Ask HN: Do You Journal a Lot?
I wonder if some people are still journaling or writing about their life and thoughts in a private way (like in a diary), and not publishing it on social media.
Interesting side effect was that for a long time I wanted to have a comfortable note system that would allow to store ideas related to books I am reading, side project, work projects etc. And I could never keep a system because I always over complicated requirements for that notes system in my mind. Now I just started to use my journal for that, it’s fairly unstructured and would be hard to use as a reference once I have a lot of content, but that’s absolutely fine. Just the act of taking the note in journal is super helpful. And with a few distinct journals in the app I have enough structure to keep it useful
I didn't make a concerted effort to start doing this regularly until 2017, where I was writing it by hand, not just typing (I tried writing by hand a bit this year too, but it just takes so much time and gets so hard to keep up with). Before 2017, my total word count from all journals from 1998-2014 was just over 100,000 words, so it's a bit crazy how much more well-documented my recent past couple of years have been.
They used to be very private, but when I started it back up again in 2017, it was with the idea that I wouldn't be totally embarrassed if someone came across them, so there's some self-censorship in there, and also an attempt to add context that others beside myself might need to understand things. In 2017 it was 95% to record game design ideas and things I was doing in regards to games, but by 2019 I started including more what was going on that I might want to remember that was not just game design, so it's probably about 65-70% game design now, and the rest what's going on in my life. And this year has pandemic stuff mixed in.
Just the past two months I haven't recorded I've come up with like six more game ideas, developed each of them a bit, and made significant changes to some other game ideas, as well as some programming on two of my video games, so there's a lot of catching up to do, probably at least 6,000 words worth (probably would have been >15,000 words if I wrote them as it happened).
Highly recommend!
I write it in a running text document with the latest entry at the top. Keeping it simple has made it easy to keep up with.
I've settled into the following format.
* date
* how yesterday went and any notable events
* what I'm hoping to get done today
* as of lately, local covid #s
* 3 things I'm grateful for
* the top headline of the day
* a quick rating of my current "thinking power", energy, mood, and how I'm feeling physically
But this idea of a single text file is interesting, I'll give it a try. Thanks for sharing
My journaling consists of:
- 70% thoughts and ideas.
- 20% todos related to thoughts and ideas.
- 10% events in life.
Usually if I'm working on a project or considering a project I write down my thoughts, things I've learned, and so on. Sometimes I refer back to old entries. Sometimes I don't. Every now and then I might turn some of the entries into a blog article.
Usually I just type a play-by-play of the day. Helps my memory and work through emotions.