I had an idea for something like this, although it would require a bit more up-front effort. Basically, you provide a list of important people, interests, and events in your life, and then the prompts are generated dynamically based on that information. So instead of a prompt like "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one," you'd get something like "If you had to take a vacation with [Tom], where would you go and what would you do?" or "When's the last time you went [kayaking]? Do you think [Jake] would want to go with you?" etc.
Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
11–20 of 26 posts
Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#12Cool idea. Include an about page somewhere. Where do you pull the questions from? Also a random idea is that you allow people to save their entry directly into a git repo, which feels a bit safer than browser storage. I think there's a way to do that from the web.
I guess an about page is a great idea, I'll create one that answers the questions here later.
My setup for the questions is the following - I have a questions file with one question per line and a cron job that takes the top one, builds the static page by including it in the template and then appends the question in the end.
That way I can always add more questions but if I run out of questions it would just start from the beginning.
Do you have an idea on how to save to a git repo from a static page? I don't want to make it any more complicated than it needs to be.
Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#13This is awesome! Had been looking for something like this for a while.
Small suggestion/question (you would have probably thought about it and I wonder if you consciously decided against it) - why not provide a way to seamlessly store it in cloud storage - google drive, etc?
Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#14I had an idea for something like this, although it would require a bit more up-front effort. Basically, you provide a list of important people, interests, and events in your life, and then the prompts are generated dynamically based on that information. So instead of a prompt like "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one," you'd get something like "If you had to take a…
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Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#15I had an idea for something like this, although it would require a bit more up-front effort. Basically, you provide a list of important people, interests, and events in your life, and then the prompts are generated dynamically based on that information. So instead of a prompt like "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one," you'd get something like "If you had to take a…
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Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#16I had an idea for something like this, although it would require a bit more up-front effort. Basically, you provide a list of important people, interests, and events in your life, and then the prompts are generated dynamically based on that information. So instead of a prompt like "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one," you'd get something like "If you had to take a…
I built an app like this & raised a respectable pre-seed round for it. tl;dr journaling types were into it, but already had a journaling process. Regular people would use it for a week or so & then stop. tbh (app) had flash-in-the-pan success with the concept, but did it via simple one-tap survey. Might be a tbh 2.0 approach here.
Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#17This is awesome! Had been looking for something like this for a while. Small suggestion/question (you would have probably thought about it and I wonder if you consciously decided against it) - why not provide a way to seamlessly store it in cloud storage - google drive, etc?
I guess this is one of many ways to improve it, I can still give my reasoning:
With the current setup you don't have any setup. You don't need an account, you can just start.
As I wrote above, trying to minimize all of the friction, this was easy to implement and made sense.
How would you imagine the cloud storage feature?
Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#18Prompts for journals is an old concept. You can buy lots of (physical) journals that have 1-3 questions as a prompt on each day. Personally, I tried it and still failed to maintain it.
Do you have an idea why you could not maintain it? I think another component why I open the page every day is that I only have the chance to fill this question that day - something that you wouldn't have in the paper one.
So your prompt changes daily?
A fixed prompt likely was why I couldn't maintain it. The prompt was generic and open ended, but I tired quickly of coming up with new stuff to the same questions.
But the likely real reason is that it just became a chore. I probably should have reduced it to once a week or something. I have kind of tried that as well and still failed.
Another reason is quality. The first draft of anything sucks really bad, but I don't want to write badly. It's a lot more effort to write something present or future me will be happy with.
Ultimately, I think it's a matter of perspective and priority. I like the idea of journaling, but it is somewhat labor intensive (especially if the "first draft" is not good enough for you). The reality is I often choose to do something else with that time.
Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#19What a great idea for people that don't have too much time! I personally try to stick with the same topic every night(something on the theme of "what went well" or "what are you grateful for"). However, this is a great way to speed things up and start putting ideas/thoughts on paper. Also keeping it locally stored is great from a privacy standpoint.
My only question: is there an "open" feature that makes the prompt optional for folks who maybe have something more pressing to journal about than something that the prompt may suggest that day?
Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself
#20What a great idea for people that don't have too much time! I personally try to stick with the same topic every night(something on the theme of "what went well" or "what are you grateful for"). However, this is a great way to speed things up and start putting ideas/thoughts on paper. Also keeping it locally stored is great from a privacy standpoint. My only question: is there an "open" feature that makes the prompt o…
There is not yet an open feature as you suggested but I feel like this could be nice. Not only for journaling but also for todo lists or similar, just starting every day with a blank sheet.
I saw that “1 Day” as suggested in another comment seems to be basically that.
I’ll play around with it later.