They say journaling really helps in goal achievement, and I guess I understand why. In that it forces someone to actually think about their life and where it’s going. I’ve been far too lax in this myself over the past… Five years. Ow.
I think it’s telling that my journalling seemed to stop when I got introduced first to audiobooks, and then to podcasts. I also stopped writing seriously at about the same time. I got a lot more writing done on my monochrome Palms and Visors than I have on my color, multimedia Palms and Pocket PCs and I think there’s a real connection there. As long as I have audiobooks and podcasts to listen to on the go, I don’t have to do what I did throughout, well, not just the 90s but my entire 20th century life when I had downtime: think. Portable media in general has made it much easier for me to live an unexamined life. I need to see to that.
Hence, journaling.
But how best to approach it? I have, as I see it, four main options.
1. I can keep doing this the way I’ve always done it, back to my Palm days. Keep my journal entries in Word documents, one per month. The advantage to this is that it keeps my journal stuff all in one place, in an easily archived and researched, as well as making it trivial to go back a reread stuff in sequence. The disadvantage is that it’s a minor hassle to start new journal entries towards the end of the month as the document gets longer and I won’t have access to the archives anytime, anywhere.
2. Use a specialized journal program like DayNotez. This is available for Windows and Windows Mobile, and automatically timestamps entries. Also makes it easy to associate entries with contacts and generate tasks from my notes. Downsides include being locked into a proprietary database oriented system and having to stick with a specific tool.
3. Journal by emailing stuff to myself. I’ve already set up a special jeffkirvin.net address. I can send emails to this address where they’re automatically sorted, labled and searchable in Gmail. Also makes it easy to vent to friends and journal at the same time. Downside: I’m not sure I want Google to datamine what’s in my journal. “Do no evil” my ass.
4. Journal in my Exchange calendar, putting notes either in individual events or just creating a free, untimed “Journal” event for free form ideas. This is how DateBk5 and Agendus do it, and it’s not a bad idea at all. I can journal from Outlook or my phone, everything is searchable and yet still shielded from Google’s prying eyes. Downsides are that it’s really difficult to review joural entries in sequence and that this will tend to balloon my PIM.VOL file on my phone unless I only store a limited number of past events locally.
And the winner is?
I think I’ve settled on journalling in Word because it has the least severe downsides. I don’t want to be locked into a specific tool, email has privacy issues and ActiveSync truncates really long notes.
2 Comments
I’m with you on this one. I’ve returned to using Word as well, mainly because the vast majority of my journals over the past 10 years where written in Word and changing doesn’t work so well. I used DayNotez for about a year but have the same objections you do, not to mention that I can’t use DN directly on a Mac (I have to fire up Parallels).
Word just works the best. I can use the files on my 2 PDAs with TextMaker as well so this is a win-win.
BTW, if you’re looking for a note applicaton that AS won’t truncate, look at PhatNotes (actually I can’t believe you’re not already using it). I don’t know what the note size limit on it is, but it’s pretty large.
As far as journal sizes, I don’t start a new journal every month. I do my journals in volumes with each journal file being a “link” in a volume. In the way dark ages when I first started doing a journal on a computer (think Apple //c), file size was limited by what could fit in RAM without too much swapping, so the links tended to be small (about 25-50K). I would write links until a floppy disk was full (5.25 inch ones, mind you that held about 170k) and the contents of that disk became a volume. Nowadays, of course, we don’t have those restraints, but I still do volumes and links. So about 75 pages makes a link and I abitrarily set the size of a volume at 8 links. I tend to go in spurts when writing in my journal and I may write a full link in a week, and other times it may take me months to do a link. So monthly based journal files wouldn’t really work for me as I do thinks now (although it may actually inspire me to write on a more consistent basis).
Don
I have gone back almost to plain text. I use PmWiki as a journal. Entires are stored in flat files as text. If I ever needed to I could simply extract them into text files.
Entries are created automatically in yyyymmdd format. I can tag entries and view past entries grouped by tags, month, etc.
I can create entries using a browser, or via a text editor such as emacs/vim. I have set up a couple of links that let me export the whole lot either as text in files with a months worth of entries, or as pdf. Thus I can easily take either the whole or parts of my journal and read them on almost any device.
Ian.
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