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Welcome to new members
(sh.itjust.works)
I see quite a few new members have joined our small community in the last few weeks which is great! A warm welcome to every single one of you!
I was wondering if you would be interested in post where everyone would be able to present themselves in a few words if they wanted to, maybe share a little info about themselves and their journaling habits or why they're considering journaling?
No obligation, obviously, and nothing too personal should probably be shared but here it is.
If the discussion gains enough traction I may pin it as a permanent welcome post and an invitation to new members to introduce themselves. If it doesn't, well so be it.
I will introduce myself in the comments, read you there ;)
Hi! I just stumbled across this community. I've been journaling about 6 years now I think. I started because I was worried about my memory and thought practicing remembering what I did that day might help, as well as having something to refer back to. So I just started writing down what I had done that day. Initially a few bullet points, then that grew. I write something every day but the only rule is I have to write something, I don't require a certain number of words or to cover anything in particular.
I don't think it's helped my memory (In the end I'm pretty sure I just have ADHD, with plenty of memories but no control over retrieving them). I kept it up anyway, and often refer back to them to see what I was doing on certain days (like the time a speeding ticket arrived in the mail and neither my wife nor I could remember going anywhere near where the camera was - in the end it turned out my mother in law had borrowed the car that day).
When I was starting I put some thought into the medium and decided for searchability I wanted it to be digital, and for longevity I went with plain text files. I have a folder for each year, then name them with the date such as 2025-01-13.txt for today. I feel these are going to be really important to me when I'm older, as important as photos, so I have them stored across a number of free cloud storage providers, that I update every few months (every day to one, the rest in bulk).
I'm not sure what I'm hoping to get out of the community, but I've subscribed anyway and we will see how it goes 🙂
Welcome :)
That's smart. I try to write daily too but I don’t really.
I’ve been journaling for 50 years and beside a few short periods I don’t think I ever managed to do it daily. Alas, I cannot check since for decades I regularly destroyed my journal. Something I quickly learned to do as a child in order to escapee my mother… inquisitorial habits and her not liking what I was writing in it; and what I was telling about myself. I don’t have much regrets in life—not that I’m that faultless perfect nice guy that never do any wrong, I’m not but I also tend to assume all my poor choices as well as the bad things I may have done—but this regular burning of my journals is one of the two things I regret doing in my life and wish I would be able to undo traveling back in time.
Any specific reason to make you thing it doesn’t help? I mean, I consider writing the best help to train my memory right after having long (interesting) discussions with (interesting) people.
Text files are great, and they’re very reliable in the long-term so, since you’re making backups, there is little risk of you not being able to read them in the future.
Like I mentioned in another comment (moments ago), I’m committed to analog myself but I still have devised a search/indexing system that works wonders. It’s based on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten (a fancy name to describe a shoe box of some sort filled with... index cards). The meaningful parts of my journal ends up indexed in that Zettelkasten so I know I will be able to find it, in no time be it tomorrow or in a few years.
Looks like you’re very well organized :)
It’s a real small community, and one that only very recently started to move out of hibernation. Imho, what you will get out of it depends a lot what you will be willing to put into it. What I’m pretty sure of is that the more people decide to participate and contribute content, the more new users could be tempted to participate themselves ;)
Once again, welcome!
Thanks!
When I started, I knew I needed to make it a habit or the time between entries would grow until I'd basically stopped. They say to form a habit, start really small. If you want to make a habit of flossing your teeth, you don't have to do them all, start small. Do just one tooth, but do it every day. It's the regularity that's important not the extent to which you do it. So I started with the rule to do it every day with no specific length, and it has worked for me.
It doesn't sound like you had much choice, but at least you can change it going forward 🙂
Just that my memory didn't get any better 😅. I can't tell you what I did last week any more than I could when I started. Except now I can look it up because I kept a record. I have very few memories from my childhood, but if someone says the right thing then suddenly a whole memory will come flooding into my head, full of detail. It's something about how my brain works that I've just accepted.
This was my thinking when deciding to use text files. As a bonus, with advances in AI I figure it won't be too long before I'll be able to feed in all my entries and ask it about what I did on a particular day, what some interesting things were from that year, or what were some key moments in my life. I think the technology for this would exist now if I put the effort in, but I think I might appreciate it more in another 20 or 30 years.
One of the things I don't much like about physical medium is the risk of losing it, whether by misplacing it or by having my house burn down. The ability to make virtually unlimited copies and spread them around means I feel more comfortable with that risk. Text files are not very big so I don't have to worry about storage costs. I also make many copies of photos and videos but they are large and therefore much more expensive to store.
I don't think I ever followed r/journaling, so I'm not sure what kind of content was common. But I have subscribed here and will try to contribute where I can, though I'm more of a commenter than a poster 🙂