Show HN: I fixed journaling for myself

This is really cool OP - did you create the list of prompts?

I'm working on Paper Website[1], which lets you turn a handwritten journal into a tiny daily blog. I've written nearly 150 posts[2] this way, and I think what's made me so consistent is having an "audience". It sounds weird, but there's ~200 email subscribers to my journal, and it's had nearly 200k page views. Knowing people are reading my stuff motivates me to keep going - I've tried regular journaling before and it just feels like I'm writing into the void.

I'm interested in your prompts because often people don't know what to write about - it's an awesome primer to start.

[1] https://paperwebsite.com [2] https://daily.tinyprojects.dev

I had an idea for something like this, although it would require a bit more up-front effort. Basically, you provide a list of important people, interests, and events in your life, and then the prompts are generated dynamically based on that information. So instead of a prompt like "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one," you'd get something like "If you had to take a vacation with [Tom], where would you go and what would you do?" or "When's the last time you went [kayaking]? Do you think [Jake] would want to go with you?" etc.

I built an app like this & raised a respectable pre-seed round for it. tl;dr journaling types were into it, but already had a journaling process. Regular people would use it for a week or so & then stop. tbh (app) had flash-in-the-pan success with the concept, but did it via simple one-tap survey. Might be a tbh 2.0 approach here.

What a great idea for people that don't have too much time! I personally try to stick with the same topic every night(something on the theme of "what went well" or "what are you grateful for"). However, this is a great way to speed things up and start putting ideas/thoughts on paper. Also keeping it locally stored is great from a privacy standpoint.

My only question: is there an "open" feature that makes the prompt optional for folks who maybe have something more pressing to journal about than something that the prompt may suggest that day?

There is not yet an open feature as you suggested but I feel like this could be nice. Not only for journaling but also for todo lists or similar, just starting every day with a blank sheet.

I saw that “1 Day” as suggested in another comment seems to be basically that.

I’ll play around with it later.

Cool idea. Include an about page somewhere. Where do you pull the questions from?

Also a random idea is that you allow people to save their entry directly into a git repo, which feels a bit safer than browser storage. I think there's a way to do that from the web.

I guess an about page is a great idea, I'll create one that answers the questions here later.

My setup for the questions is the following - I have a questions file with one question per line and a cron job that takes the top one, builds the static page by including it in the template and then appends the question in the end.

That way I can always add more questions but if I run out of questions it would just start from the beginning.

Do you have an idea on how to save to a git repo from a static page? I don't want to make it any more complicated than it needs to be.

There seem to be REST apis that are specific to Gitlab/Github like [0].

There's also isomorphic-git [1], which is git client implemented in Javascript.

[0]: https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-13-a-simpler-api-for-a... [1]: https://isomorphic-git.org/

This does look very interesting. I like it.

I shall admit I've spent too much time though building my own journalling apps too. What's the right tradeoff- I wonder - between writing your own journalling apps v/s time spent journalling.

This is awesome! Had been looking for something like this for a while.

Small suggestion/question (you would have probably thought about it and I wonder if you consciously decided against it) - why not provide a way to seamlessly store it in cloud storage - google drive, etc?

I guess this is one of many ways to improve it, I can still give my reasoning:

With the current setup you don't have any setup. You don't need an account, you can just start.

As I wrote above, trying to minimize all of the friction, this was easy to implement and made sense.

How would you imagine the cloud storage feature?

Hmm I like the idea of prompts, it has always helped me when trying to think of what to write... but I also like the actual act of physically writing on paper. This is a great idea for somebody who prefers to work on the computer though!

Really nice. I love how lightweight the page is. I think it just needs an about page or overlay with a note about privacy. (Btw, the <style> element should go inside the head, not before it.)

i am confused by the prompt i am getting: "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one"

i understand journaling to be about today, not something eventful in the past. that prompt i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay.

the key for me for journaling is habit. the habit to do this every day, and not to skip. the prompt doesn't matter. i just write about anything noteworthy from that day.

with a plain text editor, into a file.

it's not ideal though. it's the last thing i do before going to sleep, and once in a while i miss an entry. and on some days, i feel there is nothing to write.

> and on some days, i feel there is nothing to write

This is what I was trying to fix for myself.

And I found that creating a new text document is just an additional friction.

> i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay

This is what I visually restricted the input field for as I also feel like some questions would otherwise suggest a long answer. Trying to answer them in a brief way is a feature for myself.

it's not just that the question suggests a long answer, but it is that i like writing and i have a story to tell, so i want to tell that story. i would not even want to write a short answer because i already know what the short answer would be, and it's not very interesting so there is no point to even bother to write it down.

what i am trying to say is that, for me at least, the prompt itself would have to limit the scope to today or maybe this week. (but then i would not be able to write anything for this particular prompt)

maybe prompts like: what made you happy this week? what made you sad? what was a challenge you faced this week?

if you come up with a dozen questions like that, and then randomly rotate through those, one each day, i think that might produce interesting results.

Nicely done. I love simple apps like this. Bonus points for local data.

Prompts for journals is an old concept. You can buy lots of (physical) journals that have 1-3 questions as a prompt on each day.

Personally, I tried it and still failed to maintain it.

Do you have an idea why you could not maintain it? I think another component why I open the page every day is that I only have the chance to fill this question that day - something that you wouldn't have in the paper one.

So your prompt changes daily?

A fixed prompt likely was why I couldn't maintain it. The prompt was generic and open ended, but I tired quickly of coming up with new stuff to the same questions.

But the likely real reason is that it just became a chore. I probably should have reduced it to once a week or something. I have kind of tried that as well and still failed.

Another reason is quality. The first draft of anything sucks really bad, but I don't want to write badly. It's a lot more effort to write something present or future me will be happy with.

Ultimately, I think it's a matter of perspective and priority. I like the idea of journaling, but it is somewhat labor intensive (especially if the "first draft" is not good enough for you). The reality is I often choose to do something else with that time.

Well done, and the one-click download/local data was exactly my first thought when visiting. One question: why CSV?

I can just open it in other tools and for example merge two sources. E.g. I do this on my laptop and on my phone. Download both, open with Excel and sort by date. I also considered more questions in the future or tracking numerical values.

I use Day 1 and talk into it, listen back and reflect