Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals
sivers.org
sivers.org
I also use markdown, which feels "close enough" to plaintext and as of now vscode for organizing digital notes. I absolutely agree with the whole "thoughts on" approach and have using tagging to group knowledge in my notes. I wrote a little plugin for vscode that helps you with organizing your notes without having to worry about file structure: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-n....
As for the psychological impacts. Having a journal to help empty my mind has been extremely helpful in managing my anxiety. If I ever find myself thinking too much about work I just turn towards my journal and empty it on to the pages. I find myself less likely to dwell if the thoughts are on paper or captured elsewhere. I think that it helps with acceptance as often times I say to myself, "It'll be there tomorrow." once it's out of my head.
- .org files are plaintext, easily backup-able
- what he has in categories, i have in tags for easy consumption across a few files (reflections.org akin to his); this is important to track multiple things e.g. sex + romance easily
- doing a daily/weekly debrief really showed me how slowly i was moving on allegedly important things, so it exposed that i have an integrity issue right smack in the face and caused me to set observable goals and reflect on pass/failure
highly recommended either via his method or org mode though
My journal, for years, has been a word document with dates at the top of each entry, and I've yet to come across something I wanted to do that couldn't be handled by this system.
The earlier comment about 20 hours is a bit intimidating. I'm sure there is tons of useful operations and shortcuts I have still to learn, but the quick and simple outlining work for me. Once I got the hang of a few of the keyboard shortcuts it was trivial to just sit down and type (with the exception of copy-paste vs kill-yank).
there's no comparison between navigation/searching in word documents vs. emacs. that may be fine for a mostly write setup, but i'm actively interrogating and reviewing my items - this isn't easily with 1 huge word file, or multiple word files per date, or whatever setup you have.
Sure it can. If I embed images in a document file along with the text, then Ctrl+F lets me search for that text, which makes it easy to find adjacent images. I tend not to put a lot of images in there, but in practice this works fairly well for the images I do include.
You're also only looking at the benefits of your strategy, without looking at the costs. The cost is, you have to tag things. My strategy works without me tagging anything. I wouldn't be surprised if you can find things slightly faster, but I would be very surprised if this time savings outweighed the time spent tagging.
If it's fun for you to tag things then it's not a cost, so I'm certainly not criticizing anyone using Org mode. Do what you enjoy. I'm just saying it's more of an aesthetic choice than a productivity choice.
This is similar to the various "blog like a hacker" tools out there such as Jekyll or Haunt. People cite all these supposed benefits like version controlling your posts and whatnot, but ultimately the vast majority of successful blogs, including the "hacker" ones, use Wordpress, Blogspot, or something similar.
The underlying point I'm making is that the temptation with highly flexible tools is to spend all your time tinkering with configuration for the tool, rather than doing the thing the tool is intended to do. Some people can avoid that temptation, but I'm not really one of those people.
(Random aside: my file is actually an Open Document Format file (.odt) not a Word Document. It originally was a Word Document, but hasn't been for years, so I'm not sure why I wrote that.)
And it offers some very nice interpreters to be used on top of plain text. For example, agenda views can support any workflow you can possibly imagine, from a daily planner to a kanban, without needing to write Elisp.
Org, and in general Emacs have this very nice feeling of giving you tools to build whatever you want. In contrast to much more rigid GUI applications.
After all, Word documents are "just" a series of compressed xml files. Even the open source alternatives will allow you to recover text in the event you lose access to Microsoft products.
Instead of trying be introspective about my life, I've started to write down facts: I did so-and-so and this is why it worked, or why it didn't work. And what was my emotional reaction. That definitely yields less stupid sounding journals.
I'm not super consistent with it, but this post is making me want to put more effort into it. As Derek says, I'm not writing for me today, I'm writing for future me.