Do you keep a journal / log / diary?

I have a paper journal using the bullet journal methodology to write down how I feel, tasks, priorities, daily journal part and other things that define my day — it’s really powerful for self-reflection and allowed me to notice certain thinking patterns and frustrations before they became huge problems!

I use Notion. Have a daily journal, at the end of each day I reflect on everything went on that day not just business-related. My daily template looks like this:

# Intentions - Highlight (urgency, satisfaction, joy)

# What under my control would make today even more great

# highs / good / happy / proud moments

# What went wrong

# Grateful for

# Message for future self

I tried to do a bullet journal about my life, but I didn't really like it.

Now I update notes every month I have about:

• My strength / weaknesses
• My purposes
• The personality traits I try to improve
• The habits I try to avoid and why

It works well for me. Keep me on track, show me my personal growth, and remind me what's important.

My note system is not a journal, but it's where I write workflows and things I can't automate (or don't have time to) with software.

I've mindmaps about everything I find interesting (often from books).

... and another mindmap for my productivity system 🤪

Kind of...

I use a simple and single mardown file as a journal of all my daily tasks, and an Obsidian.md project to store all my knowledge/experience/ideas/etc.

Started writing in the morning last week. I write whatever is on my mind in a paper notebook. I'm experiencing a boost of System 2, higher level thinking.

May start a more project-oriented practice.

Yes. I always liked the idea of journaling but never stick to it because I couldn't find the right tool that's quick and distraction free. Most of the tools I've tried are either bloated or badly designed.

Eventually I gave up and created a mobile app: ZenJournal as a brain dump of my ideas and thoughts throughout the day.

80 percent of it are just ideas and plans that popped into my mind. I always thought people need to have a balance of public social media sharing vs private mind garden.

Once I dump all these ideas, I can quickly search and filter all the logs and remind myself of old ideas and create new connections. That's the biggest reason.

Then the rest are just rants about personal stuff, I usually feel much relieved after it's dumped into this external memory, because my brain is no longer the only place with the burden of negative thoughts.

I've got a couple things

A morning practice with three questions:

1. how did yesterday go?
2. how do you feel today?
3. what are the things you need to accomplish today to feel satisfied (then I schedule them using a pomodoro framework)

I also use a pretty detailed notion doc for all my product ideas. I try to do a regular reflection on what's working, what's not, why I might stop, or why thing x justifies continued effort.

If you are looking for advice, what worked for me was just doing the thing that felt intuitively right. the morning practice started just with the to-do list, and expanded from there.

The product reflection functioned as sort of an internal decision log, then ballooned into something I quite like. It all feels easy, because I stick to the intuitive side of it.

Recently purchased a PandaPlanner. I was very skeptical at first, but it's been hugely helpful for not only productivity and daily prioritizing but also weekly/monthly reflection on progress. Would recommend.

Yes! brain-dumps/journaling are very important to my happiness and productivity. I do 3 different types of brain-dumps - for tasks, understanding, and worrying.

1. tasks
The goal of my tasks brain-dump is to identify any unknowns. This makes the tasks less overwhelming.[0]

I start by writing anything I can think of that relates to the task. Then for anything that's not specific enough [1] I zoom in and do a brain-dump on that sub-piece.

I keep going until my task isn't overwhelming to me.

2. understanding
This can be for anything personal or work related. The idea is I have something on my mind and I want to dump it out. I'll end up fleshing out some details. I'll develop a better understanding of what's going on.[2]

3. worrying
The goal of the "worry" brain-dump is to teach myself not to worry for most of the day. It reduces anxiety and makes me happy.

I learned this tip from my friend who works in a clinical psychology lab for adolescents.

Many of their teens struggle with anxiety/worry. The lab teaches them to allocate a certain time during the day for "worry time." During this 10 minutes or so, the person is free to worry about anything. They'll usually take out a physical or digital notebook and start writing. Then when this ten minutes is over, they can't indulge in worrying anymore. They have to wait until the next day's chunk of worry time.

I'm not an adolescent but I find the same principle is useful for me. If I allow myself to spend a long time worrying about this or that, it paralyzes me in my work/life and brings me down. Whereas, if i know I have this designated "worry time" to deal with that, I can just focus on doing my thing the rest of the time.

One more thought on brain-dumps:
When starting a brain-dump practice, It's important that however you choose to get your brain-dumps down, it's as low-friction as possible. Brain-dumps are private. They're for you. They're supposed to be messy and fast.[3]

[0] https://medium.com/better-programming/cultivate-your-can-do-attitude-10864742d76d
[1] https://blog.amazingmarvin.com/break-large-projects-tasks-bite-sized-tasks/
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/287465-i-write-to-understand-as-much-as-to-be-understood
[3] https://medium.com/@bytebase/an-iterative-approach-to-notes-f1c2a28c4d29

I have a notion journal and weekly reflection to see how I've progressed and check what has went well. I try to follow the 3 daily positive questions so I stay positive.

I maintain a today.md file which I use for the entire year. This is what my file looks like:

# Monday 13th July

## TODO
- [-] 1 do XUZ 
- [x] 1 do ABC
- [-] 2 work on P 

## Misc

- Dont forget to water Skewi the plant.

# Sunday 12th July

I have been doing this for 1 year now, I am not consistent but I have found this works better than more complex tools.

Steve Jobs famously said this in a speech: ... for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

This, to me, is the primary reason why I keep a journal — to help align myself to my goals, and so that I can see it when the answer has been "No" for a few days in a row.

I just create a Google Doc for every quarter or so, and just log whatever I planned to do that day / what got done, along with the date and time. I sometimes plan my tasks here too, but of late, I've been doing it on Notion instead. This helps in two ways:

1. As I get small chunks of work done throughout the day, I write it in the doc immediately. And when doing so, I glance at the last log time, and make a mental note of how long it took. This helps me keep pushing myself.

2. At the end of the day, I see what's not done, and mark it in a red font colour. This way, if I just scroll through the doc after a week, I'll know in two seconds how much of my planned work got done that week!

I think this is a easy way to keep a log / journal, without adding one more tool to your workflow. And it just serves the purpose without getting in your way. So here's a promise to myself: if this comment receives more than 5 upvotes, I'll write a blog post about it on Pradeep CE! 🙂

As for a public log, I maintain a now page. Same concept as above, but I revisit this every week or so.

Does a blog qualify?

A daily journal would take too much time and effort.

But I have a blog where I post a couple of times per week about my tech experiences and thouhts, which is a way of journaling in public. It's old style in that I don't focus on just a niche but cover a variety of topics, wherease most current blogs are content marketing venues heavily optimized for specific niches.

I also record occasional thoughts and ideas with a note taking app.

I have a journal where I log my notes but I tend to write only the important events, so I don't do it on the daily basis.

Keeping a journal is awesome for documentation (so you can look back on how far you've come) and also serves as a way to organize thoughts as your write them down!

I use a combination of a paper journal - for unstructured brainstorms, free writing, personal writing and Notion - for more formal documentation, writing in a way that I want to keep my thoughts organized.

I love the balance of both because I feel very free to write whatever comes to my mind in my paper journal, but when it comes time to organize and document, Notion is the best.

Oh yes. A general journal, but since I use a graph based note taking app (https://ting.is) i connect all my thoughts to projects or topics or people.

I use it both to trigger myself to think about stuff. Just jot down everything that's happening, and that usually triggers me to reflect on what's going on.

And for insights, ideas, and fears.

Lately I read about CBT in The Coddling of the American mind and started doing a CBT journal (http://jesperbylund.com/blog/2020/7/improve-your-thinking-with-a-Cognitive-Behavioral-Journal).

I think it really, really, helps to just write stuff down.