Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself(dailyprompt.org)

66 points by kuehle 3 years ago | 23 comments

Journaling is a great practice to learn more about yourself - if done daily.

I tried it multiple times and couldn't stick to it.

This project is how I finally fixed it for myself.

It works by eliminating my excuses.

There is only one question a day that I'll answer - no time spent on "finding the perfect topic".

I only need to go to the page - not find my notebook or create a new note/paragraph in another app.

I only left myself a relatively small input area, less than a page in a small notebook - that way the commitment doesn't feel too big.

I really enjoy the process and it has become something that I do early in the morning - a little bit of time for myself.

It's now public because I am sure it could work for you too.

Bonus: The data is all local, the input will be saved in the browser (IndexedDB) while I type, no login necessary - the full journal is accessible as a CSV (bottom right).

https://dailyprompt.org

tinyprojects 3 years ago |

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

nemo1618 3 years ago |

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.

chadwittman 3 years ago | |

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.

stomczyk09 3 years ago |

What 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?

kuehle 3 years ago | |

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.

Evidlo 3 years ago |

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.

kuehle 3 years ago | |

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.

Evidlo 3 years ago | | |

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/

barthelomew 3 years ago |

This does look very interesting. I like it.

I shall admit I've spent too much time though building my own journalling apps too. What's the right tradeoff- I wonder - between writing your own journalling apps v/s time spent journalling.

pidusd 3 years ago |

This 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?

kuehle 3 years ago | |

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?

ComputerCat 3 years ago |

Hmm I like the idea of prompts, it has always helped me when trying to think of what to write... but I also like the actual act of physically writing on paper. This is a great idea for somebody who prefers to work on the computer though!

perilunar 3 years ago |

Really nice. I love how lightweight the page is. I think it just needs an about page or overlay with a note about privacy. (Btw, the <style> element should go inside the head, not before it.)

em-bee 3 years ago |

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.

kuehle 3 years ago | |

> 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.

em-bee 3 years ago | | |

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.

bovermyer 3 years ago |

Nicely done. I love simple apps like this. Bonus points for local data.

BeetleB 3 years ago |

Prompts 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.

kuehle 3 years ago | |

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.

BeetleB 3 years ago | | |

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.

stakkur 3 years ago |

Well done, and the one-click download/local data was exactly my first thought when visiting. One question: why CSV?

kuehle 3 years ago | |

I can just open it in other tools and for example merge two sources. E.g. I do this on my laptop and on my phone. Download both, open with Excel and sort by date. I also considered more questions in the future or tracking numerical values.

mettamage 3 years ago |

I use Day 1 and talk into it, listen back and reflect