💭 How accurately can you remember distant memories?
When you remember a past event, you are actually remembering the last time you remembered it.
^ This is very true except for (rare) people with photographic memories.
Journaling is just saving your thoughts for potential future use. It can help you in reflecting, accelerate your learning, and providing peace of mind.
Benefits
- When you put abstract thoughts into concrete sentences, you get a clearer picture of your understanding.
- When I have a lot going on in my mind, simply writing my thoughts down lifts the heaviness and gives my mind much-needed relaxation.
- When you look back on a particular decision you made, a written memo is the best way to remind you of the pros and cons you considered at that time. Don’t trust memories, trust your diary.
Types
Some of the different types of journals I have include:
- Dreams
- Ideas
- Books
- Career
- Life (Gratitude + Quotes + Retrospective + Social)
My Ideal Journaling Solution
I wanted:
- Backup and Sync across mobile and desktop
- Password protection (end-to-end encryption)
- Markdown (You’ll see that this is a recurring theme. I love Markdown because it falls in the sweet spot of being decently configurable and decently readable in raw format.)
- No lock-ins (easy to Import / Export)
- Tags (for quick lookup on related entries)
- Neat design
- Multimedia support (photos / doodle / audio)
- Writing Prompts (good-to-have)
- Reminders (good-to-have)
Day One provides all of the above must-have features along with a nifty one “On This Day…”, which basically reminds you of your journal entries from previous years.
It’s one of the few paid apps that I use regularly.
I have used Bullet Journal in the past (back in 2017). But it was trying to do two things: Journaling + Task Management. Now I use dedicated apps for both (more on Task Management in a future post).
Call to Action: Start with writing one line about your day regularly and reflect on it after a month.
“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.” — J.M. Barrie
Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap