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Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
101–109 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#102Do you keep a personal journal? Yes. Org-Mode+Org-Capture If yes, do you find it useful? Yes. There are many advantages to keeping a personal journal. It allows you to have better recollections about what actually happened in the past, which is important taking into account that memory is constructive and prone to distortion. Many ideas and insights are forgotten, recording them is a way to fight that. What tools wou…
I've been keeping a journal with Org-Mode for nearly three years now. I also have an easy system of adding entries via my mobile devices, which was a huge thing I missed at first. Here's what I finally came up with as a solution that works really well for writing Org-Mode journal entries from my iPhone and iPad and getting those entries back into my main Org-Mode journal file:
- I use the Drafts app [1], which has a incredibly powerful feature that lets you create custom commands that include a series of steps, such as "Append to /refile.org file in Dropbox", which I have setup as a "Save to Journal" command
- I have a TextExpander snippet that includes the proper Org-Mode format for an entry, complete with a the date and tags and even a default entry title all filled in. All I do is type "Jjj" inside Drafts and I'm ready to start typing my journal entry.
To write a journal entry from my mobile device:
- I launch Drafts, type my TextExpander abbreviation ("Jjj") to fill in the Org-Mode template, then just start typing my journal entry.
- When I'm done writing my journal entry, I hit the "Save to Journal" action in Drafts, which appends that entry to my refile.org file on Dropbox.
- Once a week or so I open the refile.org inside Emacs and for each entry I run a custom function [2] that refiles that entry into my main journal-2017.org file. The function properly files the entry into the right spot in the datetree. Processing my refile.org file literally takes a few seconds, as I have that function bound to a key that I just run with the cursor over each entry.
I've been using this process for a few years now and it's incredibly easy and reliable, not to mention completely free of any proprietary data formats, which is exactly what I wanted for journaling. I'm using a similar process (Drafts app + TextExpander + Dropbox) to make Ledger CLI [3] entries from my iPhone very easy, so that I can keep my financial ledger up-to-date when I'm out.
[1] http://agiletortoise.com/drafts/
[2] https://github.com/raamdev/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs.d/conf...
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#103I have been keeping a work/science journal for a few years now. I keep it simple: One text file per day in a single directory. Ever significant thing I do gets a new headline in the file. The text file is written in org-mode using org-journal, but any other formatting convention would work just as well. I find that writing the journal entries focuses my thoughts, sort of like explaining them to another person would. Also, it helps me focus on the important things, and it helps me remember.
Last year though, I made a significant improvement that changed the way I keep my journal: I added a bit of magic that moves all journal entries marked as "todo" from the previous day to the current day when a new daily file is created. This allows me to keep a persistent to-do list that I slowly work through, where finished steps end up in the journal.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#104Since I follow the "Inbox 0" principle, I just set up an IFTTT recipe for that. Combine with the search of Gmail make it really easy to look up after.
https://ifttt.com/applets/14412595d-quick-ohlife-replacement... (I have no idea why we now can't share recipe on IFTTT, that's sucks...but it's basically, every day at 8pm, send me a mail with the title "How did your day go? #ohlife")
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#105I've kept a digital journal for the last five years (I have a chronic illness, so I look over my logs whenever I get sick to try and identify the trigger).
I tried a bunch of different programs, but I ultimately ended up writing a python script that creates a new .txt file with the datetime as the name("2017-01-20-22-02-50.txt"), launches vim, appends the day, date, and time to the top of the file ("Friday, January 20, 2017, 22:02 PM"), and then I just write my thoughts down inside vim.
I'm fairly disciplined about writing an entry everyday, but if I weren't, I'd just have it run as a daily cron job.
Having each entry as its own file is nice since you can just grep a term and find all the dates + times that the term was mentioned.
It's been incredibly useful - just this week I realized that my daily headache started when I began taking a new supplement, so I cut it out and sure enough, no more headaches.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#106Yes; no specific methodology; tools on linux: Rednote or Lifeograph
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#107I am using DayOne to journal. To me the most important feature DayOne has and Note does not have is the searching ability. In addition to regular search which Notes also has, in DayOne you could filter by years, look for journals from the same day from past years, filter by activities (DayOne can also read your activity data like running or walking), and also you can tag your notes and filter with tags.
Some other differentiating factors - you could password protect your journal with a DayOne. DayOne makes it really easy to find and add photos (Activity feed), and it shows thumbnails of the photos when you edit your journal, which makes it easier to edit the text. In notes, photos are displayed in full size all the time. One very useful feature of DayOne is that you could add a photo and quickly set the location and date of the journal to the photo's.
I have been using Awesome Notes to journal for about 3 years. Only until recently I started using DayOne. Awesome Notes is great, but DayOne is so much better.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#108I have a dedicated gmail address from which I receive a daily prompt email, scheduled with a cronjob. I usually reply with 2-3 lines about my day.
Can you share how you do the automation? Really interested in it. Thank you
It is literally just a cron entry that runs
> mutt -s "Today is `date "+%A, %B %d"` - How did your day go?" myemail@gmail.com where dailymessage.txt is just some prompt.
Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a personal journal?
#109I really wanted to get in to journaling. Because of that I created https://mydailylife.co - which sends me an email everyday to remind me about writing my entry. So far I've really really enjoyed it!