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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

I've been journaling for about 15 years now. The big key to getting consistent at it was to stop worrying about trying to write a lot, or trying to write something insightful, and just write a sentence or two at a minimum. Often, that turns into more or into something insightful.

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Having some sort of prompt helps, too, to keep up the habit. I use Day One, and they have a prompt that changes daily; today's is "What is something I want to do for myself in the coming year?" One of my favorites is "Describe something you learned from your mother" which is absolutely not something I would have thought to write about unprompted.

Another cool thing they have is templates. I use one called "Daily Self", which just asks a bunch of questions about my day: Who did I see? What's my mood like? What are my accomplishments? What did I eat? (I added a couple more questions, what I read and what music I listened to).

Both of these have been effective tools for me. If I have something on my mind, I write about it and don't worry about prompts. If the daily prompt interests me, I'll answer it. And if there's nothing else, I just open the Daily Self template and write about my day.

Thanks for the advice, yeah I'd like to add guided journaling modules and some optional prompts. Just knowing where to get started helps a lot with journaling

I've been doing it only for 3 or 4 years, and this 100% lines up with my experience. There are times when I haven't been consistent, and it always comes down to feeling that "I can't do a good job of it right now, maybe later..." and then I miss that day, and miss that week, etc.

I use the mobile app Pixels for journaling though. It lets the user define custom tags (I track emotions, activities, wake up time, body pains...), which for me is pretty useful, but I would say it also raises the floor on the effort it takes to make an entry, because I don't like to miss data points on those tags. So to the reader: start small, be forgiving, and don't worry about getting good data. 99% of the value of journaling is the practice.

I'm glad you pointed out the tags issue. I've been using Daylio for a while now because I like doing little entries throughout my day and I initially set up a bunch of tags. Lately those tags have started to feel like a burden because I worry about missing an entry related to those tags. That burden hasn't become significant yet, but it is something that's bothering me and I could see it be an excuse later on to just give up on the whole thing... i.e. the data junky in me says what's the point of tracking data if the dataset isn't accurate.

I’ve been working on the same thing. Does anyone here have tips on how to filter/mask a given time-based data set so that it infers data where possible (i.e. if I logged one mood for the day, it’s probably safe to map that across the whole day) and ignore unrealistic data (I.e. if I logged one meal for the day, that’s probably not a useful day of data).

So far just been winging it on a case-by-case basis but curious if there’s a fundamental pattern I’m missing

My current solution is to write many times a day (each hour when possible). Write short sentences with key information and then move on. Sometimes I'll edit some old entries to remove details and reduce length. The best part is that "key information" also changes, so it also ends up reflecting what was important to me at the time.

Interesting, haven't heard this approach before.

The thing that finally got me into journaling was becoming obsessed with fountain pens and stationary. So I journal as an excuse to use my fun pens and ink and paper, and as a nice side effect I actually get some useful journaling done!

I agree. I built a journaling habit by scheduling time for it every week. Sometimes I just don't feel like it and scribble something down. But sometimes even when I start with just a scribble, I keep going and it helps me to think through thoughts in my head.

1/ what do you feel like you've learned or gained from this? 2/ do you ever go back and study what you wrote or is it more about giving your thoughts clarity today?

I'm not the OP, but for #2, it's almost all about the latter. Occasionally I go check on random or specific days.

What have I learned or gained? It definitely helps ground me in the flow of time. It's so easy to lose weeks or months or years if you're never reflecting. Journaling helps me be more aware day to day.

Not OP, but have been journaling for the past 7 years with some pauses in between.

The greatest tools for me are:

1. When I'm feeling as if I'm stuck I go back sometime (like a week) and confirm that I've indeed progressed.

2. My recollection of events is better just because I'm logging them. If I really want to confirm something I can go back and check. This is specially helpful in day to day issue resolution with my wife, which has been an important topic for us.

3. Sometimes I go back a year or more to just have some memories. It helps me to feel human because I had big troubles with long term memory.

I've been journaling for 20 years and often I open old files to talk to the younger me. It's remarkable how you change over the years, a feeling that, AFAIK, any other medium achieves (maybe video/audio recordings, but text is way simpler to register, storage, and retrieve).

It's one of the things I'm most grateful of doing for so long.

1/ For me it's similar to meditation in terms of the appeal. It's a way to slow down and think, not necessarily for measurable gain but to be a bit more present in the flow of things. I've learned a lot about myself as I do a lot of introspection when writing. 2/ Yes, a major feature I'd like to build is a retrospective flow as I've developed a pretty nice system for going back and pulling out "nuggets" from past entries. Seeing your own thoughts after some time, as a stranger is a really useful tool to understand how your mind works.

interesting; I benefited from the opposite, which was having a goal of filling one page. This acted as a sort of reward and feeling of accomplishment. But also found any expectations on quality tend to deter me.

this is the way

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