Comment by idearoots | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idearoots | Hacker News Reader

My non-obvious observation after five years in this field:

In essence, journalling is similar to a psychotherapy session.

The clarity of mind you get after a journalling session comes from structuring things in your head, not in your TfT tool.

Yet, as one would expect, people project that feeling onto a tool — which leads to more time invested.

Ultimately after the N-th session, when you try to use the tool to get more of that feeling — you get the opposite, burnout, and then people switch to a new TfT app for the same cycle.

These benefits are why "Daily Pages" were vital to Roam Research's success. Not the bi-directional links or graphs as many think.

"Daily Pages" get you closer to a new therapeutic session, which is what you want most of the time.

I use :

  - paper notebooks. 
  - remarkable 2 
  - markdown/notion + NeuraCache [I'm a founder] for flashcards and spaced repetition

+ I've been in group and individual therapy for three years now.

I have never been happier with my setup.

I've found the same, the catharsis of writing the "Daily Notes Pages" [0] is probably the main benefit of these systems.

In my case, the immediacy of handwriting has been a better fit than typing for this purpose. I also use the reMarkable 2 with a linked pdf planner [1] that I built, and with some custom collections I find it hits about 90% of what I'd use a "proper" TfT for. Obsidian and Logseq still look pretty seductive, but I know I'd spend most of my time in the weeds configuring plugins etc.

I'm hoping the rM2's OCR and export capabilities improve over time so that we could combine the benefits of quick, effortless capture on that device (via handwriting) with automated categorization, linking and search (on my laptop, maybe via Obsidian/Logseq/etc). There's a lot of potential if someone can effectively bridge that gap! It's something I hope to explore some more this year.

[0] https://maggieappleton.com/daily-notes [1] https://hyperpaper.me/ (as seen recently on HN :)

Great to see a Maggie Appleton reference!

She also did a talk on Tools for Thought in April 2022:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6uhvFGPUE0 (she's the first half of the video)

And she has an unfinished blog post on the topic as well:

https://maggieappleton.com/tools-for-thought

I just found her site a month or two ago (via HN, I think), it's really fantastic! Thanks for the pointers

> In essence, journalling is similar to a psychotherapy session.

Thus why I journal. I don't do it daily, but when I do, it gets my thoughts out and I find that once they are out, it just helps to put words to something that you might be feeling.. well, isn't that what you pay a therapist for, right?

Our tools differ, but our end goal is more or less the same. I keep it as simple as possible, because as you said, burnout is real.

How do you use the remarkable 2 in your workflow?

I also agree that the one most useful habit is a daily log. It hits the sweet spot for me in terms of low friction + benefits in organizing information.

If the thought is clear, I write it in a paper notebook as nicely as possible — in a "Daily Page" format.

If the thought is unclear, I write random contextual things in RM2 and erase or leave them there to mature or die.

I also use RM2 to read articles, pdfs, and draw or think about them.

So it mainly serves as a thinking space that feels Offline.

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