Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?

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/

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.

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.

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.