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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   4607 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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Do any of you keep diaries or journals?

If so - what do you write in there? What format do you use: notebook, digital, etc.? And how long have you kept it up?

I write down all kind of things from reviews to essay drafts and todo lists in Trillium.

I have a journal folder as well though I can rarely be bothered to touch it, usually only when something particularly interesting happens in my life.

I keep notes, random thoughts and pictures in an empty Discord channel because it's convenient and accessible from anywhere. Discord automatically timestamps everything and gives me a very powerful search engine and API to use bots to auto scrape and save an offline copy every week. Very useful for transferring small information between my phone, home PC and work PC.

Not judging because I've done it too, but oh God I hate that this is the easiest way to sync stuff between your own devices.

I use a slightly more bootleg version of this. I use a whatsapp chat with myself as a commonly shared dump among my phone, PC and laptop.

Much in the same way, GitHub is just free cloud storage for my personal coding projects.

I don't find much use in longform private emotional introspection but I do find it helpful to keep a record of any significant actions I've taken. It's useful for reference and for finding any patterns that could provide a benefit in making plans and adapting routines, whether it's charting exercise or recording work I've done around my home.

It's all kept in OneNote along with a plethora of other notes, drafts, saved documents, cuttings and the like. Before I started using OneNote I used various handwritten to-do lists for actions combined with minimally organised digital files for anything more demanding. Having everything available in a single trivially editable digital format is significantly more versatile so now I only use paper to-do lists for short term items and information.

Onenote is amazing but the absence of interoperability sucks. I have used it on and off for years, eventually exported everything and was all the happier for it. Unique features like infinite canvas are not that helpful, it turns out.

Inline calculation was neat.

Microsoft dependence is a drawback for sure but since I'm using the OS already it's a minor negative. Where it shows up the most for me is the disparity between integration with Edge and the Office suite vs Firefox.

Did you export straight into Obsidian? Or was it more involved than that? Is there anything major that you miss beyond little QoL features like calculation? I might start a new page of notes in preparation for adding it to my to-do list.

Basically straight to Obsidian, probably via this script, or some predecessor. The worst thing about it was garbled image OCR that got embedded into md files. Not pretty.

I wonder. Everything valuable about Onenote is either implemented natively, or via community plugins, or is a nothingburger. Command palette > OneNote UI. Even drawing is supported okay-ishly now with ExcaliDraw.

Obsidian tables are not as nice. There's no Excel integration (but there is some csv support). There is multi-frame and tabs, but no multi-window. No straightforward OCR. Eh, I can live with that.

For about 13 years, in different forms.

Used to be a physical notebook, with the chronicle of ongoing problems and solutions and dreams and other stuff. Now Obsidian-based pile of Markdown files (primarily). I hope to one day integrate it all – maybe neural networks will soon get up to the task of OCRing my scribbles.

I have a backbone structure in the form of a diary, where I write things I generally do not want to forget or might find valuable to review in a year or more, plus registration of mundane events that might or might not come in handy later (health/security concerns), plus everything else from drafts of Motte posts to documents to code to dumps of web pages, sometimes interlinked for convenience.

All of this is streamlined with templates. The daily template looks like

  • Headline (date, one-line summary)

  • Mission

  • Day Planner section with a more or less precise timetable that is parsed into time tracker with notifications

  • Diary section

  • What I have read (links to files or webpages)

  • What I have written/made (links to files)

The Weekly note template consists of a mission, one-paragraph summary, a table for recurring observations, and expanded links to individual days.

There are independent hierarchies of nested tags and folders, plus some minor structures implemented with dataview.

I believe that my system, like many others of this sort, is a product of path-dependency and cognitive sluggishness, far from optimal for its purposes, so I'm uninterested in providing more details and spreading it. There are communities of people obsessed with journaling, GTD, Zettelcasten, you name it; they care a great deal about optimizing it, but it doesn't seem to help very much.

Day Planner section with a more or less precise timetable that is parsed into time tracker with notifications

Interesting, how does the notification system work?

Yeah. I use mine it to mainly yell into the void. There are certain days where certain things bother me to such an extent that only way I can make sense of the situation; is if I force myself to sit down and write out my entire monologue on text as if its a writing I will have to put out into the world. I can write more calmly than I think.

Looking back at my earlier entries since I started in 2017; The quality of my writing has improved a fair bit. Incidentally I started getting all A's (used to get B's) in essay based courses after I started effort posting on the motte (Early 2020). Kind of a lame and too good to be true sounding anecdote, but it totally happened and no one will believe me if I told them.

Incidentally I started getting all A's (used to get B's) in essay based courses after I started effort posting on the motte (Early 2020). Kind of a lame and too good to be true sounding anecdote, but it totally happened and no one will believe me if I told them.

I think the same happened with me. Part of it is just practice, but the thing I was most conscious of while writing college essays was thinking "if I posted this confidently on themotte it would get torn apart in the replies" (my standards for posting on the rest of reddit are far lower in comparison).

I've always found "my fake internet friends will think I'm stupid if I screw this up," to be a much stronger motivator for good writing than grades.

That's pretty inane, I much prefer my prime motivation for writing well. "Someone is wrong on the internet, now I need to dunk on them as eloquently as possible".

Definitely a strong motivator that one.

Not as strong as that girl from college who totally remembers you exist watching you lift (while being on the other side of the country).

Weirdly, I use a spreadsheet with columns for various things I keep numbers on (lifts, dinner, garden, weather, animals, purchases, etc). It works surprisingly well.

When I go work out I take notes regarding my lifts, form, and how I feel in a given day. It's about as close as I'll ever get to journaling I think. Been taking dates since August, so not very long, but it's pretty helpful for figuring out what I should be doing and how to best approach the gym on a given day.

I tried to keep a journal. Did it for 3-5 years very off and on, just wrote about my day and general updates. Did a physical notebook, wasn't very helpful.

I've been doing another notebook for a dream journal for about 6 months and am much more consistent with it. Plus I remember my dreams more which is fun.

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