Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?

Yes.

Very much. But my useful is mostly about personal stuff and once in a while revisit. Looking at things in retrospect. Sometimes I get something to learn, sometimes it's just fun or once in a while it makes me sad too.

I have been doing it on notebooks (paper journals; and not the fancy and famous ultra costly ones). Really. It's very recently that I started to put some entries on Android Journey app which are kinda too personal to leave in my daily diary which I don't lock in a box. So, I will recommend a paper notebook and pen. I am from India and I am always in the hunt for good and affordable notebooks and fountain pens - we don't have many in the former category. Anyone looking for something good here try Brahma Series (or Brahma Forces) notebooks - they sell Moleskine like notebooks (honestly paper quality is actually a lot better) minus Moleskine's marketing cost in its price. (disclaimer: nothing against Moleskine)

Not really. Some days I just write about something that happened. Or something I thought or just anything. Some days I skip. Somedays I just pen a poem or so (or something that I kinda thing are poems). A short story. Or a sketch (yeah, I make sure the notebook I get have good pages and works well with pencils, ballpoint pen and fountain pens - the latter being my favourite), a caricature, a schedule, sometimes card game score when I am travelling with my friends and we had a game, travel itinerary. I have found some pages where there's some math of splitting trip expenses among friends. Something from a book I am reading, or a film I watched, or something about it. I travel/backpack a lot and that's when my diary gets maximum attention. But these things don't happen very frequently and it's mostly the typical diary entries. So, it's my personal diary and I wrote it just because I like it. It it helps me in my development in some way then it's entirely coincidental and it wasn't the intention at all.

Yes, as explained above. It can just be anything.

Well, I don't think you could get something useful from my kind of journaling (I believe you are looking for journaling that is done from the productivity point of view and similar expectation; I maybe wrong though). Keep writing is all I would say. I have been writing since I was in class 6 - pretty much 20 years now. Yeah, frequency has gone down a lot since school. No doubt about it.

IMHO nothing better really. The price hike is really surprising. No, this app really doesn't do anything special. But it seems there are people (and a lot of them) to whom this app appeals a lot and I am sure they find it useful and it works for them. I think the look and feel is very clean and gives a diary like experience maybe. But anyway, its Mac app cost just doesn't make sense to me at least.

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've tried many times to do it digitally over the years, tried many apps, none really stuck more than a few days.

Last November I started keeping a physical Design Diary, though, and I've managed to keep it up since. I come up with tons of ideas for games, stories, websites, etc, and I tend to lose the ones I don't actively pursue over time, so now I just write it in there. It's nice because with pen and paper I can actually draw the designs of things too, although it's still mostly text. I also put notes from lectures on design I listen to in there also. I also just record whenever I work on those projects and some of the decisions I made while doing so.

I also put some personal things in there as well to provide some context and help aid my memory of when things happen (I have a terrible memory), but I do write this with the idea that somebody might read it or I might want to share it someday, so I try to fully explain the ideas as well as I can.

In fact, I don't just take notes in there or anything. I take notes on scrap paper first, since my natural notetaking style is pretty messy and filled with gaps, and then I sit down later and take those scraps and expand on them in the diary, sometimes days later.

It's already become one of my favorite physical artifacts (that's not an actual game I've made), and I'm trying to start a second one that retroactively goes back to previous games and stuff I've worked on.

The only structure I have in there is I keep things segregated by the day it happened on, more or less. Sometimes I have lecture takeaways put in there weeks after I actually watched it though.

Yes, totally. I only write in text files for portability and because I find more liberating to just write with no care for special formatting and being sure that I can read what I write on almost everywhere.

Yes I do.

I have been writing in it for the past year and it has really improved my life in many ways. I have written about it detail here :

https://medium.com/@NikitaVoloboev/day-evaluations-5706f31c9...

The feeling of knowing that not a single day has went unwritten about is amazing. I know what I did on every single one of these days and it feels really empowering to see yourself evolve with time.