Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?

To answer both at once: the methodology used is specific to my goals. They're specified by me and probably only work with how I approach each topic.

For example, my mathematical journals are rather structured. I move between branches over time but I tend to stay focused in a single area for quite some time working on problems, derivations, and occasionally formulating simple proofs from theorems I've built up as I ask questions. Often re-inventing much of what has been discovered but the purpose of the journals is to learn the process and to make maths a habit as much as it is to document the journey.

My personal journals are much more free-form. I just write stream-of-consciousness what I'm thinking as I look at the page.

Also, do you revisit your journals?

Often. The point of objectifying myself is to examine why I think the way I do, how opinions and habits entered my life, etc. The result of such examinations is that I can choose to change these qualities over time.

The unexamined life is not worth living. The significance came to me late in life but began as child when my mortality and that of those I loved came to me in the night. Life is a horizon of filth, gore, tears, laughter... surviving. On the shores of death I do not wish to go without leaving some evidence of my journey. The pursuit of wisdom, to me, is the joy of being human.

Since 1999, I've been using DailyDiary [1] to journal and track specific topics such as my personal day-to-day activities, weight, exercise, health issues, kid's day-to-day, specific projects, etc. The key for me is to be consistent, and the email nature of DailyDiary tries to reduce that friction as much as possible.

Having so much (searchable) written history has proven immensely helpful on occasion. And it's fun to reminisce when reminded of an event in the past. The kids get a kick out of hearing stories of their past too.

[1] https://www.dailydiary.com/

Disclosure: I'm the founder.

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 wrote a simple script 14 years ago to automate the organization for me.

http://pastebin.com/pnWQemAf

I just alias a simple one letter command to "jour.py work" or "jour.py blog" and running it will open a file with a date-based name in my editor of choice. Re-running it on the same day gets me the same file.

This method has the advantage of a very organized, timeless format. The disadvantage is that it's on my local machine. Of course, a cloud based file store could be used, but there is no default encryption and there is no mobile option.