Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
I have been keeping a personal journal for a bit more than 2 years now. Mostly for the purpose of retrospective analysis, tracking my goals, challenges and general mood. For now I was just dropping my thoughts into a simple text file with timestamps. I'm looking to improve in this area through tracking things more systematically and developing a stronger habit. I have some general questions to the community here :
Do you keep a personal journal?
If yes, do you find it useful?
What tools would you recommend?
Is there any specific methodology that you follow?
When journaling, do you try to track any specific aspects of your life or just write about anything that is currently occupying your mind?
Any advice on how to get the most out of personal journaling?
Thanks for the answers!
tl;dr : I'm looking for your advice on journaling.
108 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] thread1) Five minute journal. Used to keep track of mental state and review day mostly.
https://www.amazon.ca/Five-Minute-Journal-Happier-Minutes/dp...
2) Way of Life app for iPhone
http://wayoflifeapp.com/
I track about 40 things from floss, to running, to meditation, etc. It's a very easy way to, in under a minute, run through and check off the things you did, or didn't do if the task is something like "eat fast food".
It's great for reviewing over time like a month or quarter to see how you are making out.
I really think these guys have nailed simple task tracking.
Google image search shows a lot of great examples.
Reviewing them really helped me evaluate and improve my software architecture patterns.
I have over 100,000+ words sprawled across 15 years of plain text notes and it works wonderfully.
For people who have the same issue, I came up with https://www.60secondseveryday.com
It's the fastest way of daily journaling - you make a 60 second phone call every night to answer the question "What do you want to remember about today?". From there, it gets transcribed, archived, and it's all searchable as well.
Disclaimer: I came up with the service after having a need for it myself
But I wouldn't use it on principle because a journal is private, and having it handled by a third-party doesn't sound like a good idea at all. Especially when you explicitly state that it is transcribed, archived, and searchable.
I realize that privacy is an important concern which is why I've taken it extremely seriously. So rest assured, this journal is private.
Perhaps I've misunderstood how your service works, and these concerns have no basis in fact. If so, it would be awesome to know that! Such information might make a very good fit for a privacy policy, which I'm having a very hard time finding any mention of on your site. (Yes, I saw the brief, breezy dismissal of such concerns in the FAQ section of your pricing page. That doesn't count. And, no, I haven't tried it. I shouldn't need to try it to get some idea of what you actually do to mitigate these risks.)
I hate to seem overly harsh on this point, but these are uncertain times, and your service is one which invites people to trust it with the sort of deeply personal information which, in the wrong hands, could be misused to ends from embarrassment to social and professional annihilation. Perhaps you have given this hazard the degree of concern it merits, and engineered your service to minimize it to the maximum possible extent. If so, you might do well to present the appearance of having done so, too.
I've given it a shot several times but have failed in the past, but what has made it easy to keep up as a routine this time around is a finite duration to write within + the requirement of continuously typing w/o breaks; to achieve those two things (shameless plug), I built http://write.surge.sh: it basically allows you to set a duration within which you journal, and if you stop typing for more than a few seconds within that duration, your current session is completely reset.
It's also open source at http://github.com/krrishd/write for those who are interested in how I built it :)
> Do you keep a personal journal?
For the last two years I've written a journal entry almost every day. Some days I didn't write, like during travels, but I added information about these days afterwards. Sometimes those entries were pages long and contained conversations or dreams, sometimes it was just: "1. Dezember - 3. Dezember: much work, travelled to Budapest"
I stopped writing about three weeks ago.
> If yes, do you find it useful? > When journaling, do you try to track any specific aspects of your life or just write about anything that is currently occupying your mind?
My purpose of the journal was to keep track of my motivation and good mood, so I put mostly positively worded events in there, like "* Went to training, despite mismotivation of the last days". I also recorded things that I never / seldom do.
It served that purpose well. I don't need it anymore, that's why I stopped, but I'll probably pick it up again someday.
> What tools would you recommend?
Plaintext Files. Or MacOS Notes. It doesn't matter really. Finding the perfect journal is procrastination to prevent having to write a journal.
> Is there any specific methodology that you follow?
Write an entry for every single day, no matter when, no matter how short it is (but make it at least one grammatically correct sentence). If you forget, just write the entry for yesterday. Mark the entry with date and time.
> Any advice on how to get the most out of personal journaling?
After doing it for a while, you will develop a feeling about whether and how it benefits you. Follow that feeling.
Apart from that: Keeping a journal will always enable you to reconstruct and remember details of your life 10 years from now. One key sentence is often enough to help you remember the day.
That is why I'm going to pick it up again.
I have yet to find looking back over it useful. I helpful in organising my thoughts when writing it down.
I used to use Day One but now I use a simple web app running that I built to replace Day One and Evernote late last year.
I'd build your own journal setup. Plain text files would likely work too. Make sure to back it up. It's a pain changing the system after you've written out 1000's of entries.
I tend to write about what's going on and what's coming up as well as what I'm thinking / worrying about.
Advice would be to just write it for yourself - assume it'll only ever be read by you. I find that helps me get things down without fussing.
I tried to for many years with paper and pen. It never worked for me until I started using DayOne [0] on iOS and Mac. Simply superb design and one of my favorite pieces of software to use because it does (almost) exactly what I want it to .
When I type, I'm able to render my thoughts directly into text, whereas when I write with a pen I have to think about the physical process of writing. I imagine I'm not the only one here who feels this way.
A valid criticism of DayOne is that they don't currently support strong encryption, and their (optional) sync service stores your entries on their server. Their blog said that they are working on a good client side encryption implementation [1], however the last update was some time around the middle of last year [2].
[0] http://dayoneapp.com/
[1] http://dayoneapp.com/2016/05/end-to-end-encryption-for-day-o...
[2] http://dayoneapp.com/2016/08/encryption-update/
What in particular do you think DayOne offers that can't be offered by Notes on iOS or macOS?
It's not necessary. But, it's nice.
The other was "Alarms" which was discontinued even on Mac.
One can try this - a full screen writer app like WriteRoom or CleanWriter (my favourite - just love the type writer sound) or iA Writer and write in simple text files and save in an encrypted folder and sync it with the service of your choice self hosted or otherwise.
I struggle with this personally because while I know that typing is a faster way to get things down, I really really like the "analog" method of physically writing something down. It offers me some amount of tangible pleasure, but like you said, by the time I get the idea down much of that initial mental spark is fading so it becomes a race against the pen.
Perhaps there's some combination I could practice. Anyhow, this app looks quite neat and I will definitely check it out. Thanks for the link.
It is still the reverse for me. For me, writing involves less cognitive load than typing:
While writing, my mind wanders into thinking more (probably since it still has a capacity to, perhaps just because writing is slower than typing) which helps further.
While typing, I still make a lot of mistakes, which take attention away. I hate touch-screen keyboards as my error rate with them continues to be an order of magnitude higher than the same with physical keyboards even after several years of use.
I keep an unstructured, personal journal, and half of what's in there are thoughts I have, going to bed or waking up in the morning. There are some good pieces of writing that've come out of it and just yesterday, a former coworker and friend thanked me for some observations I had about the company we once worked at. Sometimes the things we reflect on can be a big deal.
I started to aid my sleep, putting all the racing thoughts in my head down on paper and closing the book on them was very calming, I can then forget them for a while.
I also love the act of translating your nebulous thoughts into (semi) clear language of written words, to me it's a focusing lens on your life, and allows associations, perspective and ideas that may not come about otherwise. Even if just because it forces you to reflect for more than some fleeting seconds.
I never see myself changing the primary method of writing these down freeform. But every time I finish a journal I do read back through and write up in google docs some bullet point style wisdoms and take-aways to remember for the future .
Glad to know there's others that get benefit from journaling too.
Goal setting, Mood Tracking, Habit Tracking, Reflection Etc. is hard to lump into one system, but I have seen it done by a few people.
I personally (and know hundreds of others) spent years writing in a blank notebook with a structure that I created for myself.
Something that would allow me to write my goals, map out my day, write what I'm grateful for, track my important tasks, etc.
I saw this as a problem, asked some friends if they had the same issue, and decided to create something that would have everything above.
You can check it out here: https://bestself.co/products/self-journal
This is not a "plug"
You can download the PDF on this page and check it out first.
I believe in it that much that I want everyone to have access to this.
Cheers!
-Allen Co-Founder | BestSelf Co.
Again, I don't do this (though I want to) but I'll follow this discussion with interest!
Yes. I mostly do it to unwind/relax. I think it's a good way to get your brain to slow down and collect your thoughts.
What tools would you recommend?
I use pen and paper. I stare at a computer all day and it's nice to take a break. Obviously, there are a ton of upsides to doing things digitally but for my particular use case I wouldn't benefit.
Is there any specific methodology that you follow?
I used to keep several notebooks for various purposes. I found it to be a burden. I'm way less organized now but it's easier to just put everything in one notebook.
When journaling, do you try to track any specific aspects of your life or just write about anything that is currently occupying your mind?
A lot of what I write about are problems I'm working on. I also write a lot of reviews, movies, restaurants, things I drank, etc. If I can't think of anything I'll usually write a short story from some writing prompts. I have no aspirations of being a writer, it's just fun sometimes.
Any advice on how to get the most out of personal journaling?
Try to do it everyday. My life isn't exactly full of excitement so sometimes it's hard to get motivated to write about it but there's always something I could be writing.
> mutt -s "Today is `date "+%A, %B %d"` - How did your day go?" myemail@gmail.com < /home/phreeza/dailymessage.txt
where dailymessage.txt is just some prompt.
I'm storing four types of content:
- J, journal entries, one file per day with a summary of what I've done that day. Already proving useful, I forget what I did three days ago.
- N, notes, working notes on a topic. I treat this like a half neat half messy notebook. I write things in topic files while working through a problem.
- T, thoughts, similar to notes but much neater. Often longer form and drafted and rewritten a few times these are small 'articles' on my thoughts on a particular topic. One or two may get converted into blog posts.
- Q, quotes, if I find a quote in a book or online I find interesting it gets a file in here.
The output is a linear weblog style currently.
I've only had this running for a few weeks and it's rather cumbersome at the moment. What I hope to improve on:
- Improve onboarding, hugo has a nice tool which sets up new documents and opens the editor: `hugo new n/topic.md`. I want to build on top of this to reduce friction when writing.
- Away from PC. This system works very well when I'm in front of a computer. When I'm not I have read-only view on mobile. I take notes on paper, the best of these get transcribed into the system. I'd like a way to write on mobile and have that automagically get added into the system. The backend would probably be an AWS lambda function, frontend, perhaps a web app?
- Frontend, I want search and better browsing, tagging &c. But this will come later, when I have more content.
I'm trying to stay detached from any 'app' and maintain control of my data. The 'solution' I'm building will hopefully serve me for a long long time.
for the moment I use drupal's book module to take notes, it's hard to "extract" them and the support for markdown is not the best I expected.
I wish there is a CMS that can render flat markdown files ..
Though if you really want a web ui have a look at Jekyll's new admin ui (google summer of code project). Caddy (a golang web server) has a Hugo add-on that has a web ui. Lastly github and prose.io is pretty good.
I have one file per year, I write one entry per day, mostly what happened during the day, in the "journal" part, and make notes in the "notes" section, notes can be writeups, code snippets etc. Each new year, I condense the best of the notes section into the next years new note section.
I do this in org-mode, using Spacemacs, its a bit of learning curve involved with Emacs/Org-mode but Spacemacs sets it up for you very neatly.
I store the files on dropbox.
Since its my journal, that I want to make sure that my kids still can read when the times come, this UTF8 text file format that Org-Mode is, is absolutely essential.
I don't use any computer tools at this time. I use a Black and Red notebook, because I didn't like the ratios of paper quality, sizes, or lining of others that I tried. Writing on the computer doesn't seem to have the same effect (and this is confirmed by various studies, from the looks of it).
There's no particular methodology. I try to write often, but don't find it necessary to write every day. If I don't feel like writing, I don't, usually, I do. I put the date down, and that's it.
Pretty much anything goes there. Events that happened, predictions and outcomes, personal concerns, dark thoughts, quotes, prayers, litany, ideas for projects, mini-stories about fictional worlds, notes about topics, insights, poems, math problems, diagrams, doodles.
[0]: http://bulletjournal.com/
Basically, every day, write down anything that comes to mind that you should do on that day (possibly by fetching it from a page of a less granular time period, like a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly list of tasks/events), as well as anything that you discover you need to do in the future (put the date of the event, or a rough time period you want it done next to the item, so it's clear you don't have to do it today). Don't feel the need to schedule it on some other page - just write it onto the current day and defer that scheduling work to later.
As you do the things in your list, mark them as completed. At the end of the day, make a place to write down stuff for tomorrow. Move all the stuff you wanted to do today that you didn't to the next day. Move all the stuff you marked for the future to a place where you store tasks for the future - this is called a "future log", and there are all sorts of variations. I'd start with a page for all tasks you want to do in the future, and "migrate" to a new page with those tasks monthly.
Generally you want a book with two (or three) bookmarks - one will be on a "future log" or "monthly spread" page where tasks you want to do soon, but not necessarily right now, in case you want to pull additional stuff to do today, and the other will be on the page with the current day where you'll do almost all your reading and writing.
In order to save migration to a weekly process, I use a layout where I put all days of one week on a single spread - https://www.instagram.com/p/BPUIKR1Am3o/
Then I can put stuff for later in the week onto that specific day, and I only need to migrate to future log, or rewrite the weekly-level tasks every week. And I don't need to do any per-day setup work, just draw the page leisurely on a Sunday night and do the migration work.
There are a ton of youtube examples of people doing planning, and a few tutorials on how the system works. Don't be put off by some of the more complex/artful/&c. stuff - you can do it in a minimalist fashion too.
* Bullet Journal 101 series by Boho Berry - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeTUR5GAuQfupOv-_l16G...
* Engineer Dude's Simple, Minimalist Bullet Journal - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1HerzvUph3FtUsXqsGL9...
There is also a really active set of bullet journalists (as they like to call themselves) on Pinterest and Instagram - just search for "#bulletjournal" and "#bujo" for example future logs, "spreads", trackers, collections, and so forth.
Remember - all you _really_ need is the tasks/goals/planning part. You don't need daily/weekly/... water/exercise/mood/... trackers, weather icons, calligraphy, colours, and so forth. And it's your system, so adjust as you find it works for you. I started off trying to do morning/afternoon/evening mood tracking, but that didn't work out. I also tried a daily timeline thing, and that didn't work out. So they were gone after three weeks.
Usually when I think a thought of note, or I'm experiencing a particularly strong emotional response, or just general dilemma running through my mind I'll write down what it is I'm experiencing or thinking.
Some days are quite long with multiple entries, some times I go a few days without writing a thing. I've thought about littering my entries with "tags" for easier searching, but I haven't done it yet. I don't really review what I've written very often. Plus the entries don't take long to review whenever I'm in the mood.
I use it more as a therapeutic tool, a way to discuss my thoughts with myself.
As for an application, I use Writely pro. But any text editor for Android that can open/save text files to a folder will work for what I do. Plain text synchronized across all my devices is the main thing. Future proof, plus it's my data.
I try to capture something every day that excites me, something that day that made me happy or was unusual. So it's more about getting into a habit of finding things that makes everyday special.
I've tried photos and text before but I never enjoyed looking through it after a year or two.
There's a ted talk about this [2]
1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/leap-second/id1021405859?mt=...
2: https://www.ted.com/talks/cesar_kuriyama_one_second_every_da...
I tried Day One, but I got mad that they switched away from dropbox. They honestly could have solved the problems, but I can't fault them entirely for taking the easier route here to make supporting it much easier.
I'm not sure what I would journal if I did keep one for real.
I use Evernote.
I only do regular tracking of two data points: books I've read (a simple list in Evernote) by year, and board games I've played against a human opponent (on BoardGameGeek).
Whenever I have an idea or thought I want to remember and expand on, I post it as a note to Evernote. Then as my interest in it continues, I revisit, expand, or revise each post. Some of these have grown to thousands of words or whole notebooks unto themselves.
I write down all things in my mind, things I tried out, things that did not work, etc. Every time I get new results or evaluate something, I also try to include a table or graph with intermediate results.
The journal helps me to see my progress over time. I can grep through it and see if I already tried something. I can go back and see how my results get better over time or whether I hit a dead end somewhere.
I also write a small summary directly after meetings and talks and note feedback from supervisors.
I use org-mode (emacs) for this and can recommend it. All my entries are sorted by year and week number, so I try to write a summary at least once a week. As I use Emacs for all my programming related tasks, the org-mode file is open all day anyhow, so I usually add things more often than that.