I have been journalling _intentionally_ since about 2013, and it has since becoming a sort of digital hearth from which all of my other executive function flow.

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.

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.

user:	RobotDisco
created:	July 22, 2022
karma:	1