
Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals - Ivoah
https://sivers.org/dj
======
_virtu
I bullet journal for organization of my day to day life. I've picked up
calligraphy. There's something about taking 15 to 20 minutes a day to just
focus on the nib gliding across the paper that's very calming for my mind.
Often times I'll just write down phrases or words in calligraphy that are said
during meetings as my form of journaling. I find that it helps me focus and
gives me a sense of enjoyment for almost every meeting where I'm a more
passive participant.

I also use markdown, which feels "close enough" to plaintext and as of now
vscode for organizing digital notes. I absolutely agree with the whole
"thoughts on" approach and have using tagging to group knowledge in my notes.
I wrote a little plugin for vscode that helps you with organizing your notes
without having to worry about file structure:
[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-n...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-
nested-tags.vscode-nested-tags).

As for the psychological impacts. Having a journal to help empty my mind has
been extremely helpful in managing my anxiety. If I ever find myself thinking
too much about work I just turn towards my journal and empty it on to the
pages. I find myself less likely to dwell if the thoughts are on paper or
captured elsewhere. I think that it helps with acceptance as often times I say
to myself, "It'll be there tomorrow." once it's out of my head.

------
maximente
hate to be yet another shill but i spent about 20 hours learning emacs org
mode basics and came up with mostly the same setup:

\- .org files are plaintext, easily backup-able

\- what he has in categories, i have in tags for easy consumption across a few
files (reflections.org akin to his); this is important to track multiple
things e.g. sex + romance easily

\- doing a daily/weekly debrief really showed me how slowly i was moving on
allegedly important things, so it exposed that i have an integrity issue right
smack in the face and caused me to set observable goals and reflect on
pass/failure

highly recommended either via his method or org mode though

~~~
kerkeslager
I have some difficulty justifying the organizational effort involved in this.
I've yet to come across a compelling feature of Org mode over, say, a bunch of
unstructured text files. It seems like the main benefit is to be able to write
blog posts about it.

My journal, for years, has been a word document with dates at the top of each
entry, and I've yet to come across something I wanted to do that couldn't be
handled by this system.

~~~
maximente
tags (metadata) for items aren't available in either word documents or plain
text documents. a couple keystrokes filters down on tags in org mode. this is
a huge value add - think searching photos or bookmarks with/without tags -
this can't be done easily in word/plaintext

there's no comparison between navigation/searching in word documents vs.
emacs. that may be fine for a mostly write setup, but i'm actively
interrogating and reviewing my items - this isn't easily with 1 huge word
file, or multiple word files per date, or whatever setup you have.

~~~
kerkeslager
> tags (metadata) for items aren't available in either word documents or plain
> text documents. a couple keystrokes filters down on tags in org mode. this
> is a huge value add - think searching photos or bookmarks with/without tags
> - this can't be done easily in word/plaintext

Sure it can. If I embed images in a document file along with the text, then
Ctrl+F lets me search for that text, which makes it easy to find adjacent
images. I tend not to put a lot of images in there, but in practice this works
fairly well for the images I do include.

You're also only looking at the benefits of your strategy, without looking at
the costs. The cost is, you have to tag things. My strategy works without me
tagging anything. I wouldn't be surprised if you can find things slightly
faster, but I would be _very_ surprised if this time savings outweighed the
time spent tagging.

If it's fun for you to tag things then it's not a cost, so I'm certainly not
criticizing anyone using Org mode. Do what you enjoy. I'm just saying it's
more of an aesthetic choice than a productivity choice.

This is similar to the various "blog like a hacker" tools out there such as
Jekyll or Haunt. People cite all these supposed benefits like version
controlling your posts and whatnot, but ultimately the vast majority of
successful blogs, including the "hacker" ones, use Wordpress, Blogspot, or
something similar.

The underlying point I'm making is that the temptation with highly flexible
tools is to spend all your time tinkering with configuration for the tool,
rather than doing the thing the tool is intended to do. Some people can avoid
that temptation, but I'm not really one of those people.

(Random aside: my file is actually an Open Document Format file (.odt) not a
Word Document. It originally was a Word Document, but hasn't been for years,
so I'm not sure why I wrote that.)

------
viburnum
I’ve journaled on and off for years. It’s incredibly stressful for me. Most of
what I write is unbearably stupid. It’s excrutiatig to see how dumb I am. I
tried to turn lemons into lemonade, and decided to keep a “what did I learn”
journal, but it was even worse. Maybe journaling isn’t for everyone.

~~~
copperx
I'd love to hear more about your experience, especially about what happened
exactly with that "what did I learn" journal. I'm on the same boat.

Instead of trying be introspective about my life, I've started to write down
facts: I did so-and-so and this is why it worked, or why it didn't work. And
what was my emotional reaction. That definitely yields less stupid sounding
journals.

------
zrail
I've tried to keep a daily journal of sorts so many times in so many different
formats. The one that I seem able to stick to the most is specifically for
software development. It's just a markdown file with a top level bulleted
list, one entry per day, and a sublist for the things I did that day.

I'm not super consistent with it, but this post is making me want to put more
effort into it. As Derek says, I'm not writing for me _today_ , I'm writing
for _future_ me.

------
stolenmerch
I'm a total believer in this. I tried for years to keep a journal and nothing
ever stuck. Since 2010, though, I've been using services like OhLife and
DailyDiary that send me an email prompt every night and I just reply with a
few sentences. I then dump these to text files and backup periodically. I can
also attach photos and store those. This has been sustainable and archival and
I'll be coming up on a decade of daily use soon. It's dead simple. I have
little to no infrastructure or tools to maintain and (re)learn, plus the
reminders keep me going.

