# journaling It's interesting to me that "journal" and "journey" come from the same root—the same one that led to "daily" and "day" respectively. I'm very much on a journey to discover how I can use written notes to help me in my life. It only gets more meta from here as I journal about my journey in journaling. I've never been an avid journaler. I usually write a daily diary only when I'm traveling (on a journey, you might say). As of late 2022 I started keeping my random notes I'd write to myself in one place. This place has migrated a bit, and sometimes I edit the old notes to stay more relevant to me long-term, but for the most part everything stays together now. In this note I'll talk a bit about my needs, approach, and the solutions I've tried in the past. ## Needs I'm forgetful. This affects me in at least two levels: the first level is forgetting information. What movie did so-and-so recommend I watch? The second level is more of a failure to synthesize information. Did I like the last 3 movies that so-and-so recommended? How is my taste in movies changing over time as I receive recommendations and then watch them? I'm also anxious. My brain gets "full" sometimes. I can't think due to having so many thoughts clanging around in there already. I have to get them down on paper so they stop bothering me. Do I use what I write? Do I look back later? That doesn't matter so much to this need. It helps me feel better to write down my thoughts. I use multiple devices for authoring and reading my notes. Mainly a personal laptop, but it's nice to be able to have a shared vault with my work laptop. I also sync my vaults to a tablet for when I'm traveling. And it's very handy to be able to access my notes from my phone. I want to leave a mark. I hope that whatever I learn I can share, and do so in a way that benefits future-me as well as others. ## Approach I've tried the "blogging" method, where I write a post, put some photos in it, and publish it. It stays on my site, has its "permalink" (how many blogs have I taken offline over the years now?), and I guess it feels to me like it gathers dust. Maybe it's useful to someone, but it falls out of date. I've tried the [Zettelkasten](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1) method, where I keep my journal in "cards" and try to link them to each other intelligibly. This method would probably work for me if I kept doing it, got better at doing it, and had a clear outcome in mind for the catalog (this method is often employed by people who write books or papers). I think the main drawback to this was not having a good solution for editing or publishing the cards in my catalog. I very briefly tried a "wiki" method, but got overwhelmed by the available solutions. Currently (early 2024) I'm trying a mix between a private "diary" method and a public "[[garden|digital garden]]" method. ## Solutions ### diary - writing my notes in individual, unlinked text files gets tedious and doesn't present any force-multipliers. - I've tried [jrnl](https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/) to author notes quickly and easilly. Going back and maintaining them through a text editor like VS Code takes extra work. It's very simple (on purpose), and perhaps causes me to do too much [toil](https://sre.google/workbook/eliminating-toil/). ### blogging - I've had my share of Blogspots and Wordpresses. A lot of CMS maintenance gets in the way of the actual knowledge work. - My most recent attempt at a blog used the [Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) static site generator, and that worked fairly well. Still a lot of theme management, and I wasn't quite sure how to keep public and private information in the same place. ### Zettelkasten - [The Archive](https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/) was quite nice! It's meant for Zettelkasten but I bet it would work ok for a digital garden as well. No syncing, no publishing. ### wiki - [TiddlyRoam](https://tiddlyroam.org/) caught my eye. It ended up being a bit backwards in some of its UX choices (didn't have markdown out of the box, didn't indent when I press `tab`, didn't auto-continue a list when I press `return`) ### digital garden - I saw [Roam](https://roamresearch.com/) but don't like the fact that I'd be putting the source of my information in the cloud. - The same applies for [Notion](https://www.notion.so/). - I tried [Foam](https://foambubble.github.io/foam/) early in my experimenting with Zettelkasten, but I'm putting it in the garden category now because that's probably how I would get more benefit out of it if I tried it again in the future. The main roadblock I ran into was not being able to maintain multiple separate repositories of information from a single place. Since I stopped trying Foam I decided to unify as much of my note-taking as possible, so it might be worth another look! Unsure if it has publishing tools out of the box. - I considered [Org-roam](https://www.orgroam.com/) for half a second. I don't know Emacs and can't be bothered to learn right now. Pluswhich I'd have to build my own publishing pipeline (fun, yes, but not the point) - I probably didn't give [Dendron](https://www.dendron.so/) a fair shake. - [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/) sure looks and works great for my needs! I don't even mind subscribing for the Sync and Publish features.