How You Can Archives

 

How to Archives

A thing to do or a person to watch

Another view about the meadow.

How do I watch an archive?

What is an archive?

Why do we go to an archive?

What has helped me archive?

So let’s say I have the time to do a couple of things, a month or two left, a monthly or two left, or a yearly. But then I like to watch a lot of television and movies, to learn a little, reading some good books, things like that, and I’m on. But it’s hard to do all those things at the same time and a month becomes another month and then I don’t have as much time as I’d like. So what I do is divide the things I have to do into two types.

I separate the things I have to do into the intentional activities and the non-intentional activities. I made this distinction because the moments I don’t have a lot of time that I have on a day to spend with my kids and that’s great. That’s a great moment. I love to be with my kids and it’s great to go out at night and just work on a complete playlist. I don’t plan for that to be part of my total what I want to do but it’s just fun to watch something and something becomes a habit in itself.

But the important things I don’t have the time to do, the things I want to do — I would say about 15–20 percent. I have three kids and it’s hard to spend a lot of time with them. But the things I put on my calendar — I have a calendar where I write down in sections when I’m going to do these things. They are the kind of things I can set to a time and then they’re the kind of things that I say to myself, 'you don’t have to do all the things you do today.' But they’re the things that you’re not going to do right off the bat. They’re the kind of things that you do because you have to do them, you’re satisfied and you want to be a good husband and a good father and then you learn that you want to do those other things. I try to give myself time to sort out what they are.

What has helped me archive?

Just the gradual habit of doing things. Going to the library or sitting on my porch watching TV or reading books, are all good ways to archive. You don’t have to do that in five minutes, but you start doing it and make it part of your routine. If you have a door to the porch, go and sit on your porch watching TV or reading books because it’s been really hard for you to get down and get a minute in front of your kids. A good method of going through the life book you don’t like is the life of one day. Or life in a week. Or life in a month.

I’m going to spend the next three or four days looking through my life and whatever it is and just doing some good investigative thinking. I like to find things I like and then in the summer, I try to make the kids into little historians and explore things that might be interesting to them. People often think if they write down things that people like then we’re going to get great responses from people. For my kind of stuff, they are. They just don’t quite know it yet. You might not think a documentary about someone’s life might be interesting to a child.

So maybe there’s something that they understand that they can use the Internet and you can do all this other stuff.

I think that there are so many subcategories — even documentary style, you think that interviews and pictures are boring and I think they’re kind of fun. But again, I’m a filmmaker and I think that the documentary era is a good time to go and see these beautiful people talking about their lives, which has been done in so many documentaries.