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Discussion on: Do you keep a journal?

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preslavrachev profile image
Preslav Rachev • Edited

Journaling is great, and teaching yourself the habit of keeping a log of your daily activities, pays off tremendously over time. Even better, sharing some or most of your thoughts with others.

Personally, I have been using various forms of note-taking for the past decade or so. I have tried always having a small notebook aside, but less so in the latest years, as I'm storing all of my notes electronically. For a few years, I was a strong Evernote user, going as far as to call it an extension of my brain. Eventually, due to Evernote’s feature bloat and growing complexity, I began searching again for a tool that would allow me to structure my thoughts in plain text with as little fuss as possible. Around that time I discovered Markdown. It’s been my best friend ever since.

Since I have a lot of ideas for side projects, I needed a way to keep my progress and findings up-to-date, since often, days or even weeks pass, before I get back to working on something. I started keeping detailed changelogs of all of the things I’ve been working on. The newest notes would end up on the top of the page, together with a date and time, of when a particular record was kept. Gradually, I realised that what makes those side projects valuable is not whether they will eventually get finished, but all the knowledge gathered while working on them. Having helped other people, gives me a rare sense of satisfaction and fulfilment. This is the reason that I have started outsourcing my journal out to my blog. Many of my posts are rough, some are unfinished, but if the knowledge I have gathered helps even one person today, it makes me happy. I started doing this around 2012, after reading Masters of Doom. As far back as during the mid-90s, John Carmack used to share his progress with the gaming and developer community in the form of rough .plan files, formatted as logs of his daily activities.

P.S. In case anyone is wondering what kind of editor I’m using right now, I eventually stopped on the minimalist, but genius Bear Notes for macOS and iOS.

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rommik profile image
Roman Mikhailov

Thanks for sharing and the link to Bear Notes! Posting the daily logs to the blog is not easy (in my case). That would require formatting, in case of sensitive or proprietary information.

Awesome Blog and I like that you added a pop-up chat, I've never seen it on blogs. I think that is a great idea!