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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?
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?).
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