History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.

A kept record does work that memory cannot. It holds what actually happened rather than the version that survives retelling, and it lets you see patterns that are invisible from inside a single year. Without it you are left repeating your own experiments and calling the results new.

Start or revisit a record of something that matters to you: decisions and why you made them, or what a difficult period actually looked like week by week. Read back over last year before planning this one. The person who kept notes has an advantage over the person relying on impressions.