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Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

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Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

#21

Post by em-bee »

i am confused by the prompt i am getting: "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one"

i understand journaling to be about today, not something eventful in the past. that prompt i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay.

the key for me for journaling is habit. the habit to do this every day, and not to skip. the prompt doesn't matter. i just write about anything noteworthy from that day.

with a plain text editor, into a file.

it's not ideal though. it's the last thing i do before going to sleep, and once in a while i miss an entry. and on some days, i feel there is nothing to write.

Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

#22

Post by kuehle »

em-bee wrote: post #21

i am confused by the prompt i am getting: " Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one " i understand journaling to be about today, not something eventful in the past. that prompt i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay. the key for me for journaling is habit. the habit to do this every day, and not to skip. the prompt doesn't matter. i just write about anything n…

> and on some days, i feel there is nothing to write

This is what I was trying to fix for myself.

And I found that creating a new text document is just an additional friction.

> i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay

This is what I visually restricted the input field for as I also feel like some questions would otherwise suggest a long answer. Trying to answer them in a brief way is a feature for myself.

Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

#23

Post by em-bee »

kuehle wrote: post #22
em-bee wrote: post #21

i am confused by the prompt i am getting: " Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one " i understand journaling to be about today, not something eventful in the past. that prompt i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay. the key for me for journaling is habit. the habit to do this every day, and not to skip. the prompt doesn't matter. i just write about anything n…

> and on some days, i feel there is nothing to write This is what I was trying to fix for myself. And I found that creating a new text document is just an additional friction. > i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay This is what I visually restricted the input field for as I also feel like some questions would otherwise suggest a long answer. Trying to answer them in a brief way is a feature for myself.

it's not just that the question suggests a long answer, but it is that i like writing and i have a story to tell, so i want to tell that story. i would not even want to write a short answer because i already know what the short answer would be, and it's not very interesting so there is no point to even bother to write it down.

what i am trying to say is that, for me at least, the prompt itself would have to limit the scope to today or maybe this week. (but then i would not be able to write anything for this particular prompt)

maybe prompts like: what made you happy this week? what made you sad? what was a challenge you faced this week?

if you come up with a dozen questions like that, and then randomly rotate through those, one each day, i think that might produce interesting results.

Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

#24

Post by tinyprojects »

This is really cool OP - did you create the list of prompts?

I'm working on Paper Website[1], which lets you turn a handwritten journal into a tiny daily blog. I've written nearly 150 posts[2] this way, and I think what's made me so consistent is having an "audience". It sounds weird, but there's ~200 email subscribers to my journal, and it's had nearly 200k page views. Knowing people are reading my stuff motivates me to keep going - I've tried regular journaling before and it just feels like I'm writing into the void.

I'm interested in your prompts because often people don't know what to write about - it's an awesome primer to start.

[1] https://paperwebsite.com [2] https://daily.tinyprojects.dev

Re: Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

#26

Post by Evidlo »

kuehle wrote: post #12
Evidlo wrote: post #5

Cool 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 fr…

There seem to be REST apis that are specific to Gitlab/Github like [0].

There's also isomorphic-git [1], which is git client implemented in Javascript.

[0]: https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-13-a-simpler-api-for-a... [1]: https://isomorphic-git.org/

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