Journaling and Prompting

I used Notion for several years for journaling, but I found the cognitive cost of switching into its DSL wasn’t worth it for me. Notion is built on blocks, things like databases built on top. Even when I exported my notes to Markdown, it still reflected Notion’s internal data structure instead of giving me something clean and portable.

For example, the inline database ends up as a table with href links to other parts of the document - nice, but not very useful when I want plain text I can actually work with.

Meanwhile, I have been doing a lot of prompting, and Markdown makes more sense for my workflow. It is not a journaling tool but it is simple and widely supported - GitHub, VSCode, etc and it eliminated a lot of the context switching that came with using dedicated note-taking apps.

What I would miss probably is the inline database, and other rich content which I have learned to stop using. But, I have optimized my journalling workflows to a lot of my prompting techniques. I use regular tables and split documents more deliberately. I reference them across journals when needed, kind of like having dedicated prompts for each part of a workflow.

I use the a lot of the prompting techniques in journalling as well - instead of creating inline database, I use the regular tables (more flattened and un-linked), and started splitting documents more, and referencing them in my journals.

I also sometimes put YAML frontmatter at the top for metadata and descriptions. That way, if I ever want to run an LLM over my journals - for summarizing the year or building a semantic search - I am already set up. (Might even turn that into a feature for https://gpt.qalam.dev)

I have realised the tool must matter less than how I structure my thoughts.