Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life? I know there are quite a few people here, who journal frequently, and I was curious about how it has improved your life. How do you journal? What has it done for you? |
Ask HN: Has journaling improved your life? I know there are quite a few people here, who journal frequently, and I was curious about how it has improved your life. How do you journal? What has it done for you? |
- I now find it easier to put events from my day-to-day life into a structure. If you ask people about their memories, you will find that many of them have a single moment they remember well. But what happened right before and what happened right after? Sometimes we forget the sequence of events that led into something or how we “got out of it,” so to speak. Journaling helped me know how A led to B and then C.
- It’s a good way to keep (somewhat) accurate records. If I ever wonder something along the lines of “hm, I wonder when it was that I started doing x thing,” it’s very convenient to check the journal and know right away.
- It helps me see how often the future recontextualizes the past. Some things that seem unimportant in the present become important in the future and vice versa. I mean this both in a philosophical/emotional sense and a practical one. The more you notice the general way things develop, the better you become at predicting what will be relevant and what won’t. It makes it easier for me to see facts in terms of what future things are implied in the current conditions.
- It’s a good way to understand your own feelings. There is a catharsis that comes with writing quite a few pages about something that has been bothering you or that you otherwise want to reflect more about. It has definitely helped me.
- It’s a good way to avoid getting stuck in a frame of mind. Whenever I read back my journals, I see how many things I have already gone through – which, ironically I thought were completely new experiences / thoughts. I see this in other people as well, where someone will make a grand declaration about something and forger the other times they said the exact same thing. There is a Roger Ebert review of the 63 Up movie that mentions that “whenever one of the subjects. . . brings up a past statement or event, the movie cuts to a sequence of shots or moments illustrating that the character has always been preoccupied with that thing, or done that thing, or denied being worried about that thing.” I think this is relevant to everyone.
I write every day, ca. 800 words per day and I don't really have to force myself to do it any more. When I don't have time to do it, I miss it. And I really, really struggle with sticking to habits.
I journal to:
- be more aware of my emotions and thought patterns, feel more present - to have a space to think without editing myself (divergent thinking) - to notice broader patterns in my life, in my behaviour - to rant - to practice taking different perspectives (reframing) - to build snapshots of my life at a given moment (that came after a few months of writing, it wasn't my plan)
I write every day after waking up, for ca 15-30 minutes depending on how much time I have. I do my best to never skip more than one day, and on the following day I try to catch up.
My journal didn't have much structure to start with, but with time some patterns emerged and generally it looks a bit like this:
1. how I felt when I woke up (incl. dreams) 2. how my day went 3. how I felt in the evening 4. what I found interesting and/or beautiful (list) 5. what I need to do today (list)
1-3 are very unstructured and full of typos. My app makes it hard to edit changes, so I embraced that and just focus on the flow. I don't mind.
Results:
- Generally, I feel much more present when I write in the morning - This is a big one for me: It's easier to spot red flags (lowered mood, anxiety, lack of focus, avoidance) and work with that. For instance, if I notice that I feel more anxious than usual, I add a TODO with a quick walk, making sure that I don't neglect myself (eat the damn breakfast), or even just spending more time with my partner on that day - Writing how I feel allows me to spot certain patterns, i.e. if read HN in the morning, even for 5 minutes, I can become less focused, I'm more moody if I don't sleep well, etc... I can build routines to counteract that. - Writing like this (not unlike music) can help you soothe or amplify your current mood. This can be a problem, but you can also learn how to use that. - my fluency when it comes to writing has improved drastically
I need to run, so apologies for any typos in advance. In short I can only recommend it! If you want to learn more feel free to come and say hi! (https://sonnet.io/post/hi)
It started for me as a cathartic release, I had basically blogged my vapid teen thoughts since the livejournal.com days, and after graduation I picked that kind of thing up again except in private, basically writing my feelings down after a bad life patch.
Eventually I realized that I was noticing that my emotions often were the results of patterns, and I started using my journals to notice things that made me feel worse, and things that made me feel better.
I wasn't particularly structured in terms of life goals or even complicated ambitions, and had a separate Getting Things Done-style task management system, but I found that while that was great for small tasks, I really wasn't able to put together the brainpower to think about projects. So after a while I used my journal for bullet-journal style todos as well as writing about my feelings and events that happened during the day.
Eventually I came up with some kind curated structure ... not only did I write down whatever happened of note, I started asking myself questions like: "What are the main things I want to do today? What did I learn? What am I grateful for? What were some frustrations?" Eventually I realized that if I asked myself that at weekly, monthly, and yearly levels (usually just "highlights" of the previous cadence, restarted) I realized that I had managed to do a lot better in my life than it seems like in the everyday struggle (I also realized from that that I had some self-esteem and outlook issues to work on, haha.)
After fighting with all sorts of fancy "knowledge management" systems like zettelkasten and whatever, and mostly failing despite my job basically being having to deal with all sorts of random things other people throw at me which will eventually come back to bite me if I don't figure out the larger system, I realized that if I started adding a sort of wiki component to my journal software, I could tag my daily logs and eventually sort of look at entire subjects I've had to learn, observation by isolated observation, in a sort of holistic way, which was way easier on my brain than trying to conceptualize it all in one focused go (or even those kinds of "deep work" sessions people often talk about. I learned around this time that I had focus issue :D)
So yeah, I journal _a lot_, and everything has ended up building layers for almost everything I need help getting my brain to deal with, whether it be emotionally, or cognitively. It starts off as a moment-by-moment log (even if written all in one go in the evening before I go to bed, if I don't have the mental togetherness or ability to write it throughout the day as I do stuff.) and I have found all sorts of ways to take those chunks and rearrange them for all sorts of other purposes.
Honestly, it's the only way I personally can function now, dumping as much of my brain into a journal and not having it bounce around my head to stress me out.
I didn't invent these techniques, it's a frankenstein of a lot of different productivity and mental health ideas I've found on the internet or talking to other people.
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I don't know if my particular _choice_ of journal matters, but it's a bunch of text files that my editor that has some scripting libraries for journal macros and now wiki macros. I know nowadays people do this kind of thing with software like Logseq (https://logseq.com/), and that's where I'd probably start if I was doing it today.
I'm an avid pen and paper user, and use it in different modes. Two modes related to journaling are "short bursts" and "diary writing".
First kind happens whenever I need to put something I feel on to paper and reflect. They're haphazard, short to medium length writings which allows me to understand what I'm feeling.
Second kind is rarer, but allows me spend quality time with my thoughts, make bigger event in my life permanent and reflect on them at the same time.
Journaling allows me clear my mind about the things I go through, and see things with a wider perspective, also it allows me to compact the events to feelings or wisdom, by offloading the details to my diary, and carry only the gist of the event with me. It's also soothing and relaxing for me.
But just to comment
I write a lot, I have many little apps... My short term memory seems to be shot so writing helps retain further. I gotta get better at joining all these things together and doing some inference/reminders... Just analyzing. And long term storage so I don't lose the info. I remember writing as early as 2010s on OneNote but I also cringe at my past self, don't really want to relive that. I was uninformed/closed off in my own bubble/delusional.
I also have for several years now been doing this "positives" thing and this idk if it helps. I don't take it too seriously/just write something into it.
Writing does help me focus/prioritize/brain dump.
I find myself actually journaling now that I don't have to think about where I'm going to do it, or in the case of most note-taking apps, which note I should put my current thought in. Journal it first, and if it deserves to be somewhere else, move it later.
The project is https://markwhen.com
Something I started doing that helped me was to stop worrying about my grammar in my journal entries. They're mostly write only and off the cuff so I tried to make it a brain dump with more thought and not too much more.
I keep some track of stuff I'm working on in my day job, so I can reconstruct what I did the day before before the standup, instead of during it as I used to, but beyond that, I just forget stuff when I don't care about it anymore. No need to keep it around in a different format, if I don't care about it enough to keep it in my mind.
I think the gratitude journaling has helped a lot. I started while working as a VC and basically needing to send rejections to about 800 companies a year. I noticed that I started to look for errors automatically, including when I got home from work. Gratitude in the morning and things that went well before bed seems to have helped my brain optimize for looking for good, instead of finding mistakes.
I recently started using penzu to actually journal. I mostly use it when I’m upset. It does help me calm down and also organize my thoughts before an argument (usually with my wife).
The act of sitting down and ruminating on what went well during the day, as well as planning each day for simple achievable goals has had a very calming effect on me.
Unfortunately I don’t seem to get much of it if I’m already happy and fulfilled - so I mostly stop journaling when I’m OK but resume if something is amiss.
The space constraint encourages brevity and lowers the activation energy
At first it provided little value. Now, 4 years in I can look back and see how much my life has changed (or stayed the same). It's amazing how many thing I do that totally slip my mind.
This method does lose out of the "What am I thinking about" and deeper reflection. But I've often found that type of journaling just gets me into a head spiral
What originally started as blog/newsletter fuel has become a way to offload thoughts. As I work through a new sense of identity being a father, it has helped lighten my mindset. By getting the bad/sad/unfortunate things "on paper" I feel like I am more equipped to take on the work day.
My technique is as simple as possible. I open a new Notion doc, start a 10 minute timer, and write until I hear the ding. If I could disable the backspace/delete key I would. The goal is just to write with no priority given to quality.
I have a poor memory, so I like having minor life events documented, and documenting them probably helps me remember them in the first place. It's also good for working through and solidifying whatever I've been thinking about lately.
Struggled to do it regularly, frequency dropped off. Less frequent entries meant longer entries, because I tried to keep up with what was happening. Later on I just journaled at important (read: unhappy, difficult) events. Even that dropped off. During all this, journaling just made me more miserable, because I couldn't even do that minor unimportant thing properly.
So from my experience, don't. Just another thing to worry and despair about.
YMMV, of course.
Something I’ve been trying recently which seems quite useful is on Sunday nights I’ll reflect on the week that just passed and what I want to do for the week to come. At the end of it I put a list of action items, so I can look back at it thought out the week.
I just use journaling as a way to converse with my brain, complain about what's difficult and remind myself what's important to me. Sometimes I analyze things that happened or will happen.
Helps when I'm overwhelmed.
https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/
It is hard to list all the benefits, but I have found this method to be one that works for me. I hope it helps you.
That of course, doesn't mean I actually do it regularly, just that I probably should, like many things that have been displaced by drama and crapscrolling.
As for how, I currently use Obsidian. But I find the loading time discourages me from ever writing any quick notes, it feels like more of a time commitment than it really is even with just a ten second load on Android.
I use Google Keep exclusively for all utilitarian note taking, maybe I need to find a new app for journalling.
Additionally, journaling has provided me with a sense of consistency and reliability. By ensuring that everything is recorded and accounted for, I've minimized the risk of data corruption or loss. I know that each transaction is either entirely completed or not done at all, reducing the chances of winding up in an uncertain state.
I use Obsidian. Amazing. Couldn't recommend it more.
Sometimes I reflect a lot other times I don't. Not really any consistency to it - it's a done by needs basis
Helps me look at myself from a third person perspective - as if a friend were commenting on things I'm going through
It has improved my life - and help me look at things more logically especially if I'm in the weeds of things
It's a bit like being given a piece of paper to solve math problems, instead of trying to do it all in your head.
Makes a huge difference.
i journal in vim and push to git, 5y this year.
1. Help me better understand my feelings and where they come from
2. Help me plan things in my life at a higher level, so I'm not just living day to day. I find that writing generally helps me think more logically.
3. Make it possible for me to reflect back to almost any given day and understand what happened that day. Prior to journaling I'd get the feeling that days, weeks and even months and years could sometimes be a huge blur.
For me I've been able to mostly accomplish these goals.
I'm still having trouble with consistency, but I'm working on it. I like building things so to keep me motivated, I built my own app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-journal-a-day/id1659288235). Doing so has somewhat helped me stay motivated and write.
So I started journaling. I eventually built a good habit of doing it once a week. Every week, I read the previous entry and then write a new entry. Around the end of the year, I go back and read the whole year.
I prefer to use a physical journal with nice paper and a decent pen.
It has been very transformative for me. I write about my experiences and I write about what I read. I also write about what changes I want to make, and reflect on how changes I wanted to make are going.
Reviewing my thoughts in this way has led me 1) to be more forgiving of myself, focusing more on growth instead of failure and 2) to make incremental progress on objectives I have.
I do this because I have really strong automatic negative thoughts, and always have. These can be really harmful to general flourishing, in particular by disrupting sleep and undermining self-confidence.
I don't really read these back. Rather, the writing itself is a kind of practice which aids processing of difficult emotions.
When I'm having difficult feelings, putting negative thoughts down in writing "gets them out of my head" which means I can let go of them, in turn easing the difficult feelings associated with them.
When I'm having positive feelings, putting a description of them down in writing forces me to notice them more than I would otherwise, which in turn inflates them.
Creating a balance of positive feelings to negative thoughts is one of the ways to take negative thoughts under control and manage them. What fires together wires together. Spiralling rumination is a seriously harmful thing to do to your own brain. Journalling is one way I manage this.
I sometimes read old entries randomly, but rarely find it enjoyable. However, every New Year's Eve I skim through each daily from the previous year and make a list of "all the things I forgot I did this year", and the list always surprises me very pleasantly with lots of things I totally forgot about. Honestly this alone makes it worth journaling — I feel really bad about not being able to reliably recall things I did prior to 2015.
Looking at the entries from the earlier years, my writing has definitely improved a lot. I always write in English although it's not my native language. I also like to write on paper but it makes organizing the documents a pain.
To answer the question, yes it has improved my life and I don't plan on stopping journaling.
Logging and notes? Yes. I am fond of "personal wiki" idea.
Project gets its own page with all relevant info. And links to all the other relevant things. Search makes sure I can actually find it. at worst if I wanted to look at history I could git blame so "when I wrote that" feature of journal is also filled in.
I use QOwnNotes which is absolute overkill feature-wise for me but I use it coz it keeps files in markdown which means I can edit/view it in many other things if required. Then syncthing to sync to other devices.
I'd only want for better integration with todo/calendar tools.
My ideal would be ability to write a calendar event (org-mode style) anywhere I want. And a feature to be able to express "put this event on my to-do list after date X". So I could, for example, put a maintenance thing year ahead on to-do list but without a concrete data and calendar alerts to bother me
I did use org-mode for a long time and it was great when only using editor but weak integration with anything else made me eventually leave it. Like, I love the featureset but non-emacs implementations always miss something (like spreadsheet-like table handling with formulas) and I grew tired of it.
For the first three months of the year I was religiously journaling. Pretty much every single day, with weekly and monthly reviews. Then towards the end of the quarter when it became apparent that I wasn’t going to get my project finished on time and that I was miserable I completely burnt out and stopped journaling and haven’t gone back to it yet. Journaling felt like work and it also felt like it was making my mental head space worse - it was constant, hyper focused reinforcement of negative energy and would just remind me of everything I was failing at or failing to do. I was succeeding at many things at the same time and writing those down but the journal was something of a relentless OODA loop for self improvement which meant I was constantly dissatisfied because my life was fixated on achieving the next goal rather than trying to enjoy the process. It didn’t help that the main problem I was working on was a frustrating nightmare.
I do want to start journaling again because it can lead to insights but I might have to experiment with it to find something healthier but I’m not sure what that would look like. All that being said I’m not sure my biggest insights come from journaling so who knows if it is that valuable. They probably come when I respond to questions like this on the internet or interact with people.
Thinking about it, in a way maybe it has helped. After burning out I kind of came to the realisation that I really am sick of being where I am and doing what I am doing which has lead to me selling up everything I own in order to go travelling. So maybe the journaling served its purpose of hammering home to me how dissatisfied I was with life and how I needed to make a radical change. The insight didn’t come whilst I was journaling but the journaling indirectly lead me to the insight. Maybe I’ll take it up again when I finally get out of the country in a few months.
Personally, I feel there are many benefits to it, mainly:
1. It gives me time to think, to process my thoughts, explore ideas, and handle emotions. I often learn a lot about myself, what I did well, and how I can improve.
2. It is a great way to preserve memories. Only after I started writing my journal did I realize how much I forget about my past. I've always taken photos throughout my life, but those only capture a very small part of my life. My worries, the music I listened to, the TV-series I raved about, my dreams, my thoughts on the books I've read, the deep talks with my friends, are all preserved in my journal. It is easy to remember your vacations to exotic locations, but do you remember your everyday life from years back?
3. It can be meditative. It feels great to be able to sit for up to an hour and write without any barriers. I don't have to stress about my writing style, the words I use, embarrassing stuff about myself. I truly feel I can express myself to the fullest.
I'm really happy that I decided to write my journal in Markdown. This format can be opened pretty much everywhere, even on my phone or my moms computer. Furthermore, it enables me to do some crude formatting for code, create headings, and even attach images. And since it is digital, I can search in it pretty easily.
Oh and the mobile app has a decent editor for text / markdown files :)
Mine tends to be stream of consciousness, just one level above brain-dumping on scratchpaper, until I hit on something I want to explore. Then it becomes more structured (and sometimes ends up very structured indeed in mindmaps or various project folders, etc).
It works great for me. I get ideas down in useful forms. I don't have to continually consciously think on ideas to keep them alive, reducing cognitive load. I have a tool for effective reflection. I feel like it's helped me lead a more intentional life. Simple as that.
My approach is to read journal entries written on this date from previous years. For example, this morning, I read what I wrote on 5/16/20, 5/16/21, 5/16/22.
I wrote down my methodology here: https://mcook.fun/journaling
Best improvement: I realized that I always feel awful after meetings with some people and cut or heavily limited some relationships. Not having a journal, it was a regular pattern for me. To be invited, have a meeting, feel so-so after that, forgetting gradually about the experience, and sometime later, when the same person called, agreeing to another dreadful meeting. Having a couple of entries like: "met with X, felt terrible after the meeting, wasted time, X was bragging about sth all the time." It helps to avoid repeating such mistakes.
I think it depends on how and why you journal. I used to write a page in a notebook whenever I felt like writing. In my case don't think it has improved my life in a very tangible way, however it is interesting to look into a journal entry 5 years ago and see how different I was. So while it was not tangible self-improvement, it was very emotional and revelatory, both good and bad. However, I barely read that journal anymore, I will probably read it once a year maybe.
Perhaps if you are more specific with your goals it could help. These days I just use a daily habit tracker where I tick if I performed an action towards my goal for the day. Other than that, I write my thoughts on an online blog just to release the cognitive load. But that's intermittent. There are so many things that fall under "good habits" but we need to choose carefully what we want to spend our time on based on the reward/effort ratio. I have 2-3 max habits that I focus on completing daily at any given phase in my life. I may pick up journal-ling maybe when rest of my higher priority habits are more deeply ingrained / their goals achieved.
Most people don’t like it. I think this is because they haven’t given it an honest try or considered the critical importance of being able to talk to yourself openly about what’s happening in your life and mind.
This would probably seem strange to a lot of people, or perhaps they believe they already do it with an internal monologue. Chances are pretty good that without a book to reflect on and the intent to do difficult things, your mind will readily distract itself and prevent you from doing difficult things that a journal might facilitate better.
For me it has made that personal exchange a lot more natural and easy. When I do foolish things I can talk to myself about it and figure out why I did it, what I can do differently next time, and feel better having put energy into doing better next time. When I do good things I can be grateful, consider what went right and why, and set intentions to do that more.
I also write about people I care about so I can be more intentional about how I’m present in their lives. I have ADHD and without being very intentional, I can figuratively and literally vanish from people’s lives due to getting in my head about things or being sucked into work or hobbies too much.
But I also know I’m happiest when I do things for people, I thrive on socializing despite being so good at being a hermit, and at the end of the day, I don’t think life is particularly worthwhile without a significant focus on being prosocial. So, I keep track of this stuff with the journal and make sure I’m staying on tracking with my goals and value system.
I can’t attribute all life changes to journaling, but I’d say it has made me a far better friend and parent since I started taking it seriously. I also know it has lead to me being better to myself, which is really important. Overall I’d say my personal affect is generally more constructive and positive, and I look at problems in my life as something I can engage with more now, whereas before I was far more avoidant.
There are other paths to similar practices, so journaling isn’t the only option. I highly recommend it to anyone willing to try, though. We should all be better at talking to ourselves. Our past, present, and even future selves.
I journal exclusively on a computer. I find I can get my thoughts out much faster on a keyboard and that helps the process be a lot lower friction for me.
In my journaling, I’ve found it really amazing how much I forget about situations and things I’ve done. It also helps me reflect on my day and my relationships. I am a strong proponent of journaling. When I write, I have 3 audiences in mind: myself, my descendants, and anthropologists. That is, partially just fun, but I also really appreciate there were people who wrote about themselves 6000 years ago such that we have that information.
I use Day One as a journaling app, though I don’t pay for it (I am frustrated by app subscriptions). I often try to include a picture with my entry. I’ve thought about getting my journal printed and bound so it’s not exclusively digital, but I haven’t made the effort yet.
Did it work? Yes, I've lost almost 30 pounds.
Was it worth it? A solid no. It's given me some kind of eating disorder, which came with fatigue, occasional blackouts, and all sorts of problems with my GI tract.
The accountability etc is almost magic in its effect but I had found it really hard to do. Then 12 weeks ago I started on Ozempic, almost no effort required - 30lbs lost. 3 years earlier I started taking 54mg methylphenidate and on the days I take it, concentration is not a problem.
With stuff like that it helps a lot to journal but in a way where it's not hypercritical / nit picky / focused on every little detail but just slightly broader strokes in my experience to keep it healthy & sustainable (not messing up how you perceive yourself)
The home one helps me keep track of where I'm spending my time, and of habits I'm trying to acquire, so I can make adjustments when things get out of balance. It's also a good place to keep notes on things I'm studying or working on.
The work journal is where I log what I'm working on each day; it's also where I plan, brainstorm, solve problems, and record solutions. I've found it to be especially effective when I'm blocked/stumped/tired: I open the journal, and take stock of what I know and what I can do about. It's also a great place to record ideas for later.
I expect to continue doing this indefinitely.
Has it changed me? Not really. It’s nice to look back and see what I wrote or pictures I took but that by itself isn't life changing.
Why do I still continue to do it then? Mostly as I developed the habit and it’s automatic now. Every morning I make a new entry for the day when I get on the computer then I finish every day writing in it, adding pictures etc.
It’s a nice way to clear out my brain at the end of the day. I guess in some way maybe it helps me organise my thoughts at the end of the day. Also planning the next day (or few days) is quite helpful to do in the evening vs in the morning for the day ahead.
Having said all that I started journaling at an amazing time. I captured the few months building up to the pandemic and reading back on my entries in the first half of 2020 is pretty wild. For a while I captured headlines and data on cases and deaths which are quite shocking to read with hindsight.
The lockdowns are quite interesting too. I can see when I started to struggle with different aspects of the pandemic and how I managed those depressive episodes.
So while it hasn’t changed my life I would probably say it does give me something to look at and learn from to hopefully be better in the future. I guess you could argue that is a change although not quite what people generally mean when talking about life changing habits.
My guess is you're asking if I feel journalling is worth it as you're interested in doing it? I would say yes. Don't do it expecting to change your life but it something I would suggest pretty much everyone do.
Looking back on happier or sadder times can be quite powerful in helping deal with any struggles of today. I have had a few health issues the past few years and being able to look back gives me a lot of positive mental energy when dealing with the next thing to come along. I can read and feel again how I felt during the harder times and track my progress even when things got harder for a while. This gives me the hope I often need when struggling in the present.
The act of recognizing what I’m preoccupied with and examining it closely has been incredibly important for me. I can see that so many of my journals many years ago were negative, down on myself, frustrated, feeling stuck that I couldn’t get past things. Those have changed to be more accepting, exploring the positive side of things, reframing. Some of this is, of course, the effect of getting older and working on myself in other ways but journaling has definitely been a part of that.
I also have two young kids so I spend some time writing about things we’ve done, letters to them annually, important moments. I don’t share my personal life on social media but I try to keep a regular record of milestones and trips. My photo roll does most of that work but it’s nice to add a bit of color while I still remember the details.
One tip I’ll share … make sure you write it for yourself. I do a lot of writing in my job and on my blog and I often get into this trip of “does this sound good” or worry about other people reading it. Let go and just write what’s on your mind then write what you think about what’s on your mind.
1. Workout journal - I write down want I did and what was the effect. Often trends physical trends emerge after weeks, months, or years.
2. Summary of the day journal - Whenever I can, I write a short summary of the day/week. I look back to help my memory.
3. Problem journal - If I have a specific, important problem, I dump everything into a single spot. It reduces rumination, slows down my thought process, provides perspective by seeing it externally, and often solutions organically emerge.
It has mostly been useful for occasional reference. It is useful to notice long-term health trends and patterns. It is also useful to be able to confirm suspicions like whether I might have got an idea from a book I read - did I read it before or after some idea I had say six years ago.
Things I have found useful in writing the journal are to make sure things are spelled correctly, so I can easily grep through it without worrying about whether I made a typo. Ditto regarding synonyms: I strive to use the most common word to describe something and not get fancy. I use conventions for recording things, so for example my weight is on its own line in the format "Weight: xxx", so it is easy to write scripts that scrape such information to build tables and graphs.
There is very little beyond strict factual information, and I write it in prose, not bullet-form.
1. I write a training journal that consist of .fit files with extensive notes in .txt files - how I felt during and after the training (including things like "I discovered a new road next to a river, it was beautiful" or "I kept thinking about X and I was pissed), what I ate and how I slept that day, that I was observing swallows flying and that it made me feel good for some reason... writing a journal like this forces you to pay attention to little things. You notice patterns, maybe little signs of overtraining, signals that it is going well, connections that you might otherwise miss, like "I have elevated heart rate every time I eat poppy seed cookies"...
2. when I have something on my mind, I write it as an email for "someone close". This started during a difficult but interesting period in my life when I was actually sending emails to my close friend (we were on different continents and it was before Skype, mobile phones etc. - emails were the only connection we could have at the time). Nowadays I sometimes just write what is happening in my life without sending it to anyone but I usually still think about it as if I am writing to a friend. What is great about it is that this somehow re-frames heavy stuff into a funny story - it works even at the very moment when you are living through something tough; instead of just being depressed or scared you are already formulating in your head how you will write that email later and somehow your perspective changes into something a lot more positive - at least in my case it works like that.
I like doing it digitally because I tend to cut/paste things around to try and make sense of whatever it is that I'm ruminating on.
As far as tools go, I tend to write inside of Notion these days, as linking between journal articles is super handy when I want to see how my thoughts and feelings around a certain topic have matured over time.
If I don't write something down, I forget it and move on to the next idea. While I rarely read what I have written, it is a massive benefit by itself to commit to paper what I am thinking because the process of transforming a pool of unorganized, but related thoughts into something resembling a cohesive idea that can be told linearly is invaluable in resolving contradictions and evaluating their value. I prefer to handwrite because I don't think in ASCII (or Unicode, or LaTeX, or any other computer format). Ninety-nine cent composition notebooks and commodity rollerball pens are all I need.
The "what I did today", or "done list" is a good way to remember what you were up to, and to assess your own progress. It can be used to justify a promotion, or to have a look at your past self. They're the most satisfying to re-read.
The "how I feel about things" kind is more of a debugging tool, to process your thoughts and understand your feelings. They're a good way to structure your thoughts.
It's also good to keep a protocol, because it's hard to track things that happen over a longer period, like the synptoms of a sickness or the transgressions of a loud neighbor.
My travel journals ended up being far more interesting than my photo albums. They tell much more interesting stories rich with anecdotes.
I personally love mixing journal entries with to-do lists, notes, sketches and doodles. It paints a richer picture of my life at a point in time. I can see what I'm working on, my design process, and the influence of various events in my life.
If you want to get into the habit, here are a few tips:
- Remove friction as much as possible. I use Day One for Mac and iPhone, but started with a text editor. Don't use templates, don't setup anything complicated. Forget tagging or any kind of structure. You can optimize note-taking and journaling for two things: fast input, slow retrieval or slow input and fast retrieval. You certainly want the former, not the latter.
- Don't beat yourself up about frequency. I have weeks where I journal more and months with zero entries.
- Write in a braindump-kinda way, just to get it off your chest. This is for you, not for an audience. It's not even for you, because you probably won't read it anyways. I mostly write staccato-style. Sometimes I use lists with one bullet point per sentence, because it helps to me braindump misc thoughts without a coherent structure.
- I don't focus on "big thoughts" or "big insights". Surprisingly, stuff I did that day, what I ate, people I know right now or hang out with, a movie I watched or a game I played is much more interesting later than having life-changing insights through journaling. So, if I read that my weight was 70kg in 2015 and now it's 67kg, I find this a lot more interesting than some presumably philosophical big thought I think I might care about later. Big thoughts will stick to your mind anyways.
- I usually search for stuff like what year I have been on a particular vacation or when I was sick the last time or sometimes, when one of my kids said this or that for the first time.
- But: Sometimes, you find patterns. I sometimes are surprised that the idea of "start a blog" goes back for more than 10 years and I never did it. Make what you will with that information, but for me at least, it puts my own thoughts into perspective: I carry stuff a lot longer around than I'd think if you just asked me.
- As a small test: Do you ever read your old HN comments? Probably not. Journaling is similar. Writing stuff down helps, but can you really tell if participating in HN changes who you are?
For the benefits: - Writing: I'm faster and clearer than before, and I continue to progress. - Memory: When I feel unproductive at the end of the week, I look back at my entries. Most of the times, I have to recognize that I did more than I remembered at the moment. - Structure: In the morning, it signals "work starts now". At 4:30 PM, it means "put an end to the current tasks, and setup tomorrow for success". - Personal: It helps to process emotions and internal grumblings.
It took me a while to stop caring about journaling and actually start using my journal for /anything/. At first, I felt obligated to make an entry each day, fill all the fields, tick all the boxes, and be happy with the result. You don't have to. It's your journal, you can do whatever so make it work for you.
N=1.
First of all - good luck, I hope traveling will help you clear your head and find that change you are looking for. It worked in my case. Also, you reminded me of two other things journaling can help with - as you point out, it can lead to insight. Trying to formulate your thoughts clearly in writing can be very potent. And journaling can also work as a storage of good feelings - for example, I walked multiple paths of Camino de Santiago [1], each of them was a few weeks of great times... and I was journaling them. Every now and then, when I feel down after especially long and dark winter, I re-read those journals and they make me feel good. Áh, nostalgia strikes... I am gonna read them right now.
https://medium.com/personal-growth/travel-is-no-cure-for-the...
And your comments about ADHD, being more intentional with people, and living a prosocial-oriented life. I too could easily veer down a hermit-like path but deliberately effort not to. And I used to think that a personal CRM was overkill and such detailed tracking of others a waste of time. I haven't implemented anything yet, but I see the value of it now. Relationships are cumulative, interactions build off of each other. Remembering salient details in prior interactions (e.g. from my recent life, little tidbits I could find useful: Rachel deeply loves her mom. Ana is aware that I get car sick easily and made an accommodation for me, etc etc...)can enhance future ones.
Apart from nurturing a constructive relationship with ourselves, for ourselves, it’s critical to do it for the people around us as well. I don’t think it can be understated how important and worthwhile it is to be intentional and mindful about it.
Someone noticing you get car sick might seem like a small matter in passing, but that’s the fabric of what makes our relationships. Like you said, it’s all cumulative. I think it’s absolutely worth taking a moment to contemplate that or note it away somewhere.
I say the same exact things to others about my experience. I love that it captures a snapshot of my life a truly unique period in US history. It captures my adventures jogging through the center of NYC busy streets during the lockdown, and all sorts of other adventures. I can tell you in reasonable detail every single notable thing about my last holiday trip, or any other place I've been.
I've also become the de-facto historian in my household. When my wife remembers something and wants to know a detail about it, I'm usually able to give at least a general summary of the experience.
In order to get over any resistance, I made a deal with myself that I could put as little or as much in as I want, and that I wouldn't be too personal. I guess you could say it's somewhat of an everyday travelog. It's the first time in my life that I actually carried through with journalling.
I've also been able to pick out trends when I compare the data on my Whoop vs activities and meals on a certain day. I don't always capture my meals, but I do often enough that it provides help when I'm trying to find a trend.
Here's a really strange random trend I discovered: On nights where I eat burrito bowls from Chipotle, I get measurably more deep and REM sleep.
I could go on all day about the ways my journal has been useful. I'll leave it there.
Edit: Just for fun, I send a link to this thread to my wife. She mistook your post as being from me at first. LOL
Just like you this was the first time I stuck with journalling and to be honest I am not sure why it worked this time but not others. Perhaps maturity? :D Or perhaps it is the streak feature which is motivating like you said. I also went easy on myself not setting any hard-to-achieve goal of N words per day. While most days I write quite a detailed entry there are a few days where I only wrote two or three sentences as I wasn't feeling it for whatever reason.
You make an excellent point regarding trends that I totally forgot to mention when posting earlier. I too have found quite a few trends, almost all health (or wellbeing) related. Things like how much better I felt on the days I did intermittent fasting. Or that having my coffee black first thing was much easier on my stomach than with milk (although I'm not lactose intolerant it certainly upsets my stomach if I have it in the first hour or two after waking up for reasons unknown).
These trends have led me to making changes that one could argue have been life changing as they have given me more energy, mental clarity or resolved long standing annoyances that I couldn't pin point the origin of.
Sitting here thinking about journalling now I feel perhaps my initial call that it isn't really life changing is perhaps not quite true. At least not totally. There are certainly a few small changes I have made that have improved my quality of life quite a bit and this has prompted me to add a todo for tomorrow morning to do a bit of analysis to see if there are any other trends I may have missed.
A nice thing about Day One is the tags/hashtags support. I started adding a bunch to entries almost every day to track things so sorting my entries is reasonably efficient.
One last thing I wanted to mention is didn't bother with the template feature to begin with but I set some up a while back to prompt me to capture things like when I ate, how much exercise I did, how I felt that day, how well I slept, etc. It is amusing to look back and know exactly what I ate on some random day and especially helpful when you identify otherwise random things like your burrito bowl and quality of sleep!