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Please try multimodal journaling instead of struggling with obisidian, notion, or a notebook
I had a chat with a friend recently about journaling. They were telling me "I've tried so many times but it just doesn't stick with me", and what they did was they tried to implement journaling in their daily life by trying to write every day in a journal about their day. The point, like for many journaling people out there, was to express what happened through their day and take some time to reflect on how they felt, what emotions they were feeling, etc....
They told me it was way too hard for them to stick with the habit, and that they ended forgetting and giving up without realizing, they felt they weren't able to do it well enough so it wasn't for them. And to that I say : NO, if you can't achieve some goal in a specific way that everyone tells you is the right way, then the problem might not be you. Sometimes the way everyone does it is just that, one way to do it, and maybe you just have to find the right way to do it for you !
This conversation made me remember my own journey from few years ago when I was trying to journal more about my thoughts and emotions, I felt kind of lost, I felt it was a chore and a burden, it took time out of my day to do something that wasn't even that fun to do ! Today, I feel as though I've found my peace with the journaling process, but it wasn't through forcing myself to do something that wasn't right for me, and that's what I wanna talk about today. Hopefully this comes across many other people who desperately tried making it work and still have some will and some hope to try something new. <3
What is journaling anyway
First and foremost, I can't say I'm exactly a journaling expert. I've been journaling for a bit more than 2 years now, but these 2 years still taught me some lessons about the art of noting stuff down !
When you want to start journaling, you might start by looking online at what other people do. You might want to know how to journal, when to journal, where to journal, what to journal. In doing so, you will mostly come across :sparkles: the notebook people :sparkles:. These people swear by the classic approach of writing things down by hand. Who would blame them ? Writing things down by hand is by far one of the classic ways to journal, and it's proven to be the most effective way for the brain to process and remember the information you're writing. A notebook and a pen is also a very very cheap way to start writing, so in a way, this is obviously the most common and efficient way to journal stuff.
Notebook people have different ways of practicing though. This can go from writing a simple entry every day about whatever crosses their mind, to having a full on dedicated organisation center for everything going on in their life. Of course, this is a spectrum, and you will find a lot of different ways to do journaling just with a simple notebook ! Here's a few of the ones I like :
The second type of people that I see most often are the "second brain" people, who preach the way of the book Building a secon Brain. These writers use technology at their advantage to achieve their goal : an infinitely growing place for storing knowledge outside their own brain. Based on the popular book by the same name, the idea of the "second brain" is that your journaling should be about laying down every piece of knowledge about you in a safely stored notes app on you electronic devices. Using the power of linking and databases, you could theoretically create the perfect space where you can feel, think, and remember, all while using as little space as possible inside your actual brain.
To me, the idea that the brain might not be able to handle all the information thrown at us every day isn't absurd per se, but more so the idea that it is less costly to design and use a very convoluted system of application. Don't get me wrong, I've been a "second brain" girlie at some point, and I do still like some of the systems I put in place during that time. I'm currently writing this post inside of my very well designed Obsidian vault, but that's beside the point.
The "second brain" definitely has some merit to it, but I think that constantly wishing and designing your perfect system is just a side project that takes away precious energy and time that could and should be used to express your thoughts !
How I do it
For me, journaling is first and foremost about its intention :
You want to record your thoughts and feelings, and you want to review them and process them more deeply.
To achieve this goal, I do some sort of "multimodal journaling". I try to distance myself from the medium I log my journal entries as much as possible, because what matters is just doing it, as much as possible, and feel good about it.
Like everyone else, I have a goal to take some time in my day to journal a bit, think about what happened, think about how I feel. But to take notes, I just try to use whatever's the most available and whatever makes the most sense right now. Since I might have some sort of ADHD or neurodivergence, I often need to switch things up once in a while otherwise most habits don't stick. You couldn't force me to use a written journal everyday for two weeks, but I could do an effort to keep one on me at all times just in case it feels right to use it right now ! Similarly, I've been unable to maintain and properly use my daily notes setup on obsidian for the same reason, I cannot take time off everyday to do the same repetitive task that sometimes doesn't even really make sense in that context.
So, what do I do to journal ?
How we feel
The journaling method I use the most is an app called How we feel. The objective is logging emotions throughout the day to have data and hindsight about your mood during the last few days, weeks, month etc... you can add tags of all sorts, and recently we've gained the ability to log body sensations too !
I love this app first and foremost for the exceptional UX, and lack of ads and paid subscription. When logging something, you get a nice emotion matrix, ranging from "high energy and unpleasant" to "low energy and pleasant", and then you get to chose two words that describe best what you are feeling right now. Standard stuff !
Then that's where the journaling part comes in, you can add a description to your log, a picture, a voice recording, and tags !
This app is basically part of all of my every day journaling and I love it, it's simple and straight to the point yet super powerful.
Photos
I take a lot of pictures of daily stuff, sometimes for a HWF log, other time just to be able to reflect or show someone else what I was doing. I take pictures with my camera sometimes, but mostly with my phone ! I got this app recently that's full of cool filter to make your photos look like old school cameras and I've been having so much fun with it, it adds a lot of character to every picture and makes them look a lot more professional than they actually are lol.
Audio recordings
Although I haven't been doing this one a lot these days, I love using audio recordings to journal stuff. It feels more natural to speak than to write, and sometimes that's just something you need. Very emotional subjects are really tough to write about, but venting and rambling and "vomiting words" is just better.
Dumping words on my keyboard
I like keyboards, a lot (might do another blog post about that one day). So something weird I do sometimes is pull up any keyboard and start typing thoughts as they come in. This is a weird one because it's not going into any file and it's not saved anywhere, the keyboard is usually not plugged into anything or the computer will just be turned off. It's just about the act of typing and writing something with a keyboard. This is not for everyone to be honest, and I don't know if this can be translated to other mediums. But I'm still throwing it out there for the sake of talking about it.
Journal app
I use the journal app on my google pixel sometimes to write stuff, it's simple and basic, doesn't have ads, and can be used without an account to avoid feeding data to google. You can write, add pictures etc...
Obsidian
This is again a medium I haven't use for a while, but I've used and set up obsidian for a while. Obsidian is a well known note taking app that uses the markdown file format to do some pretty awsome stuff. You can basically create your own little wikipedia with text files. It's great for managing tasks, writing daily notes, taking notes on subjects you're studying, movies you've watched or books you've read.
Sometimes I use obsidian as a journaling tool because its very practical to link knowledge together, and think about new ideas through linking stuff. My memory isn't the best sometimes and obsidian is very nice tool to keep around whenever I wanna store stuff I really want to remember for later and produce new ideas.
Notebook
After all this talk about digital recordings, I'm still quite a fan of the ol' classic notebook. It's hard not to love the feeling of writing on paper honestly, it's just a different experience in my opinion, and I think anyone who wants to journal even a little bit should be keeping a little notebook somewhere to just write stuff by hand sometimes. The advantage of the notebook is honestly the free form nature, you can write as big and as small as you want, you can write in the middle of the page, you can draw, you can scribble something and then scrape everything off.
I cannot count the number of times I've done something on a notebook I could not have done on any digital support. A notebook has no features, no updates, no storage, no billing plan. You just buy some paper and grab a pen and start doing whatever you need to do, it's liberating. Always consider having a simple notebook.
Conclusion
For my friends that's maybe reading this, and to everyone else, the fix to your issue with journaling isn't about trying harder or forcing yoursel to use a medium you're not confortable with, it's just about trying stuff out that feels enjoyable and insightfull for you. If something doesn't stick, try something else, there's lots of way to record your thoughts, your emotion, your life. If you can't put them all in one single place, place them in in all kinds of different places ! In the end, I think journaling is really more about the intention than the medium you're noting things in, please mix and match your tools, make it messy, remove the friction and the constraints. Please just have fun.