Journaling

A lot of my writing has been journaling, writing about my life to myself. Mostly it’s just scribblings in notebooks, and now I’ve got boxes and boxes of old notebooks that I can't bear to toss. Reading through them is pretty incredible. It only takes a few words to be transported back to that moment when I wrote it, years ago, not just remembering what I was talking about, but actually remembering the thoughts going through my mind at the time.

I started using Day One on my iPad a few years ago to keep a journal. I really don’t feel like I know what I’m doing with the journal, so I’ve been doggedly recording things. It actually was really useful over the last couple of years when my days were really complicated. I’d check in with the journal a couple of times a day as things transitioned, just to keep track of where I was and where I’d been.

I’d say that Day One is part of my organizing scheme, part of the group of apps that I rely on that includes Omnifocus and my Calendar. I use it a lot, and refer back to it a lot, but somehow, I’m still not quite sure where it fits into things overall. It’s not a notebook, it’s not a planner, it’s a journal, and I guess I’m still a little fuzzy about how that’s supposed to work.

Bullet Journal

I was pretty excited to learn about the concept of bullet journaling. What I found really cool was the way it broke things down into manageable chunks, starting with the month, and then working day by day. I also really liked the Future Log, where you just have a list of things that are coming up in the next six months or so. I realized that I was missing that sort of long-term view in my current scheme.

But ultimately, a bullet journal just wasn’t for me. The system calls for a separate, paper notebook to keep track of things. I’m pretty much done with paper, and I’m happy to just cart my iPad and my iPhone around without having to worry about having another thing to keep track of. I tried replicating it digitally, first using GoodNotes to create a hand-written digital journal, and then Bear to create a typed, tag-based system. Both of those would have worked, but I found that I was just replicating what I was doing in my trusted system of Omnifocus, Calendar, and Day One.

I did steal some things for the bullet journal concept, though. I now review things month to month as well as week to week. I’ve been focusing more on the week as a unit, where before I was just looking at day to day until I got through the month. Starting out looking at the entire month, and then breaking it down into component weeks has really helped me sort of visualize how everything all fits together. And going back and reviewing the previous month is helping ground my memories on what has happened, and where I am right now.

Still, there’s something attractive to me about the concept of having it all in one place—to-do list, calendar, journal. I use all three of these apps, but I have to wire them together in different ways to make them more efficient. It would be nice to be able to see the whole picture in one of them, instead of having to switch from app to app and get just a slice, and that’s what a bullet journal would offer.

I’m so dependent on my system that I’m really hesitant to take the big leap, which would be to just use whatever bullet journal system I come up with. Instead, I’m looking at Day One, and trying to figure out some way that it can become my overall picture. It’s where everything ultimately ends up, and I think if I make few tweak here or there, I should be able to use it more effectively.