I don’t exactly know how I first became aware of the idea of Project 365, but I do remember that it immediately appealed to me. There’s actually a website called 365 Project, which has an excellent explanation for why people do something like this:
The idea is to build up a journal of your day to day life. Days usually just rush us by and we often forget lots of things we do. What were you doing Wednesday 14th July 2009? I bet you don’t know! I do, and it’s fun to look back on those old photos and remember things you would have otherwise forgotten.
Of course, this presupposes that your Proj365 is the photo-a-day kind. But in this age of remixes, I don’t think the label should only be applied to photos. The point of a Proj365, as I see it, is to discipline yourself to do something, once a day, that isn’t part of your daily routine. For instance, you can’t call brushing your teeth or taking a shower a Proj365, can you? So it’ll have to be something that you have to do deliberately, for the purpose of documenting each day.
In 2015, I started a photo Proj365 using Instagram as my platform. There were days when I couldn’t wait to post my picture of the day, but then again there were days when it totally slipped my mind. And so, there were times when I would post multiple pictures in one day and just indicate what date I took those pictures. While I’d been bad at posting every day, I was, in fact, able to take at least one picture every single day of 2015; even on the day I lost my phone to a fleet-fingered and even fleeter-footed snatcher on Osmena highway.
However, looking back on that 2015 project – it ended yesterday – I remember that some of the photos did a really poor job of capturing the essence of the day. I’m no photographer, and I do have a day job, so I couldn’t very well spend too much time worrying about painting a picture with my phone camera. When things did wind down, it was already too late to go out and hunt for things to take snaps of.
I did appreciate the discipline the project required tho, even if I didn’t exactly have what it took, all the time. And so, for 2016, I’ve decided to remix this Proj365 bit and instead of devoting it only to pictures, I’ve decided that words and videos could be part of the whole thing, as long as they are mine.
I also added a Twitter account – @2016JABJ365 – if only to separate this Project from the sort of things I usually talk about on my other account, @jabjimenez. Y’know. Work-things.