Ask HN: Do you keep a journal, and why?

I do! I started one in the summer of 2013. I originally started it as a way to aggregate links & helpful information for my game development endeavors, but it eventually evolved into more of a recounting of what I did or how I was feeling on a particular day. I now have daily entries for the entire time period since I started it, and I consider my journal to be one of my most treasured possessions. Sometimes I'll get busy and not add entires for a few days at a time, but I always go back and at least put a one-liner of why I was too busy to write anything.

I've found it to be a slightly more structured & useful way to essentially interact with my own brain -- it's a place for me to vent, a place to record not-so-important but still fun-to-have memories, to keep notes & sort out plans for the future.

It's a lot of fun to be able to scroll back and say "hey, what did we do for my birthday three years ago?" :) It's also fun at times like new year's to flip back through my journal and remind everyone what they listed for a resolution last year.

Funny, I just ordered a pocket notebook for the first time in years today. I'm curious to see what contingent of people on HN still use a physical notebook. I also use orgmode extensively to keep track of my intentions, media preferences, notes, and stray ideas, but it doesn't really scratch the same itch as a physical notebook.

The reason I had to order a physical notebook online is because I wanted a pocket notebook with no lines, dots, or grids on the pages, which is surprisingly hard to find. I'm attracted to the non-linear approach to notebooking, and plan to fill this one with content in a random page-order as things strike me. Sometimes I just have a cool thought or sentence, or just want to slowly fill a page with something, and it can really help your creativity solidify to have a trailing log of your weird random inspirations. Sometimes I just transcribe lines from a song or book I like, or write down something someone said. Some pages are just geometric shapes. Rarely, I'll make a simple "today this happened and this is how I felt about it" page. By the time you fill it up you have a really organic document that can help you understand what makes you unique and what you like / care about in your daily life, without the stress of writing a cohesive or linear work.

Yes, but with constraints.

Journaling is an efficient way to elucidate your stray thoughts and feelings. Writing forces you to distill everything into cohesive paragraphs, which in turn forces you to put some structured thought around otherwise nebulous mental energy.

However, journaling is only helpful so long as it's supportive. If you get stuck in reinforcing thought loops or you find it just amplifies your frustrations, it's time to change your approach to journaling or find another outlet for your thoughts.

I do. It's rather minimal, but I like it. I use a Rhodia Goalbook, which has numbered pages and a nice month/day view in the front. I can jot down events on specific days, or I can do more longform stuff on the regular pages. I'm pretty loose with how I journal, and I don't require myself to do it every day. I'm a fan of Merlin Mann's "The first page is profound" method to get myself in the mindset of putting whatever I want in the journal.

after reading this thread sometime ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20244848 ) i decided to start one. It's been an on and off endeavour, when i am most busy, that's when i should be taking those notes, and that's exactly when i completely forget about it... :/