Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

#71

Post by rpastuszak » Wed, May 17, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

I suck at sticking to habits so I built an app to make it easier for myself. Some context: https://enso.sonnet.io> and here https://sonnet.io/posts/ulysses>

I write every day, ca. 800 words per day and I don't really have to force myself to do it any more. When I don't have time to do it, I miss it. And I really, really struggle with sticking to habits.

I journal to:

- be more aware of my emotions and thought patterns, feel more present - to have a space to think without editing myself (divergent thinking) - to notice broader patterns in my life, in my behaviour - to rant - to practice taking different perspectives (reframing) - to build snapshots of my life at a given moment (that came after a few months of writing, it wasn't my plan)

I write every day after waking up, for ca 15-30 minutes depending on how much time I have. I do my best to never skip more than one day, and on the following day I try to catch up.

My journal didn't have much structure to start with, but with time some patterns emerged and generally it looks a bit like this:

1. how I felt when I woke up (incl. dreams) 2. how my day went 3. how I felt in the evening 4. what I found interesting and/or beautiful (list) 5. what I need to do today (list)

1-3 are very unstructured and full of typos. My app makes it hard to edit changes, so I embraced that and just focus on the flow. I don't mind.

Results:

- Generally, I feel much more present when I write in the morning - This is a big one for me: It's easier to spot red flags (lowered mood, anxiety, lack of focus, avoidance) and work with that. For instance, if I notice that I feel more anxious than usual, I add a TODO with a quick walk, making sure that I don't neglect myself (eat the damn breakfast), or even just spending more time with my partner on that day - Writing how I feel allows me to spot certain patterns, i.e. if read HN in the morning, even for 5 minutes, I can become less focused, I'm more moody if I don't sleep well, etc... I can build routines to counteract that. - Writing like this (not unlike music) can help you soothe or amplify your current mood. This can be a problem, but you can also learn how to use that. - my fluency when it comes to writing has improved drastically

I need to run, so apologies for any typos in advance. In short I can only recommend it! If you want to learn more feel free to come and say hi! (https://sonnet.io/post/hi)

Re: Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

#72

Post by RobotDisco » Thu, May 18, 2023, 4:52 AM UTC

I have been journalling _intentionally_ since about 2013, and it has since becoming a sort of digital hearth from which all of my other executive function flow.

It started for me as a cathartic release, I had basically blogged my vapid teen thoughts since the livejournal.com days, and after graduation I picked that kind of thing up again except in private, basically writing my feelings down after a bad life patch.

Eventually I realized that I was noticing that my emotions often were the results of patterns, and I started using my journals to notice things that made me feel worse, and things that made me feel better.

I wasn't particularly structured in terms of life goals or even complicated ambitions, and had a separate Getting Things Done-style task management system, but I found that while that was great for small tasks, I really wasn't able to put together the brainpower to think about projects. So after a while I used my journal for bullet-journal style todos as well as writing about my feelings and events that happened during the day.

Eventually I came up with some kind curated structure ... not only did I write down whatever happened of note, I started asking myself questions like: "What are the main things I want to do today? What did I learn? What am I grateful for? What were some frustrations?" Eventually I realized that if I asked myself that at weekly, monthly, and yearly levels (usually just "highlights" of the previous cadence, restarted) I realized that I had managed to do a lot better in my life than it seems like in the everyday struggle (I also realized from that that I had some self-esteem and outlook issues to work on, haha.)

After fighting with all sorts of fancy "knowledge management" systems like zettelkasten and whatever, and mostly failing despite my job basically being having to deal with all sorts of random things other people throw at me which will eventually come back to bite me if I don't figure out the larger system, I realized that if I started adding a sort of wiki component to my journal software, I could tag my daily logs and eventually sort of look at entire subjects I've had to learn, observation by isolated observation, in a sort of holistic way, which was way easier on my brain than trying to conceptualize it all in one focused go (or even those kinds of "deep work" sessions people often talk about. I learned around this time that I had focus issue :D)

So yeah, I journal _a lot_, and everything has ended up building layers for almost everything I need help getting my brain to deal with, whether it be emotionally, or cognitively. It starts off as a moment-by-moment log (even if written all in one go in the evening before I go to bed, if I don't have the mental togetherness or ability to write it throughout the day as I do stuff.) and I have found all sorts of ways to take those chunks and rearrange them for all sorts of other purposes.

Honestly, it's the only way I personally can function now, dumping as much of my brain into a journal and not having it bounce around my head to stress me out.

I didn't invent these techniques, it's a frankenstein of a lot of different productivity and mental health ideas I've found on the internet or talking to other people.

--

I don't know if my particular _choice_ of journal matters, but it's a bunch of text files that my editor that has some scripting libraries for journal macros and now wiki macros. I know nowadays people do this kind of thing with software like Logseq (https://logseq.com/), and that's where I'd probably start if I was doing it today.

Re: Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

#73

Post by ano88888 » Thu, May 18, 2023, 7:17 AM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #37

Journals ? No, it's just a mess of a bunch of unrelated things that only have date in common. I'd definitely consider doing one for travels, could be a nice thing with attached picture but for day to day things I prefer different kind. Logging and notes? Yes. I am fond of "personal wiki" idea. Project gets its own page with all relevant info. And links to all the other relevant things. Search makes sure I can actuall…

it is not about the content or knowledge. Journaling is a tool to help you reflect and refine your thoughts. The thought process that came out of writing is more important than what gets writtern. In short, it helps you think better and more self aware.

Re: Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

#74

Post by whamlastxmas » Sat, May 20, 2023, 2:28 PM UTC

rcarr wrote: post #28

Yes and no. For the first three months of the year I was religiously journaling. Pretty much every single day, with weekly and monthly reviews. Then towards the end of the quarter when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get my project finished on time and that I was miserable I completely burnt out and stopped journaling and haven’t gone back to it yet. Journaling felt like work and it also felt like it was ma…

Good luck with travels!

https://medium.com/personal-growth/travel-is-no-cure-for-the...

Re: Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life?

#75

Post by bogdanov79 » Sun, May 28, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

Plain text file. Date, entry,

Best improvement: I realized that I always feel awful after meetings with some people and cut or heavily limited some relationships. Not having a journal, it was a regular pattern for me. To be invited, have a meeting, feel so-so after that, forgetting gradually about the experience, and sometime later, when the same person called, agreeing to another dreadful meeting. Having a couple of entries like: "met with X, felt terrible after the meeting, wasted time, X was bragging about sth all the time." It helps to avoid repeating such mistakes.