Ask HN: Are you writing a journal?

[mindrun]

After I heard good things about writing a personal journal from some friends a few months ago, I also started writing one myself.

But I recently stopped writing because I noticed that the Application I was using is saving all entries completely unencrypted in the Cloud. I started searching around a bit but didn't find a good alternative which keeps my notes save and also easily editable.

Because I don't want to switch to writing into an analog notebook or something like that, it brought me to the point of thinking about providing a good alternative by myself.

Thus I'd like to hear some thoughts and ideas from other people who also like writing a journal. Do you write your thoughts down? If so, where?

[skylark]

I keep a daily journal which I save in a Word document. I don't particularly mind if it goes up in a ball of fire one day - I find that I never really go back to look through what I've written in the past.

For me, the journal's purpose is not to document my life. The journal is a daily check in - a tool which forces me to be honest about my current situation and evaluate what I can be doing differently or better. There's just something so real and raw about putting my thoughts into something physical. It forces me to really grapple with the issues I'm facing in life and come up with actionable solutions.

Even though that's my experience with journaling, it most likely won't be yours as well. Journals turn the lens inwards and magnify the things which are most important to you. Some people use journals to vent. Others just want to document the experiences they live in life to keep a history of what they've done.

You probably won't know what benefit a journal will give you until you just start doing it. Give it a week or two - do it before you sleep or right when you wake up. Before you know it, you'll be hooked. Or not, the cost is so low you might as well give it a shot.

[manmukh]

Were you using Day One? It stores unencrypted entries in iCloud/Dropbox and has the weakest password protection system I've seen. Your password isn't even synced across different devices, you need to set it each time for each device! I haven't yet stopped using it but I'm looking to make the transition to something else.

OneNote allows you to password protect and encrypt an entire section, so you could make a journal section an store all of your entries in there. It works quite well from my experience. Evernote also offers encryption but you can only encrypt a selection of text and it can be inconvenient to have to encrypt each entry separately. Both options have mobile/desktop/web apps.

Another option is a private Wordpress journal.

A lot of people here recommend using a physical journal and a pen (I'm planning on going this route eventually). You could also use good ol' text files synced with dropbox (or something else) and encrypt them yourself.

[mindrun → manmukh]

Yep, that's the app I was using before I figured out that it doesn't encrypt my entries. Also it doesn't have a web-view, right?

I thought it might be great if I would build a great-looking web-application which also has a well-documented API (you can't say that of any great journaling app out there).

I think especially for people who are traveling 'round the world - and don't keep devices like an iPhone, an MacBook, etc. with them - it would be perfect (many of them are still using Internet Cafés).

But of course, the most people are writing on their own devices. For them, we could write some native apps later.

Another tiny question: Would you pay for a service like that? I mean a few dollars /month. In my opinion, there's currently no complete service out there, which focusses only on journaling.

Okay, maybe a few poor-designed and -developed ones.

[manmukh → mindrun]

> Would you pay for a service like that?

I wouldn't. There are enough free options (e.g. onenote, email, physical journal, etc.) that work just fine for me. I personally don't see the value in paying for a service that uploads and syncs my journals, even if it has a really nice interface.

[johntash → manmukh]

Agreed. You'd have to come up with a good feature, other than just syncing/looking pretty, to make it worth paying for.

[dangrover]

I have kept a journal in a text file since 2011, synced via dropbox. It's grown to be over a meg at this point. At that time, I was feeing depressed, and it gave me tremendous sense of clarity and order to be able to put my thoughts into writing and check in every day.

I haven't had this problem as much these days, but I have kept the habit. I have a rule with myself that if I find myself ruminating over some stupid thing that happened during the day, I may do so, but only in writing. For some reason, typing my way through such thoughts, even for short periods of time, tends to make them clearer and to more quickly reveal any distortions/fallacies therein.

[arh68]

I used to keep all my passwords in Emacs w/ Org Mode. You can encrypt a heading, or an entire file, with a GPG key. This could work. Just store it in Dropbox/etc. If you trust Dropbox's encryption, just use a simple j.txt as manmukh says.

Or you could just email yourself, replying forever. That's pretty easy.

[link, almost forgot] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/encrypting-files.html

[mindrun → arh68]

Thanks for those suggestions! For hackers (who also mostly write on their pc) this could be a way to journal. But for the most people, that's not really an option.

I also think in the longer term, that's not the right way to accomplish this - because it's not really made for journaling and thus also too complicated, in my opinion.

[brudgers]

I keep a journal on paper. In part because technology is a distraction both in the moment and from a management perspective for exactly the reasons you experienced. I've toyed with Emacs org-mode and Microsoft OneNote in the cloud, but nothing really beats paper for me because I have control over the process...and getting away from the computer means that I can wonder about the answer to a question rather than stopping my writing and Googling it up.

[skrinko]

I don't journal as much as I would like. I have been using Day1 as well, but lately started using Hemingway app on Mac. You can make the interface very minimal to keep out distraction, and have in the background ready for thoughts. It can analyze level of grammar if you please. Save where you want, and what you do to secure it is your choice.

[atmosx]

I use a personal journal with 'vim'[1]. I write only when I feel like writing to it, usually when I'm under stress. The articles are encrypted with GPG, synced through my dropbox account.

[1] https://github.com/jmcantrell/vim-journal

[rb2k_]

> Do you write your thoughts down?

No. But I'd be interested to hear why people would. What is the appeal?

(serious question)

[brudgers → rb2k_]

There are several reasons I've kept a journal:

+ Writing is thinking.

+ I believe it makes my writing better, even if only via the additional practice.

+ Journaling has been, at times, a sanity check. Writing about some craziness in my life provides a way to stop ruminating over it.

+ Journaling is a great way to explore ideas that I have.

Over the past three months or so. I've focused more on journaling as a writing and exploration tool and much less as a safety valve over observations of meanness or stupidity in the world or some sadness I might experience. Those things are easy to write passionately about, however I'm generating enough ideas I feel passionate about that I don't need to tap that resource.

[Mz → rb2k_]

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

-- George Santayana

The unexamined life is not worth living.

-- Socrates

I've done a lot of journaling. I frequently recommend it to others. Among other things, it helps me keep myself out of my own way.

[bluerail]

Wow.. just today I blogged about how there is no good secure journal solution, and ended up writing one for my own..

I am building one currently which stores the entries directly to cloud services and without all boatload of features.. just for writing..

[NhanH]

I asked a similar question a month ago, you may find some of the answer there useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976690