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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1780 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

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I'm thinking of keeping a journal. It's something my parents tried to instill in me as a child, but I didn't see the point then (of course). Now that I'm much older, I think I can see more of why that type of record keeping/thought organizing might be useful.

I'm planning to type my entries on my Windows desktop. While my initial plan is to just make a folder of text files, I think it would useful to have software that helps me organize it. Ideally, I'd like to be able to sort entries by date or topic (tag?), with multiple entries per date and the possibility of associating other media with entries.

Are there any journal keepers here on The Motte with software recommendations or other journal tips?

OneNote is great and I use it and depend on it for my job, but I ended up using Joplin for my personal "note taking" app. I chose it over Obsidian for reasons now largely lost to time, I recall the things people praised Obsidian for weren't things I cared about, integrations of various kinds. Joplin syncs to DropBox, and I'm able to use it on mac/windows/ios. It's built on some bloated framework so it's a little slow to load on desktop OS's, though.

That said, as far as journals go, Joplin only contains my dream journal. Regular, brief daily journal entries go in a weekly planner, I use Leuchtturm A5 because they're easy to find and are formatted well. You can also get a different color every year and then you don't even have to label them. If I actually have something to say then I'll try for an essay and save that with its date in my personal documents.

I'm maybe a little obsessively reflective, but it definitely seems worthwhile to leave some breadcrumbs for yourself as you make your way through the world. I recently came across some of my earlier journaling from ~20 years ago at my childhood home and it was not what I expected, in a good way. There's a lot we forget.

I've been journaling off and on since childhood and digital journaling consistently since 2013.

TLDR: Obsidian. I use a template some of the time, and a journal review process I'll describe below.

I started in a program called Liquid Story Binder X, a locally installed program for writing, where you could attach entries to a calendar and it was very rewarding to look at the calendar and see all the dates lit up for the dates you had done them. This was abandonware, however, and did not autosave (at least by default) so I eventually moved to Evernote Remember before one note or google keep or anything when Evernote was a sexy startup unicorn that you could access all of your personal files? And then there were some unpopular changes, they stopped doing their own storage (hence no advantage in avoiding google/amazon) and pared down the capabilities of free accounts so that you could no longer install it on all of your devices for free. I had a paid account some of the time but I just wasn't getting enough usage out of it. So since my journal was on google servers anyway I jumped to Google Docs I brought over all of my files and linked them in a spreadsheet. I also set up my template so that I was creating the journal entry in a google form, when I wanted to. This was when I started doing journal reviews some days. If I feel like doing it, I reread journal entries from the same day. As I stated before I started journaling in 2012, so I have between 4 and 12 entries for any given day. Sometimes I review all of the entries, sometimes only the even or odd years. On review I occasionally delete old entries (if they were sparse) or add a + to the end of the name if I know it is a good one. I became really disillusioned and untrusting of Google, I think it was when they started scanning your personal files for copyrighted material circa 2020 so I jumped to Obsidian I have a dataview table that shows me all of the entries for today (so I can do the review process above) and I store new entries in one big folder in the format 22JUL2025. I have a template with a few brain-dumpy questions (what would make today great? dreams?--logging your dreams helps you remember them) and some memory focused ones(Did anyone say anything funny? What was the best thing about yesterday? Who did you talk to? What are you reading/watching?).

You could always just self-host a wiki with the same software that Wikipedia uses. (Other options include Tiddlywiki, Dokuwiki, and Wiki.js.)

I prefer Obsidian for general organization and note-taking. It would serve well as a way to organize an electronic journal with little fuss.

I've had Obsidian bookmarked for a while, but it seems to be a bit low-level for what I'm looking for. I'm sure it's very powerful, but so is LaTex and I don't generally type up my documents in that over something like Word.

I'm curious what you mean by 'low-level', here. I've heard Obsidian described many ways, but I don't think I've heard 'low-level' before.

I use OneNote. Linux users seem to recommend Obsidian for similar purposes.

New pages are automatically dated, it has built in search, and you can embed many sorts of media from pics and video to spreadsheets. Decent OCR too for text within pasted images.

It's a lot easier and more versatile and feature rich than trying to do it with text files. Try it out.

I'll give this a try. I'm not entirely sure about Microsoft nowadays, but ease of use has its appeal.

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