Journalling with DayOne!
I learned about DayOne when it was released and available only for iphone and mac. Back then I just marvelled at how good the app was beause I didn’t have an iPhone or Mac and I wasn’t into Journalling.
At the start of this year when I made the switch to Iphone I serendipitously rediscovered DayOne. I downloaded the app and started journalling. Journalling just like reading was something that I wanted to do since childhood but my attempts at maintaining a diary/journal never materialized beyond the intial excitement phase. Thanks to DayOne I have now gotten into the habit of journalling.
I have been successully journalling since the start of this year and am on a 57 day streak. Which is to say that I have been journalling every day religious since I started using this app.
The app is free but I paid the yearly membership of 39$ which unlocks the ability to have multiple journals, unlimited photos per entry, unlimited devices, email to journal, end-to-end encryption among others that made it worth while for me.
Why I chose digital journalling over physical format.
Pretty simple, I have my phone on me at all times. And that is key to journalling. Being able to jot down/record my thoughts immediately before I lose them. Added layer of security, the dayone app is locked using face id so no one can go through my journals. This can’t be said about the physical journals, by chance if I leave it opened somewhere I don’t want anyone reading it.
How I am currently journalling
I probably would need to revisit this with a follow up post. As of this moment, I don’t really have a structure to my journalling. Although DayOne provides some nice templates which you can use to kickstart your journalling habit. I have been pretty adhoc with my journal entries.
Right now I have 3 journals, a personal one, a work journal and a health journal.
My personal journal is pretty much a dump of whatever I want to write about at the moment. I am also using it from time to time as a therapy session log. Where instead of paying someone to listen to me and transcribe into the log I am doing that job by directly writin it into a journal entry when I feel the need. Also create a high level of all the key events in the day! But I am working towards creating a structure around what I should journal about. Having a structure in place would give more purpose and help me keep the journalling habit going for long. More on this when I get there…
Work is just as the name suggests, I use it to log what I have been working on, what I achieved, what I couldn’t get to…etc. This is more of keeping myself accountable.
Health is a log of all things related to health.
I would like to add more journals in the months to come but I still consider myself in the infancy stages of my journalling journey. I don’t want get overwhelmed with too many journals and having to create/maintain entries in each of them.
It is arguable that in the world of social media where everyone posts important events and happenings on their social media pages that they can just go through to look back on the events of their life. But I consider that posts on social media don’t tell you the full story. The posts are mostly to give your friends and family a fake sense of how you want to be percieved rather than what it actually looks like.
But for people like me, I like having a personal space where I can write/record stuff that I want to maintain private and have a way to to look back at. And DayOne so far seem to be the best solution for that.
DayOne is the best app that provides minimal friction to journalling and is truly a private digital space. I think if you are/want to get into journalling you should try DayOne app. Currently they have it available for both IOS and Android. But the desktop app version is available only for Mac.
Other Alternatives I looked at
jrnl : a command line tool written in python to create journal from command line. Journal-org: For those who are like me who like Emacs+Org.
While the above 2 are compelling alternatives, the lack of a proper mobile app to go along with them meant that I would have to be super meticulous about journalling. Which I am not there yet. But if I get to that point, I might consider switching but at the moment I am pretty content paying and using DayOne.
But since DayOne isn’t available for Linux, I am considering leveraging org-journal to journal on my thinkpad and then emailing it to DayOne.