Ask HN: Do you keep a diary?
Just wondering if people maintain diaries today. If you do, how long have you maintained it and what were your reasons for keeping a diary? Thanks!
Last year (8 days short of exact) I started using the OhLife.com service. Oh Life will email you everyday at a set time of your choosing. All you do is reply to the email with your entry, you can even add a photo, and they store it away.
The emails also come with excerpts from past entries. E.g. "Two weeks ago you wrote...". (You can turn this off) Finally, the service comes with export features when you care to leave.
If you don't feel like writing anything for the day, just delete the email. When you get the next one tomorrow you can pick right back up. I still don't hit every day but I consistently at least recap the events in a week.
You can probably directly correlate the length of my entries with how stressed out I am about something in my life. My reason for starting a journal is to slow down and reflect upon things when otherwise things are just too crazy. It helps both at the time of writing, and later if I care to read through things again with a clear mind. When you're stressed out you can do all manner of irrational things when you're not thinking things through clearly.
Since starting, I've also picked up on writing about the pleasant things in my life. E.g. fun nights out with my gf and friends, vacations, funny things at work. Even when things seem dull and boring I'll at least throw it into a weekly recap.
Oh Life looks like a good fit. I just signed up.
Also, I don't think the dynamic of having a friend involved would work to well. Why would I like to be bothered if my friend can't keep his commitment to write a journal. As soon as it becomes a habit and they don't fix it, I'm just going to mark it as spam.
That didn't work for me at all. It felt like a chore, and one that I didn't enjoy so I just stopped. This time I bought one (A nice Moleskine) when I was struggling internally for a long period and felt I just needed to get some things out. I wrote in it frequently during that time and only wrote in it when I felt like I needed to or wanted to. Any time of the day, didn't matter when it was.
I find this to be really helpful and going back and reading what I had wrote is very interesting. The whole process is great. I still write in it although not as frequently right now. The frequency varies. The only trick is that I keep it with me in my laptop bag so when I feel like writing it's available.
Also having a pen and paper is far better for me than typing it in electronically. I can't see myself changing that habit. So if I were to pass on any advice I would say buy one and keep it close to you at all times so that when you feel like writing you can. This is what worked for me - your milage may vary.
Seriously, a nice fountain pen makes writing so much more enjoyable. Grab yourself a decent (>$30) fountain pen and a quality ink (I like Noodler's). Combined with a journal that has quality paper, your writing experience will be so much more pleasant. Fountain pens encourage better style and your hand doesn't cramp since no pressure is required.
Plus, it's nice not having chicken-scratch that looks like a ten year old's writing (or a CS major)
What I ended up doing by mistake which I really like is that when I get to the end of a diary, I have usually written only on the front side of pages. So I start writing on the back sides of the pages and I watch as my life unfolds in reverse. I can see how I felt yesterday, then 3 days ago, then 5 days ago, and then it gets to several months. And I am looking back on how I thought/felt and seeing all these patterns. You start looking at what you wrote in a different like. Patterns, like maybe a person in your life being sad often or a certain idea that you keep writing about, start to really emerge clearly.
I think it is a worthwhile habit if you want to understand your mind. It also helps me sleep most of the time by letting me get stuff out of my head.
I've been keeping such a thing for over a decade now, first in CVS, then in TLA (aka GNU Arch) and now in Git.
All my mails since about 1998 is kept and archived aswell.. and the reason I keep everything, and store them in git, is because I have an unnatural desire to cling on to every bit of stuff I wrote, every discussion I've been involved in, and so on. Having it in git also allows me to easily replicate all or parts of it on my different machines, as a cheap backup solution.
That being said, I never delete anything and have files going back 18 years on my Drobo, so I can pretty much have a record of online activity for over half my life.