How I finally get daily journaling done with a workflow on my iPhone

It’s a lovely ode to writing and ofcourse goes into the subject of the title.

Can't agree more. I built myself a simple writing app[1] a couple of years back, purely because I wanted to have a place to slow down, somewhere I could just pour my emotions/thoughts into, without self-editing. I posted a bit more about in the root thread. If you give the app a shot, let me know. I think you might like it.

> "So what do therapy, journaling, and meditation all have in common? [...]

I'd add any unconstrained (and ideally "childish") form of art to the list. I write in the morning then doodle just before going to bed [2]. I generally struggle with sticking to new habits but relying on this form of mental hygiene, plus therapy made a huge improvement in my quality of life.

[1] https://write.sonnet.io and https://sonnet.io/posts/ulysses/ [2] https://potato.horse

Just recount what happened I the last 24 hours. Had to be something even if you just worked and watched netflix. ie, what specifically did you do at work, how could you have done it better, etc

I journal off and on, not currently doing it. But I found it to be a great tool for introspection and improvement. I would think in depth about technical problems, social interactions, various distractions and impediments to productivity. It's a great tool if you have the time. but you have to make yourself do it, every day

I found I wasn’t being completely open and honest when I was journaling on pen and paper because I was subconsciously concerned someone else would read it. A password protected journal works better for me.

Its very contextual but I truly believe this is the best way!

So, opposite to you, my system lets me revisit and read my previous thoughts, something I do enjoy. It's also a great tracking system that tells me when this or that event happened.

But, like you, it's not dependent on any specific tool. I can lose my phone and all my devices, as long as I can receive and send email, it'll work.

I finally stopped yak-shaving my writing workflow when I built a web app with a single text field and no editing capabilities, just pushing letters. It feels "dummer" than a piece of paper, but works for me. 2.5 years of almost daily writing (700 words on avg) so far. I practice calligraphy, but my regular hand writing is terrible. I used to hoard piles of paper with doodles and notes, and I'd always felt bad about throwing them out. I do like that the list of notes keeps getting longer every day although, but rarely re-read them. Otherwise I'd just use a pen.

> do not plan to read them or store them.

and

> do not plan to do OCR or any kind of special storage.

but in case anyone else is struggling with the problem you described,

> I hated digital journaling because I had to pick up the phone or sit somewhere to use the laptop/desktop. Also a quick figure would require me to at least open a tool, and at most made me connect my graphics tablet. Pen and paper just removed the friction. Now I just journal in bed sitting or half-lying under a lamp with my wifi turned off.

my solution has been an e-ink tablet, specifically the Supernote A5X. The Supernote's handwriting is extremely fast and accurate and, as far as quality, to me there's no difference to writing on real paper, even though it might not feel exactly like writing on paper. (It feels different but very good!)

All in all, it's basically like a paper notebook, just with more pages/storage and the ability to erase/edit and built-in digitization.

For this reason there is nothing wrong with talking to your self. you are taking thoughts which are always a bit fuzzy and turning them into solid actionable items. Writing things down is even better at this. But the best is teaching someone else.

A lot of people have that already from communicating on their phones a lot, or (for the young ones) growing up on touch screens, but even if you just dive into journaling like the OP, you’d probably get their soon enough.

And once you’re there, dictation can’t hold a candle. I’ll type a paragraph in the time it takes for some dictation assistant to transcribe a sentence, with fewer mistakes, more precision, and more linguistic creativity.

My typing speed on a laptop keyboard was the thing that finally made journaling work for me. I could never write fast enough by hand to capture my thoughts.

I push about 30k-50k words of text journaling into it per year, for about 6 or 7 years now, and it handles it seamlessly while keeping everything organized.

The most important feature to me is that it feels lightweight and lagless to open the app and get to typing.

My impression is that Day One has a ton of features for people who want multimedia entries, or sharing, or all the other bullet points that keep it from getting squeezed out by competitors, but it seems to keep those out of the hot path so that my own niche experience is never ruined by bloat.

I enjoy reading my writings from years ago... Are the notes stored somewhere and are they available for re-reading later? Is it possible to download or sync with external storage? I'm on mobile so the site encouraged me to come back later on desktop.

Thanks for the app tip, you removed my barrier to immediately try it today. And I can skip the lengthy blog post too!

The app automatically (and for free) transcribes as you go, so you also have a readable and searchable version of your entry.

It's probably my favorite phone app after maps.

In terms of private journaling - well, it’s private, so hard to draw any general conclusions, but I tend to think that if you’re spending more than half an hour each day writing about yourself then you might have a problem.