Ask HN: Should I maintain a daily journal of my thoughts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I maintain a daily journal of my thoughts?

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I am 21 yrs old, my philosophical thoughts seem to have changed rapidly in the past year.

@pg once mentioned that he first met @tlb when he was discussing with @rtm on the above question. pg, care to share your thoughts.

Please share your workflow, say eg: How do you use org-mode to accomplish the above

Philosophers of HN & Older users of HN: (ok, sorry; old but still sexy users of HN :)

Do you regret not logging your life in your 20s?

Ignore this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-rEb0KuopI

View on HN

Sorry, but... why do you ask? I can understand asking for suggestions on what tool to use, maybe, but why would you ask to HN if you _should_ do this or not?

You might find it is not worth your time after a week (or two, or one month, or one year). When this happens, you quit. Before this happens, you will find out by yourself if you are getting anything positive from this.

It could improve your writing, or just give you a record to go back later to re-evaluate or enrich your original ideas. It could just be fun.

It only needs a bit of dedication and time. No money, and considerably less time than other activities (like learning to play an instrument or studying a foreign language)... given that the investment is so small, why don't you simply try and then decide by yourself?

A few years ago I blogged every day about my personal projects. I was running my own business/setting my own hours and took a year to focus on improving my programming skills by making my own games. I'd blog daily about what I learned, provided code snippets, wrote down my reasoning or uncertainties about certain things I did that day, etc. It really helped to solidify what I had done in my mind _and_ as I found out later also helped others who were making similar projects or using the same engine. I even started getting some emails from recruiters who stumbled on my blog and got a deeper view into my skillset and interests.

Eventually I moved to a new country where I got a job related to what I'd been doing and blogging about. With a full time job there was less time or energy to blog daily, so I slipped. Now I blog maybe once or twice a month and do not see as obvious a benefit as I did when I blogged daily, because by the time I go to write a post I have forgotten a lot of what I've done and now it's out of my mind. Not only do I not remember everything I might want to blog about anymore, but this indicates that those ideas are _not_ as solid in my mind as they would have been if I had just written them down originally.

I think blogging daily is a great idea. When I started doing it I wondered if people would just find it useless and boring, until I realized that I wasn't doing it for other people. The blog was public, but the purpose was solely for my own benefit. In the end it helped others anyway, as a side effect.

While expressing your ideas in words, especially to other people, generally helps you to understand the topics better yourself, I fear that writing every little thought down will dilute the quality of your thinking. If writing helps to solidify ideas in your brain, then perhaps it's best to solidify your best ideas rather than your common ideas. This way, your neurons will be aligned better with your best thinking. Writing everything would presumably amplify the mediocre.

You may have a point, but luckily there is a self-correcting mechanism in place: writing takes time and a little effort, and will compete with other activities (including fun).

I suspect that if you do something like that you soon develop a filter mechanism so that you really write only things that deserve a little effort, and the rest remains "in your head", so to speak.

Hopefully this is true, but I could imagine an obsessive person feeling obliged to write all thoughts or otherwise not to miss anything. I feel that the Web is filled with low-quality thoughts from persons who wrote on impulse rather than reserving writing for those thoughts having value. Having a personal habit of watching one's writing could in theory help the world by minimising garbage. HN is a pretty good example of deliberate writing, at least as compared to most places.

Just write. I'd vote for simple paper and pen/pencil. There's no reason to add a layer of tech in between...to get side tracked with org-mode or a blog engine or DNS and MySQL and hosting plans. Just sit or lay down or stand and write for as long as you can or want or have something to say.

Good luck.

Write them down so you can laugh at them 10 years later :)

On a serious note, I regret not writing things down consistently. Not every single thing I think about, but more substantial matters. I am trying to get into the habit of doing it now. Here are my 3 reasons to write:

1) Clarify and solidify your thinking 2) Learn how to express your thoughts in writing (very important no matter what you do in life) 3) Help "remember" things. This is especially useful if you need to build upon previous knowledge/discoveries. You won't need to start from scratch.

There are reason for keeping your notes private, but also good reasons for publishing them. Probably the biggest is getting feedback. Hearing other points of view is helpful in identifying missing pieces.

I generally refer folks to Steve Yegge's writing about this: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-b...

This is what a personal diary is for. Just write down your thoughts and don't care what other people think. You will likely be embarrassed by some of your entries 20 years from now, but who cares, that's the whole point of a diary.

We built Devarist to be a daily journal, primarily targeted at developers although it works just as well for non-developers.

Give it a try, would love to hear your thoughts.

https://devarist.com

I use to do this right out of college, I might get back to it. I would recommend getting an empty journal book and dating every page. forget using emacs or vim.

Yeah, start a journal or blog. I've maintained a journal (journal.alexmacgregor.com, runs on tumblr) for a couple of years.

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