I bullet journal for organization of my day to day life. I've picked up calligraphy. There's something about taking 15 to 20 minutes a day to just focus on the nib gliding across the paper that's very calming for my mind. Often times I'll just write down phrases or words in calligraphy that are said during meetings as my form of journaling. I find that it helps me focus and gives me a sense of enjoyment for almost every meeting where I'm a more passive participant.

I also use markdown, which feels "close enough" to plaintext and as of now vscode for organizing digital notes. I absolutely agree with the whole "thoughts on" approach and have using tagging to group knowledge in my notes. I wrote a little plugin for vscode that helps you with organizing your notes without having to worry about file structure: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-n....

As for the psychological impacts. Having a journal to help empty my mind has been extremely helpful in managing my anxiety. If I ever find myself thinking too much about work I just turn towards my journal and empty it on to the pages. I find myself less likely to dwell if the thoughts are on paper or captured elsewhere. I think that it helps with acceptance as often times I say to myself, "It'll be there tomorrow." once it's out of my head.

hate to be yet another shill but i spent about 20 hours learning emacs org mode basics and came up with mostly the same setup:

- .org files are plaintext, easily backup-able

- what he has in categories, i have in tags for easy consumption across a few files (reflections.org akin to his); this is important to track multiple things e.g. sex + romance easily

- doing a daily/weekly debrief really showed me how slowly i was moving on allegedly important things, so it exposed that i have an integrity issue right smack in the face and caused me to set observable goals and reflect on pass/failure

highly recommended either via his method or org mode though

I have some difficulty justifying the organizational effort involved in this. I've yet to come across a compelling feature of Org mode over, say, a bunch of unstructured text files. It seems like the main benefit is to be able to write blog posts about it.

My journal, for years, has been a word document with dates at the top of each entry, and I've yet to come across something I wanted to do that couldn't be handled by this system.

I found the organization of org-mode made it easier to build/stick to the habit of logging my ideas and activity. I like the idea of org-mode being the place to go for my notes. The outline and tagging style makes sense to me and how I think.

The earlier comment about 20 hours is a bit intimidating. I'm sure there is tons of useful operations and shortcuts I have still to learn, but the quick and simple outlining work for me. Once I got the hang of a few of the keyboard shortcuts it was trivial to just sit down and type (with the exception of copy-paste vs kill-yank).

tags (metadata) for items aren't available in either word documents or plain text documents. a couple keystrokes filters down on tags in org mode. this is a huge value add - think searching photos or bookmarks with/without tags - this can't be done easily in word/plaintext

there's no comparison between navigation/searching in word documents vs. emacs. that may be fine for a mostly write setup, but i'm actively interrogating and reviewing my items - this isn't easily with 1 huge word file, or multiple word files per date, or whatever setup you have.

> tags (metadata) for items aren't available in either word documents or plain text documents. a couple keystrokes filters down on tags in org mode. this is a huge value add - think searching photos or bookmarks with/without tags - this can't be done easily in word/plaintext

Sure it can. If I embed images in a document file along with the text, then Ctrl+F lets me search for that text, which makes it easy to find adjacent images. I tend not to put a lot of images in there, but in practice this works fairly well for the images I do include.

You're also only looking at the benefits of your strategy, without looking at the costs. The cost is, you have to tag things. My strategy works without me tagging anything. I wouldn't be surprised if you can find things slightly faster, but I would be very surprised if this time savings outweighed the time spent tagging.

If it's fun for you to tag things then it's not a cost, so I'm certainly not criticizing anyone using Org mode. Do what you enjoy. I'm just saying it's more of an aesthetic choice than a productivity choice.

This is similar to the various "blog like a hacker" tools out there such as Jekyll or Haunt. People cite all these supposed benefits like version controlling your posts and whatnot, but ultimately the vast majority of successful blogs, including the "hacker" ones, use Wordpress, Blogspot, or something similar.

The underlying point I'm making is that the temptation with highly flexible tools is to spend all your time tinkering with configuration for the tool, rather than doing the thing the tool is intended to do. Some people can avoid that temptation, but I'm not really one of those people.

(Random aside: my file is actually an Open Document Format file (.odt) not a Word Document. It originally was a Word Document, but hasn't been for years, so I'm not sure why I wrote that.)

Same here. The advantage of Org is that it is likely to be around forever, and it's plain text.

And it offers some very nice interpreters to be used on top of plain text. For example, agenda views can support any workflow you can possibly imagine, from a daily planner to a kanban, without needing to write Elisp.

Org, and in general Emacs have this very nice feeling of giving you tools to build whatever you want. In contrast to much more rigid GUI applications.

Though to be honest Word is likely to be around forever as well - insofar as "forever" means current computing equipment. In a world where you can't open a Word document is probably a world where we aren't able to read plain text documents either.

After all, Word documents are "just" a series of compressed xml files. Even the open source alternatives will allow you to recover text in the event you lose access to Microsoft products.

I’ve journaled on and off for years. It’s incredibly stressful for me. Most of what I write is unbearably stupid. It’s excrutiatig to see how dumb I am. I tried to turn lemons into lemonade, and decided to keep a “what did I learn” journal, but it was even worse. Maybe journaling isn’t for everyone.

I'd love to hear more about your experience, especially about what happened exactly with that "what did I learn" journal. I'm on the same boat.

Instead of trying be introspective about my life, I've started to write down facts: I did so-and-so and this is why it worked, or why it didn't work. And what was my emotional reaction. That definitely yields less stupid sounding journals.

I've tried to keep a daily journal of sorts so many times in so many different formats. The one that I seem able to stick to the most is specifically for software development. It's just a markdown file with a top level bulleted list, one entry per day, and a sublist for the things I did that day.

I'm not super consistent with it, but this post is making me want to put more effort into it. As Derek says, I'm not writing for me today, I'm writing for future me.

I'm a total believer in this. I tried for years to keep a journal and nothing ever stuck. Since 2010, though, I've been using services like OhLife and DailyDiary that send me an email prompt every night and I just reply with a few sentences. I then dump these to text files and backup periodically. I can also attach photos and store those. This has been sustainable and archival and I'll be coming up on a decade of daily use soon. It's dead simple. I have little to no infrastructure or tools to maintain and (re)learn, plus the reminders keep me going.