My Personal Journaling Journey- A post about Logging Self-Thoughts and Activities

Introduction

I had never been a fan of writing a dairy or a Personal Journal. I always thought it was too much of effort to record what you did, how you felt at the end of the day, or what you planned to do tomorrow. It felt like making a to-do list with extra steps.

I can recall several incidents where I added “5 Leetcodes problems” to my Todoist every day and ended up doing none. The point is: why bother recording something when your brain can register it for the future? You keep certain thing in your brain and check them off mentally rather than doing it manually.

I can summarize my entire day in my head at the end. Writing about what I did and adding a mood check every day? Who does that? Do people really note how they feel at the end of each day? They do actually. Surprising, isn’t it? But they do and you will find plenty of mobile apps that helps you do just that.

So, what brings me into writing a journal of my own?

I am recording my personal experiences in this post. I am going to start with how I started with it, why I quit, and why I restated journaling with a different approach and a new mindset that helped me being consistent with journaling.

How I started with a Borrowed Motivation?

Last November, I found this blog of a guy learning machine language. He used to jolt down his daily progress, focusing only on what he studied and how many questions he attempted, taking few gaps in the middle. He was sharing his progress tracking not just on his blog but in twitter as well. That motivated me to record my own progress, keeping aside all the bs I did in a day. So how I implemented it?

Daily Progress Reports

In the beginning, I was using notion to record all my programming related progress. Since, I wasn’t preparing for machine learning, my main motivation to learn a new thing every day and jolt it down in notion. I was not confident enough nor I had an audience too get some sort of validation or feedback, so I used to share it with Claude AI. It was fun till it lasted, but it didn’t last longer.

I stopped doing it after a month. There were reasons. You can call it was a second-hand or borrowed motivation that I picked without having my own thoughts put into it. Learning something new every day wasn’t a challenge, finding something to learn every day was. It was something I picked from a person that had a set goal, while I was trying to mimic it. But I am glad it lasted a month.

AI Response

AI gave me cookie-cutter feedback every time I shared my progress. I could put some parameters to adjust its response. Without it, I would get “You did a great job, hurray!”, sorry for paraphrasing I don’t have access to my previously flushed data anymore.

By parameters I meant you can ask to be critical about the progress or/and compare it to the previous one. You might get some insight from it. Also, it’s still private than sharing with your friend or some rando online.

How my I Restarted Journaling again?

I was sitting on the last day of the year with Logseq opened in my laptop. Recounting all the habits I had and seeking for some sort of changes. In fact, I was having that “New Year New Me” moment of my own. Truth to be told, I downloaded Logseq that very day for that very activity.
I made lots of plans, I was able to achieve few of them, some of them are still pending, while some were superficial. Neither writing a personal journal was there nor publishing a public blog.

Now, it’s not a random thought that came into me out of nowhere. It’s something that had been building up for a long time. In fact, the idea of personal journaling came from video games. It is surprising for someone else, but for me it is perfectly normal thing to happen.

Video Games Inspiring People

The Video games are often for fun, but sometimes they are very empowering; you can get emotionally attached with some virtual characters, in a way that it exercises your empathy. Video Games, on rare cases, can also motivates you enough to think for a gender swap. So, it should not sound odd when I say video games can teach you writing a personal journal. Though, there is no specific game that taught me journaling methodically, it is just I picked the breadcrumbs from many games. For example, Amnesia: Bunker has its entire storytelling structured in journals. These journals are not recorded daily; it records the events that worth mentioning.

The same goes for Divinity Original Sins 2: DE and many other RPGs in which you collect lore-relevant journals written by NPCs. They are linear but not strict. They are driven by relevant information, that may not be relevant to you in many cases, but for that particular person who wrote this.

Publishing a Blog

Is publishing a public blog is considered journaling? Technically, yes! You are publishing your thoughts out loud. I reckon putting your thoughts on a blog is safer than putting your face on streaming websites. Some people prefer talking, I prefer writing. Regardless of platform, you are journaling.

Is publishing a public blog considered journaling? Again, yes. Its rather stringier than having personal thoughts documented in a private platform. You may offend some, but your end-goal should be sharing opinion without prejudice. That is something harder for many YouTubers these days.

You are putting some thoughts for public to see that might be your opinion, but opinions need to have some degree of validity. You cannot claim something out of thin air; public blog make you open for scrutiny.

Besides that, you need to categorize it properly. You can do it too in your private journal, but it depends heavily on your platform, try doing it in your physical diary.

Personal Journaling in Logseq

I have been journaling since that very day. 31st December marked my very first journal for continuous journaling. When I have some thoughts on a subject, I jolt it down. I use #Hashtags to categorized them when needed.

For example, I can use #DragonAge to write my thoughts on that video game, and I can use an escape hashtag, #backtonotes, when I am done with Dragon Age.

Use #ProgressReport or #DailyProgressReport to report what have you worked today in your venture.

Writing my personal journal is not limited to private stuff, but it also holds my data that I want to publish on my blog. Besides that, I also note down any plan that I have for future. Every good plan needs to be executed, but every plan may or may not need to be documented; however, doing so gives you much clear picture of your progress over time. You can use Kanban board apps like Trello for that as well.

Why Journaling though?

Why does it even matter?

I want to go back to the introduction where I expressed my distastefulness with reporting day-to-day activities. Writing a dairy is too much of a hassle, maintain your streak is even more. Having a tool makes the life easier. Many self-help expert guide their audience to record their mood daily to reflect back upon them once you finish their course (or book).

Language teachers suggest you make audio recording(s) daily to make comparison once you finished their course.
The general idea is to reflect back on your progress. The change that comes to you is the conclusion of that course. Journaling can help you track that at a certain extent.

Print media often do it for the ongoing events, for example, sky news has an impressive timeline recording the progress of (never-ending) Russia-Ukraine war (here). News is a discipline of Journalism. This is why it matter, to look back into your life and see how it changes. It doesn’t serve that much of a purpose in personal capacity, but it serves aa a window to past that you can look back upon. It is a time that can only go in one direction.

What Lessons you can Pick from this Article?

My intentions were to help an unguided soul, waiting to document his/her own life in a piece of paper or an application, but lacks motivation, reason, or method to do it. I want to conclude this article with lessons that I believe you can pick from this article:

1. Get a platform. Virtual platforms are good for categorizing your thoughts. With diary, you got something shinny to put on your desk but its rather limited compared to a computer application. Logseq is something I can recommend. You don’t have to bother yourself with downloadable plugins (Obsidian) or limited extensions (Notion); It does the job of recording without distraction pretty well.
2. Don’t borrow motivations. You should have your reason to journalize your life. It is ironic, but you most probably going through some adventure of yourself too that worths documenting.
3. Grammar is optional. Just write, forget about any grammaticall mistakes. Keep you focus toward dumping your thoughts.
4. Log at your own convivence. No need to follow any strict writing rituals or daily streaks. You are not getting points to maintain the streak. Record when you have something to record.

I hope this article helps you in your venture. This was my story of starting my personal journal, you can share something of your own using the comment section. Follow me on Twitter if you want to connect with me.

Thanks for reading, have a great day!