In 1972, Washington teacher Robert Shields began recording his life every 5 minutes; by 1997, his diary had reached 37.5 million words

Somewhere in the basement vaults of Washington State University, there are 97 boxes containing documents that, by the terms of the family's original deed of gift, could not be opened for research until after the deaths of both Robert Shields and his wife, Grace Hotson Shields; Grace passed away in April 2024, and separate reporting has put the date for a full, exact accounting of the diary's word count as far out as 2057, fifty years after Shields's own death. Inside those boxes are approximately 37.5 million words, single-spaced, chronicling the life of one ordinary man, written in five-minute installments, over the course of nearly three decades. Washington State University Libraries' own archives put that word count and box count on record, and it was Washington State Magazine writer Adriana Janovich's deeply researched 2025 profile of Shields, built from his archived diary and interviews with the people who knew him, that went on to win the writer several journalism awards; not, as an earlier draft of this piece implied, a face-to-face interview with Shields himself, who had died in 2007, years before she wrote about him. It seems that, more than fifty years later, Shields' particular obsession with recording his life in such granular detail still fascinates us, and it's easy to understand why. Long before we had smartphones to quantify every step we take or every tweet we post, a small-town Washington teacher was out there conducting the social science experiment of the century, finding out just what it costs to have such an existence.


Man, six typewriters, and no vacation

Robert Shields was a retired minister and high school English teacher when he began, in 1972, systematically recording every aspect of his daily life in an extraordinary self-documentary. From the scant details he gave to the Washington State writer, it becomes evident that he kept six typewriters in his office in case one of them malfunctioned, so that he could keep recording without missing a beat.

He got less than two hours of sleep at a time so that he could wake up every couple of hours and dictate his dreams onto the page while he still remembered them for another five minutes. He spent about four hours every day doing this, and a stroke finished the task in 1997. He died in 2007, leaving behind a legacy which people today are only beginning to appreciate.

Long before there was technology to quantify our lives, there was Robert Shields

If you think that Shields was just a strange figure from a bygone era, you would not be alone. He is often called the grandfather of the quantified self, someone who, decades before pedometers and fitness trackers existed, meticulously logged the raw material of an ordinary life by hand: sleep patterns, bodily functions, receipts, junk mail, even the weight of the daily newspaper, all in pursuit of some vague notion of completeness. A University of Washington-led 2014 study titled “Understanding quantified-selfers' practices in collecting and exploring personal data,” published in the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, followed dozens of self-tracking enthusiasts and concluded that, for many of them, it was the collecting of the data that mattered most.

The paper specifically cited that many of these people engaged in self-tracking for data collection as an end in itself, rather than for specific goals, which sounds suspiciously like what Robert Shields was doing forty years earlier. It seems that, for him too, the goal was just to have it all down somewhere, just to have it all recorded, with no particular reason beyond that desire for completion.

What the science actually says about tracking everything you do

Now, here's where it gets interesting. If you've ever tried self-tracking or writing down everything that happens to you in pursuit of some kind of goal, there's a decent chance that you've stumbled onto something strange and counter-intuitive. Psychologists have studied diary keeping, and the results are mixed on whether recording everything is beneficial.

According to a landmark 2005 review titled “Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing,” published in the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, writing about your emotional experiences in a focused, concise manner for a short period of time (15-20 minutes per day, over a span of a few days) can have beneficial long-term effects. But Shields was not writing about his emotional experiences, and he certainly wasn't doing it concisely. He was recording everything that crossed his mind with equal attention and effort. It's this latter approach that psychologists have found to be not particularly helpful to people who are trying to process their emotions.

In this corner of the scientific world, Robert Shields' approach has also been labeled as counter-productive. Computer scientists specializing in information retrieval published a paper titled “Beyond total capture: a constructive critique of lifelogging,” in 2010 in the Communications of the ACM, that directly tackled the concept of total capture, arguing that the idealization of capturing all of our digital footprints misses crucial details about how we think and process information. Memory is not simply recorded and played back like a video, and attempts to capture everything may interfere with how we remember. A record that tries to remember everything for us may miss the way memory actually works.

The inconvenient truth about keeping records

Of course, none of this means that people like Robert Shields aren't doing something worthwhile.

Whatever the diary's value as a personal coping strategy, its value as a historical record is a separate question, and it's on that second front that Washington State University Libraries are currently working to catalog and preserve his writings for future researchers. There is, still, an undeniable irony in reading about this strange man and his obsession, given everything the research above suggests about total-capture recording.

If you've ever kept a journal yourself, whether to track fitness goals or for something more introspective, it's easy to understand why this might resonate on a personal level. Robert Shields spent four hours a day writing about everything that happened to him in five-minute intervals, in an effort to better understand his life, and by his own account he never felt he'd spent enough time on it to make it worthwhile. In our own small ways, we may all be a little like him.