As you can see, the media diary compresses a lot of information into a small amount of space. Since you’ll be analyzing your media later, be sure to add in comments that might help you during the analysis phase (described below).

Try to be militant about writing entries into the diary. You probably shouldn’t take notes while you’re doing anything that needs your full attention — driving, having a heart-to-heart conversation with a loved one, or operating heavy equipment. But stop routinely during the day and make entries: in the parking lot after you finish your drive to campus, or during commercial breaks. Don’t wait until the end of the day to write entries because you’ll have forgotten a lot by then. It’ll be fairly obvious to your instructor if you actually kept up on the diary during the day.

If you have a small camera (on your cellphone or otherwise) that allows you to associate notes with the images it takes, consider using that as your diary. The note-taking capabilities are important because you’ll need to enter information such as duration, location, and other elements shown in the diary example above.

There are many ways to work with data in order to discover patterns. You probably want to review the Questions to Keep in Mind and then read through the media diary. Make note of any media events that answer those questions. After you’ve worked with the data a little, think about how you might divide the different media events into categories (the questions offer some categories but you can and should create some of your own). You can do this by importing the data into a spreadsheet (one row per media event) so that you can copy and paste or color-code rows to create categories. Or you could be old-fashioned and create an index card for each media event so that you can sort them into piles. Whatever method you choose, it’s useful to be able to actually move the pieces around as you create categories.

As you create categories, start thinking about what additional similarities exist between media events in each category. For example, if you end up with events sorted into categories based on things you paid attention to versus those you more or less ignored, was there some factor that led to that difference? Did you tend to ignore media if you were engaged with someone else? Or did you tend to ignore media that you didn’t select for yourself?

Consider the possibility of having multiple sets of categories for the media events, looking at not only the media attended to/media ignored categories but also people like you/people not like you.