How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
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Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#2I really like Day One for journaling. It’s a very clean experience though I admit I don’t journal everyday.
I have bristled against the idea of subscribing to it as an app. I think It’s a great app, and I want to support the author, but subscription to apps just rubs me the wrong way. So I live in the free mode.
I’ve tried a few alternatives that are free (including markdown and plain text), but always come back to it because it’s so comfortable.
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#3Why write on the phone when routinely journalling before and after bed? I always feel stifled by typing speed on a touch keyboard; in this case especially, it seems minimizing the friction of expressing a spontaneous thought would take priority. I don't see mention of dictation, unless it's a given with the app. Or is that particular workflow feature so beneficial as to offset this?
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#4I’ve been journaling daily for the past few years and it’s been really fun to tick through each day around a year previous to observe my current state. Most of it seems trite or meaningless, but collated it feels like a meaningful picture of who I was back then — what my struggles were and how they split between the distant and close.
TLDR; I highly recommend journaling daily. It forces you to slow down and plug into feelings which is automatically a better start to your day than usual
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#5I really like Day One for journaling. It’s a very clean experience though I admit I don’t journal everyday. I have bristled against the idea of subscribing to it as an app. I think It’s a great app, and I want to support the author, but subscription to apps just rubs me the wrong way. So I live in the free mode. I’ve tried a few alternatives that are free (including markdown and plain text), but always come back to i…
Yes, Day One is great.
I push about 30k-50k words of text journaling into it per year, for about 6 or 7 years now, and it handles it seamlessly while keeping everything organized.
The most important feature to me is that it feels lightweight and lagless to open the app and get to typing.
My impression is that Day One has a ton of features for people who want multimedia entries, or sharing, or all the other bullet points that keep it from getting squeezed out by competitors, but it seems to keep those out of the hot path so that my own niche experience is never ruined by bloat.
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#6Journaling is actually a great way of promoting mental and emotional health.
I don't journal daily because I don't have enough to say every day, but I do something similar called "writing therapy", especially when I'm feeling emotionally stuck. I find bad emotions to only be bothersome because they are inside and unprocessed. Externalizing emotions onto a physical page (not digital!) helps me process them. The physical act of subsequently crumpling the piece of paper and throwing it out is catharsis. The act itself somehow tells my brain not to hold on to certain feelings -- I've done the work to process them and I can now let them go.
I do this when I'm experiencing minor issues that don't rise to the level of needing to talk to a $150/hr therapist. Some people prefer talking things out, but I prefer writing.
"So what do therapy, journaling, and meditation all have in common?
All three are techniques to help us convert what is usually the subject of our consciousness into the object of our consciousness.
That’s it." [1]
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#7Why write on the phone when routinely journalling before and after bed? I always feel stifled by typing speed on a touch keyboard; in this case especially, it seems minimizing the friction of expressing a spontaneous thought would take priority. I don't see mention of dictation, unless it's a given with the app. Or is that particular workflow feature so beneficial as to offset this?
It doesn’t take that much practice to get typing speed/comfort up to the speed of organized, phrased thoughts.
A lot of people have that already from communicating on their phones a lot, or (for the young ones) growing up on touch screens, but even if you just dive into journaling like the OP, you’d probably get their soon enough.
And once you’re there, dictation can’t hold a candle. I’ll type a paragraph in the time it takes for some dictation assistant to transcribe a sentence, with fewer mistakes, more precision, and more linguistic creativity.
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#8Find a lot of people I know living what I tend to consider an overexamined life.
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#9I think journaling can be a great funnel to collect everything of interest during your day. Like anything general a lot of it is just noise but the few gems inside can really be worth the effort.
Re: How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone
#10I've started journaling daily myself and just pouring out my thoughts somewhere makes me feel really really good. It doesn't matter what those thoughts/feelings are: love, hatred, sadness, gratitude, jealousy, ambition, anything really. Just writing stuff down made the difference for me.