I have tried and failed to journal many times in the past. I always find myself self-editing, avoiding writing certain thoughts or feelings and just overall not being as authentic or honest or genuine as I should be to actually get some value out of journaling. I wish I could get over this “self-censoring” habit because I love reading and writing and really think journaling could be a great outlet for me.

So, I ask, what tips do you have to help write? To help actually get your thoughts and feelings out on the page, without judging yourself or feeling self conscious or critical? What do you write? What do you find helps you write more honestly and genuinely?

Could really use some help and guidance.

Apple recently released a journal app in their latest iOS update. I used to journal when I was younger and thought it would be a good opportunity to get back into it. I usually use it as a reflection of my day, but some days nothing happens and I feel like there's probably a plethora of things I could be writing about.

So for those of you who journal what do you like to write in it?

I have tried and tried to write a daily journal/diary and always gave up after a while. My longest stretch was over the course of five years. It always devolves into a litany of banality, though, and when I look back at it, invariably appears a bit cringy.

So I have decided to start keeping a commonplace book- a place to write down interesting thoughts, quotes, ideas I come across and so forth. Without the chronological format of a journal I feel less compelled to list down stuff for the sake of it and am actually listing down ideas I'd like to remember.

Do any of you do something similar?

The recent PKM thread had me thinking about what folks are using as journaling app/portal. I do use Obsidian for my second brain right now and genuinely love it. But I find the mobile app on Android to be a bit clunky, if I'm honest. Seems slow to open even with very few plugins. For jounaling I've used DayOne for years. I started back when it was iOS/MacOS only, but then switched phone to Android and haven't been back. But now they have an app and web app for that. What I don't like is the somewhat goofy format it saves in and it's on their servers. They used to allow you to at least leverage your own Dropbox, but no longer.

For the past several months I've tried several FOSS options. Main criteria is that I could host it myself, supports offline entries stored in an open file format (preferably MarkDown), and had either multi platform app or a decent web app. That lead me to try these:

Memos
Pros:

• Great persistent web app
• Slick UI that is light and snappy
• markdown support
  Cons:
• Stuffs the .md inside a database file so can be a bit cumbersome to export data
• No offline support. There is a 3rd party app that hopes to implement it

Flatnotes
Pros:

• Incredibly simple
• Another easily deployed app
• Flat Markdown files
  Cons:
• Web app on mobile is almost unusable as in it doesn't scale well to smaller screens
• Very early development, but very likely to stay as minimalistic as it is now.
• No offline and very unlikely to ever have it

Joplin
Pros:

• Multi platform apps that perform well
• End-to-end encryption supported
• Could replace both DayOne and my To-do solution (Google Keep)
• Offline support
  Cons:
• More database stuff instead of flat markdown files

One solution I've been testing lately is using IAWriter to write to a 'Journal' folder within my Obsidian vault on Google drive Obsidian Vault > Journal > 2023.... for example. This works surprisingly well. Of course IAWriter is a bit spendy at $29 for Android and then more $ for other platforms as they're sold separately.

So I'm curious what other people are using for just simple daily journaling, random thoughts, etc. If there's an approach I've missed I'd love to hear it. Joplin is so dang close but not having the structure of plaintext files is a no go for me as I don't want to be trapped by any one product should something happen to the development down the road. Doesn't have to be free, but I want control of the entries either on my own server or cloud storage.

I have a slight struggle that I wonder if anyone else can relate to. I'm a creative "type" in that both my job (scientist) and hobbies (many, over the years) require constant innovation, in addition to the usual labor, to keep them going.

I have a note/journal app where I store my ideas. Sometimes these are ideas with acute utility e.g. an experiment design that I can test out the next day at work or maybe an idea for a paper. Other ideas are what I would consider "highdeas" - insights or thoughts that seem amazing when you're stoned but after you sober up they're kind of nonsense. The former are productive and the latter are non-productive forms of creativity (barring any offshoots of the latter that prove useful later on).

But then sometimes I get idea in-between. Say, an insight into how certain human behaviors are a certain way or maybe a rant on a topic/issue in my lab work that is interesting but not valuable enough to publish or bring up in a formal meeting. My question / discussion topic for you, is, what do you do with these sort of self-ascribed interesting ideas that have no immediate value? One option is to write them out on a forum, as I am currently doing, but I would end up writing all day. Does anyone else keep track of these? Do you schedule a follow-up with these intermediate ideas for future inspiration? I currently use Joplin which is great but I don't think there are any features to stimulate creativity in this manner.

[LONG POST - 4 months of trying different planners)

I always wanted to use one but I never thought of analog (paper) planners and tried a lot of digital ones - link to a post.

About 4 months ago I saw my friend at school using a pocket diary - similar to this image, he was writing down his tasks on it (he didn't use it again). That day I bought a good pocket diary of around 200 pages, till date I've not used more than 10 pages and its still lying around.

I realised that I was not going to use it because it was very thick and I couldn't carry it in my pocket. I bought this pocket diary. This was thin and simple, perfect for me. I've used it the longest before switching.

Initially I used to dump all the tasks and cross it after completion, later I introduced a date system and it was one date for one page. I wrote down tasks for the day and crossed after completion if something was incomplete I migrated it to next day. This worked well but I needed a place to dump tasks that I had to do in future so I made a future section from backside and added tasks to it. This was the final tweak and I used it for like a month. I used it for daily tasks, future tasks, some notes and contacts (I used to make contact.txt before this).

Later IIRC I wanted to change because it was already half full and a mess because I was trying to do a lot with it. Next I mindlessly bought a notebook - something like this but with 5 sections, I didn't know what to do with it. I also don't remember why I bought it so I used it to write down stuff that I learned online and wanted to remember. It replaced my reddit save and I wrote what I wanted to remember, it is still with me and has been changed a lot (usecase).

I made a calendar on a single page of that notebook and tracked down basic stuff on it, I started using small square sticky notes to write down tasks and that's how I left my pocket diary. Not long after I lost interest in that notebook thing and updating calendar daily was not interesting. I left that and searched a lot online. Again tried a lot of digital options but I know it will never work for me so I left it and didn't use anything for like a day before I stumbled across Strikethru.

Strikethru is something like Bullet Journal. If you want to look at strikethru then see this video & this for Bullet Journal.

I took that notebook and turned it into a bullet journal, I used it for ~a week before trying strikethru and then again switching to bullet journal after a week. That was testing period and I chosed bulletjournal (bujo) over strikethru. That book was also thick so not long after I made a new bujo notebook (normal 200 pages). Again it felt like a big task that I had to do daily and I lost interest, I again restarted it with a new design. In this month I switched to different notebooks/design a lot and was never satisfied. I also tried Nextcloud tasks for 3 days before again trying out bujo.

Last year in december around a week before christmas I wanted to change it all so I went to a store and bought a new grid notebook (we used it for doing math in 1st grade). I used it for 10 days and everything broke during the last week of december, I was not at home and we went on a vacation. I took it with me but didn't update it because it was boring. It has been 5 days I was busy organising everything else again and now I've settled on what I started with (slightly better idea).

During that time I read a lot on nosurf, pornfree, internet addiction, sleep cycles, polyphasic society, tulpas, made new friends, tried a lot of todo managers, used different journaling apps and this is what I've decided to stay with.

I went to the store today to buy the same pocket diary that I've used the longest (1 month one). Its cheap, for 15 INR and works well for me. Over there I saw a box that said monthly planner, I took it and it had 13 small pocket diaries (similar to what I've used the longest but more thin) and with that a small case that would hold a notebook. There was one contacts pocket diary (perfect) and 12 pocket diaries one for each month. It was for this year and costed 170 INR, I didn't had money so I asked the storeman (idk what we call them, here we call them uncle) did he have cheaper option. He showed me the same piece that costed 140 INR but was for 2016, he said he would give it to me for 70 INR because he would have to throw it anyways.

I thought that was a great deal and bought it. So now I have 12 mini diaries for each month and one contacts diary that has my big list of 10 friends contacts. After trying a lot of different options I came back to what I used for the first time. Its simple and stupid & fits in my pocket.

It has one page for one day and I just have to cross 2016 and the day (mon, tue, etc.) thing and update it with 2019 days. In the middle it has a big two page calendar for current month, page before it has previous months small one page date list to write down events and on page after it has next months small one page date list. The last page is for notes and the cover has 2017 calender that I won't use and ignore.

Theres little patch work todo but for that price I think I bought a good set and if I actually use this for full year then I would buy a new one next one (for 2020 & not 2017 :|)

I've spent around 300 INR for all these (~ 4.5 USD)

Tl;dr -> Used a lot of systems and in the end switched to what I used for the first time which is simple and fits in my pocket.

# What do you use for managing your tasks? Do you use it daily?

I own a hobonichi, which is really just a hipster day-planner. The key feature for me is the river paper, which allows water colouring.

I try to water colour everyday. Started that way at the beginning of the year, and after a few months, now pretty much use it as a day-planner. Of course, I would love to get back to it, and will make an effort to at least catch up over the weekends.

Would love to hear how you journal and any habits that work for you.