Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?

I've started to keep a journal last year. I find it very useful and important to my life now. I've started it as a way to record how I felt about things and what my thoughts are since my mood used to very unstable and vary a lot, and journaling is considered helpful for mental health since you can dump your thoughts out and review them. I also wanted to practice handwriting and I enjoy writing as a process. I always write in cursive.

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.

I've been doing it for close to a year. I basically just have a bunch of text files in a folder. A text file for each day I make an entry.

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 do not. I try to record photos of as much as I can instead so I can look back on my life. I do however dump my thoughts in to to notes all over the place (Apple Notes, iAWritter (icloud), Dropbox, Evernote, OrgMode).

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.

Since I began my PhD I started writing a personal journal about my research.

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.

I started a personal project for logging my life, first steps were location tracking but features like connecting my lastfm account, pictures taken and inserting notes will come.

The idea is having a mobile application for tracking to a self-hosted api and a web-client for having a feed (like facebook about myself).

This will be released open source once it's somewhat presentable.