I bullet journal for organization of my day to day life. I've picked up calligraphy. There's something about taking 15 to 20 minutes a day to just focus on the nib gliding across the paper that's very calming for my mind. Often times I'll just write down phrases or words in calligraphy that are said during meetings as my form of journaling. I find that it helps me focus and gives me a sense of enjoyment for almost every meeting where I'm a more passive participant.<p>I also use markdown, which feels "close enough" to plaintext and as of now vscode for organizing digital notes. I absolutely agree with the whole "thoughts on" approach and have using tagging to group knowledge in my notes. I wrote a little plugin for vscode that helps you with organizing your notes without having to worry about file structure: <a href="https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-nested-tags.vscode-nested-tags" rel="nofollow">https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-n...</a>.<p>As for the psychological impacts. Having a journal to help empty my mind has been extremely helpful in managing my anxiety. If I ever find myself thinking too much about work I just turn towards my journal and empty it on to the pages. I find myself less likely to dwell if the thoughts are on paper or captured elsewhere. I think that it helps with acceptance as often times I say to myself, "It'll be there tomorrow." once it's out of my head.
hate to be yet another shill but i spent about 20 hours learning emacs org mode basics and came up with mostly the same setup:<p>- .org files are plaintext, easily backup-able<p>- what he has in categories, i have in tags for easy consumption across a few files (reflections.org akin to his); this is important to track multiple things e.g. sex + romance easily<p>- doing a daily/weekly debrief really showed me how slowly i was moving on allegedly important things, so it exposed that i have an integrity issue right smack in the face and caused me to set observable goals and reflect on pass/failure<p>highly recommended either via his method or org mode though
I’ve journaled on and off for years. It’s incredibly stressful for me. Most of what I write is unbearably stupid. It’s excrutiatig to see how dumb I am. I tried to turn lemons into lemonade, and decided to keep a “what did I learn” journal, but it was even worse. Maybe journaling isn’t for everyone.
I've tried to keep a daily journal of sorts so many times in so many different formats. The one that I seem able to stick to the most is specifically for software development. It's just a markdown file with a top level bulleted list, one entry per day, and a sublist for the things I did that day.<p>I'm not super consistent with it, but this post is making me want to put more effort into it. As Derek says, I'm not writing for me <i>today</i>, I'm writing for <i>future</i> me.
I'm a total believer in this. I tried for years to keep a journal and nothing ever stuck. Since 2010, though, I've been using services like OhLife and DailyDiary that send me an email prompt every night and I just reply with a few sentences. I then dump these to text files and backup periodically. I can also attach photos and store those. This has been sustainable and archival and I'll be coming up on a decade of daily use soon. It's dead simple. I have little to no infrastructure or tools to maintain and (re)learn, plus the reminders keep me going.