As much as I love making this my habit, the biggest obstacle for me is syncing. I want to jot something down in so many different places: not just in front of a PC, but also in a train, car, shower room, restaurant, grocery, and bed. I use a mixed environment (Unix, Mac and Windows). Some of the machines are separated by firewalls. So I tend to scatter a journal-like file in many places. It's hard to combine them all in one place. And no, I don't want to give my journal to some third-party cloud solution. I wonder if anyone handles cases like this.
Always Be Journaling (2018)
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#52As much as I love making this my habit, the biggest obstacle for me is syncing. I want to jot something down in so many different places: not just in front of a PC, but also in a train, car, shower room, restaurant, grocery, and bed. I use a mixed environment (Unix, Mac and Windows). Some of the machines are separated by firewalls. So I tend to scatter a journal-like file in many places. It's hard to combine them all…
Simplenote, text files on Syncthing ...
Honestly just email yourself with an autotag... If your email is foo@bar.com, try foo+journal@bar.com. It should still land in your inbox, but sorted under that folder.
You can even text from your phone to email addresses nowadays. I do this all the time to collect notes, and email clients are robust, emails have metadata like dates, and everything is easily searchable, etc.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#53I've been journaling to varying degrees for many years. My digital notebook goes back to late 2002 with the launch of OneNote. Millions upon millinso of words about side projects, work, life, career, things I am reading or watching. My physical notebooks/sketchbooks go back decades, one a year, crammed full of sketches, ideas and small notes about stuff that I couldn't even tell you what I was thinking at the time.
My Wordpress blog which started as a plain text based website in 1993, and has slowly accumulated, intermittently, written notes (the ones that make sense) from my notebooks that go back all the way to the 1980s and earlier.
Journaling has helped think through projects, career trajectory, travel plans, working through depression, personal loss and even what coffee I like.
Journaling (not a diary) isn't for everyone, but it is something that works for me.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you like journaling, but want to make a break from the past, then why not journal but then periodically destroy the journals?
It's a good idea. I get attached to the artifact, though. I think I'd need to make it an annual or bi-annual _event_. Build a fire, smoke a cigar, burn the past. Sounds nice.
I do it from time to time, it is cathartic. You live near SF? You can come over and we can burn our things together.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#55Has anyone here ever refrained from being too honest in your journaling, out of fear someone read it some day?
I have two sections in my digital notebook that are off limits, encrypted and password protected (with passwords I never share and 2FA) that contain "Dark Thoughts" and "Bad Thoughts About People." Dark Thoughts section is where I journal about some internalized toxic negativity, usually fabricated by some mild background depression, running through my brain. Dark Thoughts section lets me compartmentalize and objectively examine those thoughts. Bad Thoughts About People are where I put all those notes I might think about a person in my life that you don't necessarily want to voice, but you need to get the thought out of your head so you aren't dwelling on it.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#56I work as a scientist/programmer - my coworkers with a science background write journals, and those from a programming background put the info into issue trackers, git commit messages and wikis/communal documentation.
I think the programmer tools scale much better for larger, distributed teams. Personal journals are ok, but if you ever think someone else might benefit from knowing some information there, put it somewhere else.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#57Yeah, gee! Great idea, if all your private thoughts are just so squeaky clean. If you carry even the slightest amount of negativity in your heart, do not ever put pen to paper in a way that seems to reveal your inner self. Kind advice from a person who has experienced at least one horrendous debacle from a regrettably misplaced notebook. Also, my parent's 25+ year marriage was undone by a similarly stunning incident.…
You can be sarcastic all you want about journaling. But your examples don't warrant that sarcasm.
It should warrant humility, and self reflection. What is it that you could not be bothered to protect other people from your private thoughts?
I do believe in extreme ownership.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#58Some observations I'd like to share based on my experience journalling for the last 5 years.
* Brevity is important. With journalling, it is very tempting to go off on a rant. Feels good at the time but its usefulness declines rapidly with time. Short notes that encompass your state of mind or emotions or feelings with some context and timestamps go up in personal value with passage of time. I keep details and rants in my separate running log files.
* Summarize regularly. Every once a few months when you have down time, summarize your notes and make observations. My favorite bit is to find an old note with a sidenote/annotation and see how I look at the same things differently or still have the same mindset.
* Use timestamps. I have settled for a yyyymmdd-topic-title.txt for filenames. Contents in each file are stamped [yyyy-mm-dd] with optional time of the day. I have under 50 such files and they seem to encompass all facets of my life that I journal.
* Use plain text. Everything else will go away. I now use notational velocity/nvAlt with simplenotes sync for my topic wise notes (I also check in these files into a separate git repo folder for backup). I keep Deep insights and running lists in that git repo's wiki. I've recently also started keeping and checking in monthly yyyy-MMM.md files for a running log of thoughts. Helps maintaining a timeline to find recurring patterns. If some topic becomes worthy enough for sharing via a blog post, it gets its own markdown file that I can edit and customize for publishing.
* Reduce friction. I think this was the big one to overcome. By the time I would get to writing, I'd lose perspective or details to write. I now use a throwaway app (google keep) to write down my reaction, emotions or interesting facts as close to encountering them as possible. Then I can expand on them or discard them when I get time.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#59I did that for a good 3 years, writing every day. Started out as a few sentences, and then turned in to bigger depending on how I was feeling that day. I absolutely love(d) being able to look back and read what I wrote and what happened on those days. It did get difficult at times to force myself to write. Many times I hated having to open up the computer and use that to type. On the other hand, typing was much bette…
I keep separate «diary» for personal stuff and «devlog» for work-related notes. Different files in different languages, so it’s never mixed. I almost never reread any of those. At times the devlog is a handy reference though. It’s also amusing to be able to peek at some day in the past and see what you thought back then. Sadly, it’s more like an ability that incites me, not any real use that it can be for therapeutic reasons.
I can relate to the feeling of «lost time». Sometimes I’ve missed to write a day and it felt that it never happened at all, why did I even bothered living through that day? Sometimes I’ve lost entries due to software malfunction and it felt like that app maliciously killed my experiences. Learned the lesson the hard way and keep text files since.
Re: Always Be Journaling (2018)
#60I wonder if anyone has advice for someone like me who thinks writing a journal is probably a good idea, but I rarely write because I can hardly bear to read what I've written. I always want to edit it for clarity or just throw it out because I don't like it. I've been able to overcome my perfectionism in a few areas of life, but not this one. I like to read other people's words, but rarely my own.
Here's a Vim alias I used when I first started writing, to automatically start me off on an empty page so I didn't have to read my stupid words from last time (or trigger associations that drove out what I wanted to write this time). alias j='vim -c 'normal G' -c 'r !date' -c 'normal zto' -c startinsert journal.txt'
I link this all the time, but my system is almost the same!
https://github.com/jodavaho/bashlog
One command `log`, keeps files with YYYY-MM-DD.md and helps sync to github. I often edit my day's words, but don't much go back. When I do want to go back, I can just use `log 3/4/19` or `log yesterday`