myself “what was the most novel thing that happened today”, then I turn that into my title. Another fun addition I configured recently is a reminiscing section. I configured my calendar to show me my life 1, 2, and 3 years ago from each day. I’ve found it to be a refreshing way to appreciate the progress I’ve made through the years. It’s also become a daily tool I use to reflect on how I can try to make each day better than its predecessors.

So what do you think? What’s one novel thing that you could bottle up for your remembering self today? What would your day’s title be?

Directing Attention

In addition to contextualising our past dates, we can also look back and analyse our day titles to take stock of what sorts of things pass as highlights and novelties in our eyes. What unique features do we as individuals tend to focus on? And when we think back to special days we’ve had, what common themes can we find among the kinds of things we remember the most? Maybe we focus on how we felt, or the people who were with us, or something that was created, or the characteristics of the space that we were in.

I like to think that by figuring out what attracts our attention and recognising what remains vivid in our memory, we can use that knowledge to more intentionally engage our experiencing self by directing our focus in the moment onto those novelties we’ve learned resonate the most with us. “Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.” – Jose Ortega Y Gasset.

Vision Boards

Where, for me, day titling is the bottle we use to capture notable experiences, vision boarding is the map we can use to guide us to them.

When it comes to making every day special for my experiencing self I like to believe that a little bit of anticipation can go a long way. Vision boards are meant to provide a sense of direction for where we want to go in life, the goals we want to achieve, and the priorities we want to focus on.

From what I’ve seen, they often come in the form of physical collages of an idyllic dream future, but it shouldn’t be a surprise to you if you’ve watched any of my other videos, that my approach to the vision board comes in the form of a list; a list of day titles that I either anticipate happening or that I want to have happen. I find that by preparing this bucket list of novel day ideas I give myself time to anticipate and direct my energy and attention.

Assigning Titles

Coming up with day titles at the end of each day can be tough, especially on those totally routine days where nothing special seems to have happened. So what I like to do is assign day titles to each day in the upcoming week ahead of time. Assigning titles ahead of time can be a great way to ensure that we’re setting a novel intention for every single day, while leaving space for serendipitous novelties that might end up occurring.

Questions

Not all unique days have to be grandiose, so sometimes the goal when coming up with novelty prompts is to consider easy routine breakers. A few questions I like to keep in mind when thinking about how to make each day special:

How can I embrace showmanship and be a little extra on this day?

What memory do I want to create on this day?

What souvenirs can I take away from this day?

What feelings do I want to experience on this day?

Is there someone in particular that I want to share this experience with?

Setup

Organisation: life pillars, ease, type

Intro

Coming up with a bucket list of future day titles can be a bit daunting as well and what’s on it will totally depend on your memory magnets, priorities, and goals. That being said I’ve got a list of 15 categories of day title ideas which I’ve personally used for my own vision board.

1) Favourite feelings

Identify some of your favourite feelings

xxx

2) Mini missions

Plan in days to execute easy mini missions.

• The day I intentionally used my non dominant hand
• The day I walked through my home blindfolded
• The day I slept in my bathtub

3) Themed timelines

Plan in themed days.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

4) Genred

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

5) Attention directing

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

6) Self care

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

7) Favourite people

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

8) Atmospheric

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

9) First times

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

10) Creation

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

11) Reflective

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

12) Shopping

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

13) Alternative

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

14) Gratitude

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

15) Temporal landmarks

Fresh start effect

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

16) Deep Dives

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

17) Goals & To Dos

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

18) Omission

Plan in xxx.

• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx
• The day I xxx

Outro

xxx

Potential time dilation benefit in retrospective time perception