
Ask HN: Personal Journal to manage time and ideas - parvatzar
In todays world of a plethora of note taking apps syncing with the cloud and available across multiple devices, we have all long moved away from having just a journal and a pen to organise our life. Do any of you maintain journals   and take some moments to disconnect? Do you feel productive using a journal and what kind of stuff do you put in there? Seeking inpiration to journalling my daily tasks and goals.
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pcmaffey
I've been journaling almost every day for 15+ years. I've a bookshelf of full,
handwritten, unlined notebooks...

When I journal with pen and paper, it's less about recording 'task and goals'
or being 'productive'. Instead, I sit down to just write. I explore whatever's
on my mind. And if there's nothing, I just write until something interesting
shows itself... and invariably, something almost always does. Writing in this
way is about letting go, about listening to what You really care about in that
moment.

But I also journal digitally, (used to use Evernote, now just use Atom). This
is where I keep my project notes and ideas, stuff that I want to record, come
back to, and edit. The point of this is to keep my ideas / projects organized.
While my folder structures are strict, what goes in the files is all very
freeform.

I also wrote an app (www.bicycl.com) to save the gems from all my journaling,
since it's easy to lose track of and forget key insights.

The key to journaling is about reflection... developing self-awareness about
how you relate to the future (goals, tasks), the past (what's happened,
stories, accomplishments), and the present (emotions, inspiration, insights).
If you find you're always thinking about 1 of those, try to understand why.
Perhaps, look instead at a different vector to see from a whole new
perspective.

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jotjotzzz
Wow, that's quite a long time of journaling. I think mine is about <9 years,
keeping old notebooks. The Bicycl app looks great, how does it it work? I'm
assuming you have to manually input.

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pcmaffey
Yup, generally when I come across a salient thought or idea, I load up Bicycl
and input it manually. The act of intentionally trying to remember a thing by
summarizing & writing it down is half the battle. Bicycl then does a really
good job of organizing these micro-notes in a way that makes it easy to
resurface your ideas / gems later.

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R4nger
I have two versions

* Simple text file. My terminal pops up every hour or so and asks me write whatever I want to. what I type goes into a simple text file that I review at the end of the day. Its pretty effective way to know where my time is going.

* I have a physical journal that I write the tasks I'd like to get done & cross out whatever was done (may be add some notes or leftover things to do). In scrum world, this would be your backlog.

Its being doing great for the past year or so. YMMV

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chamomilelatte
You should check out bullet journaling. A lot of people use this for task
tracking, habit forming, and life event recording, and have gotten a lot of
emotional value out of the time and energy spent on these journals and what
they contain.

I'm not personally good at maintaining that level of attention consistently,
but I did change how I track my life based on my bullet journal research. I
have a notebook where I record my meetings for the day at the top, and all my
tasks. I usually end up taking notes in the sidebar, and turn them into tasks
later in the week, or notes on my computer.

This has worked really well, physically writing my tasks and time
restrictions, and has lasted far longer than any to-do app I've used.

Experimenting without guilt is an important component to this - you will
probably evolve your process to serve your needs, and what you think you need
or want now may not be true later.

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jotjotzzz
I have this same idea of creating an online journaling for self-development
and goal tracking/insights/self-reflection/bullet-journaling that I have been
ruminating for a month! I would totally love to work with anyone to create it
online for personal use. I do my journaling via pen and paper but I'd love
something online.

