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Getting a journaling habit is hard. You need the proper conviction of that it means something to you, eventually. The idea that your journal will offer some sort of gain in the long run is paramount.
What’s also crucial, is the tools you use. They can’t be hindering you, they have to be ubiquitous. If writing something in your journal is a chore, which it sometimes will be, then you need to limit the frictions where you can.
My journaling story
My journaling story starts way before this last streak, which, in the sense of fairness and transparency, hits 1,000 consecutive days tomorrow evening. I write my entries in the evening, mostly, and I keep them short. Sometimes it’s just a few sentences, and a photo or three from the day, if I have any, but other times, I put longer things in there. It’s a way of processing the day, and, more often than not, things like slights, frustration, and even anger at things. I find it’s better to write it down, often that means that whatever it was that made me upset will mean very little the day after. It’s been processed.
Other things I keep track of: Sleep, exercise, family related stuff and decisions I might want to look up in the future, and, of course, big events in my life.
Writing daily, however, wasn’t how I started. Those 1,000 consecutive days are, if anything, an understatement. I used to write once a week, longer pieces, with the idea that sitting down on a Sunday and recap was a good way to really think things through. It might be, it served me well for years, but I do find that I miss some smaller things – which, by definition, might not matter – but also the processing of the day. Journaling is a way to manage what happened during the day, and if something upset you, for whatever reason, dealing with it by putting it down in words can be very helpful. That’s at least how I view it, your mileage may differ.
I use Day One
I use a journaling app called Day One, which has been mentioned in the past here on Switch to iPad. It’s a sleek app with a snappy sync. Some of you might remember it for the controversy that surrounded it when it switched from a premium app model, to the subscription model. I bashed them pretty hard back then because they truly didn’t handle that well, but since then, they’ve made amends, even though there are still things to be pissed about. I stopped using Day One for quite some time, actually, and relied on raw text files (more on that, as a concept, in a future post) for my journal entries. However, the thing with an app like Day One is that you can include photos and, if you pay extra, audio, and video too. It’s also easy to maintain multiple journals, as well as organize with tags. These things quickly get troublesome with text files, although one could argue that they’re not crucial features.
That, however, brings us back to the importance of tools that aren’t a hindrance. Day One makes it straightforward to add an entry, there’s no denying it. If you want to add photos in hindsight, you can have Day One set the date to the one corresponding with the photo metadata. I’ve found that feature particularly time-saving, since I sometimes get photos from friends and family days later, but I want them in my journal, on the right date.
Using a dedicated app and service for journaling will definitely make your life easier, but it’s also something to be wary about. Day One is owned by Automattic, custodians for the world’s larges content management system, WordPress, as well as makers of WordPress.com, owners of Tumblr, and all in all, a pretty stable company with good values. All that might change, Automattic might decide to shut down Day One, and that’ll leave you without a journaling tool. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that your journal entries would get lost, there are export solutions in place, but it could, theoretically, happen, especially if you’ve forgotten about journaling and thus miss out on any service halting message from the app. This is always the risk of storing valuable information on an external service: It might go away, and it might do so in such a fashion that’ll make you lose your data.
It’s a matter of convenience vs. freedom. Journal entries written in raw text files will be readable long after we’re gone, I’m certain. Accessing Day One servers, however, is less likely in the long run. These are things I’ve been thinking about recently, and I might touch on it in the future.
For now, however, I look forward to seeing that consecutive daily journaling streak hit 1,000. Big numbers are always fun, aren’t they?
— Thord D. Hedengren ⚡