Tag Archives: Journaling

On Journaling, Part 2: Digital versus Paper

01 Saturday Mar 2014

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I spent a lot of time pondering the question of what I should do about the whole digital revolution and my journaling. What to do? Digital media is so much more readily retrievable. One copy online can be read across the earth, whereas a handwritten tome can only be found at one location. Digital can provide a more rich experience… Add photographs, sound, video, links to maps and even automatically record the current weather. But I have decided that I don’t want to go that route. I tried it for awhile, and still do it a bit. But generally I do not.

The Benefits of Digital Journaling
Basically the benefits of digital journaling are recorded above. It is extremely easy to do. I can type faster than write by hand. (It’s easier to read, too!)  I can use my home computer or my tablet or even my phone and immediately have access to all of my pictures and videos. Just cut and paste and there they are. And as far as sharing, talk about  easy! I just click a button and upload it to a blog or Facebook. I actually did that with a recent blog post here. I typed out a personal journal entry, added pictures and realized that several of my friends and family would like to see it. So I sent it here.

The Problems With Digital Journaling
The problems with journaling digitally is technology. It changes so fast. What format do you record it on? CD ROM? Somewhere “in the cloud”? On your hard drive? And what format? Doc? Html? Txt? That sounds like an easy question, but 20 years ago if I had saved it all to floppy disk and then wanted to retrieve it another 20 years from now (or even have it retrievable)… will that be possible? We will drop technology for the next thing that’s slightly better and never look back (unless we wrote about it in our journal and want to look back at how pitifully bad our technology was in 1993 and 1998 and 2008 and 2014). So where do we record it? I’m pretty sure doc files will be around the rest of my life, but who really knows? Plus there’s privacy. If you want it truly private you can’t put it online.  Do you really want all of your thoughts out there for everyone? Or just for those close to you? If I want everyone to read it, I’ll post a blog, but otherwise I’ll just write it down. And then don’t get me started on cross platform. Is it that hard to make a really great journaling app that is readily usable across Android, Windows, Mac, and iOS? Not that there are no options. There’s MS Word and Google docs and Evernote. But those just don’t do I for me.
Secondly, it’s impersonal… or at least less personal. Chances are you aren’t reading what I wrote on the same device that I wrote it on. Yet with paper and pen, you are. It is tangible. You can touch what I held in my hands. You get to see the scratch marks on the cover, and the spilled ink, and the line across the page from where the dog jumped on my lap as I wrote. That is just not there with digital.

The Problems With Journaling on Paper
The biggest problem? There’s no back up. I’ve told my wife that if the house catches on fire, go after the journals first. (After the people and animals, duh). I usually keep my current journal on the kitchen table and there’s always a bit of a panic when a child spills a drink. Also, it takes more time to handwrite something. Yeah, those are the cons. (What? No pictures? Nope… That’s not a con, that’s a pro).

The Benefits of Journaling on Paper
Tangibility is pretty huge. But more so, writing is a better media. We think differently when we handwrite then when we type. We use different processes in our brains. It does something to our thoughts and memories when we back up what were thinking with moving our arms and hands to record it with a pen.
And the written word is a far superior means of communication than multimedia. Again, YouTube makes us dumber, and reading makes us smarter. We process things very differently. We engage our minds on a much higher level we read versus looking at a picture or watching a video. And writing these things requires us to think and engage our minds. It certainly isn’t that those things can be beneficial, but writing in a longer form is a more engaging, more effective means of communication.
Case in point: have you ever been to a movie, and you walked out and everyone talked but how great it was but you hated it because you read the book? Why did that happen? Because the written form was a much better experience than the movie with its wonderful actors and cinematography and special effects. With the written form you got into the characters’ minds, received more full descriptions of places and reasons behind everything going on.
So pictures aren’t bad, but they do not provide a better experience. Just a much more convenient and quickly shareable experience.

My Experience With Digital Journaling
I tried moving my journal over to all digital, but I just couldn’t satisfy what I wanted. I got me a new Android tablet (an Asus Transformer TF101) with a camera and a bluetooth keyboard. And I couldn’t find an app I liked. One where I could flip through page to page. I did find Evernote and I used that some, but soon realized that if I made an edit, it changed the date of the entry. Dates are extremely important for me. I tried a dozen different apps, but none I really cared for… except one.

The best journaling app I found for Android is Memoires from Drosoft. It is just a great little program. I love it because it is simple to use, easily incorporates photos, backs up to Dropbox, and automatically adds date, time, weather, moon phase, and maps of location when writing. I can share entries to other apps like Evernote or WordPress.

I also have created a private blog on WordPress.  If the general public tries to access it, then they a request for a password.  But as you can see with all the variety of blogs out there, blogging software is a pretty decent way to record thoughts and add pictures as well.  But again-there are issues regarding recording this.  It is saved on a server owned by someone else in another state or country.  What happens if the company that owns the information goes belly up?

So my system for digital journaling is to use my paper journal as the home base. I have always sequentially numbered my pages, (and the books themselves) so my digital entry gets a page number just like it’s another page and I record it. I do this in Memoires. I also created a private blog (I named it Blogodan) and upload it there as well. I use the category as the current journal I’m in. So the entry I made on 10/25/13 recorded on page 3557 was titled “3558: Wednesday, October 25, 2013”, with the category “Journal 21”. I recorded on page 3557 of my written journal “3558: MEMOIRES/BLOGODAN ENTRY 10/25/2013”. It links the two together and helps it to flow. I know if I go to Blogodan and want to see what was going on around that rogue entry, I can just find Journal 21 and page 3557 or so.

So there you go. I still journal digitally, just not that often. I did this last weekend on our camping trip because I wanted to save a few pictures with a map and a record of the weather. Yes I could have done that by hand… printing off pictures, cutting them out and pasting them scrapbook style, but sometimes it’s just easier to put get it all down.

Essentially, I record by handwriting the day-to-day events, and reserve digital entries for times when I want to record more quickly, and quickly add photos.

Next I want to describe the “system” I just now with two notebooks.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Would anyone care for hearing reviews on some of the journaling apps I’ve tried?  Have you found a better way to journal online?  What interest brought you here today?

On Journaling, Part 1: Why I Journal

15 Saturday Feb 2014

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Journals ShelfI’ve mentioned in a few posts (yes, I know that I only actually have a few posts), and I thought I’d post a little bit on how I record things. Not that my process is good, but it works for me. Or, at least it works better than not having a system in place. I’m unproductive regardless, but I’m most certainly more productive when I have my little notebooks close at hand.
I want to post this because it’s something I think about a lot. And let’s face it, this is my blog. I promise more pictures of children are coming soon. But for now… Paper and pen.
I’ll discuss my past Journaling – how I define it, and why I’ve done it. I’ll discuss what I now do and why it helps, and I’ll talk a little bit on my attempts at digital journaling.
I’m writing this because I’m a journaling enthusiast. I know there are entire blogs and websites and yahoo groups dedicated to this, but I wanted to put my thoughts in because I’ve come to realize that the more information on a topic I want to learn about is available, the more I get to spend time thinking about it. This is good and bad, but I appreciate those who have put things out there for my benefit.

My plan is to split this into 3 sections: Why I Journal, Digital vs. Analog Journaling, and My Current System of Journaling. Yes. I have a system.

PAST JOURNALS
I started journaling back in 1993. I have written more days than not. But there have been months I didn’t write, and days where I have written several pages. It just depends on many factors. I write less now that there are 4 children 2 dogs and a cat in the picture, and there is always far more that I want to record.
I started journaling just because I enjoy writing. I like to write stories, and just wanted to write about myself for myself. I wanted to remember events. I wanted to think through problems and I find I tend to so it better on paper. I like to be able to go back and read through how enjoyable an event is and to realize how stupid I can be.
As far as the media I used in the beginning, it was just a plain Mead notebook and a pilot pen. Nothing special or fancy. It did the job perfectly well, and now that 20 years has passed, it is just as legible as it was back then. Sure, things can get ruined and wet. Ink can smear. But I have done what I can to protect them. I am currently writing in my 23rd book, and I have them all.
As time progressed, I moved from really stupid random thoughts to more about my day to day life. My journaling went from a sort of free writing about nothing in particular (think Seinfeld but without the humor or laugh tracks) to a more organized approach. For that I can thank a book by Bob Greene called Be True to Your School. In it Bob, now a journalist (or at least when he wrote the book) discovered his journal from the 1960s. He wrote every day of the year, just a snippet of his day. And it was entertaining to see it unfold. His discovery of the Beatles, girls, searching for a college, right there. So I started doing something similar. Most of it was pretty mundane at the time. But now I can look back and reminisce about my life as a fry cook and how shallow my thoughts were. My summer of 1993 was a summer of me failing repeatedly to break up with my girlfriend, hanging out in the parking lot after working at McD’s and anxieties and excitement about leaving home at age 17 for college. Basic stuff. But at the same time… part of what made me who I am.
I remember who I hung out with.
I can look with fondness.
I can look with pity.
I can look with a better accuracy than most. Because I recorded it.

I recorded many things over the years. It is so great to look back to when I first met my wife and see how I described her. Joys of friends, the pain of college, and everything else. I’ve recorded every great camping spot. Good food. People to avoid. Gifts I’ve gotten. Maps of discoveries. I don’t draw, but I have had children draw pictures in them. I’ve recorded sermon notes and meeting notes. Quotes from my children and my triumphs and failures.

My media progressed as I went along. I moved from wire bound notebooks to journals from Barnes and Noble made especially for journaling. And I’ve tried out several of those. I’ve gotten kind of particular about the notebooks I buy, and really have spent a lot of time writing about the topic. I don’t particularly have a preference toward lined or blank paper. I write smaller on blank paper, and more clearly on lined paper. I think my next favorite thing may be graph paper, but I haven’t quite tried that out yet.

I think that enough for the moment. Next I’m going to write about digital versus analog journaling. The good and bad of both.