Experimenting with journaling

A good friend of mine (hi Raluca) nudged me back into journaling a couple of months ago. It's going well, partly because I've paired it with my analog habit tracker. The habit tracking is already a solid routine, so opening the notebook every evening happens almost automatically, and once it's open, writing something down follows naturally. I've been counting days and today is day 257 of habit tracking, which is slightly older than the journaling itself.

When I first restarted, I limited myself to recording what had happened that day. I later learned this is essentially the daily examen, though I practice my own adapted version with very little of the spiritual side. It turned out to be too restrictive on its own, so I now keep three notebooks, each with its own purpose and audience. One is for the daily examen with an audience of nobody. Another is for the brain-dump kind of journaling that happens every few days, also with an audience of nobody. The third is for more coherent thoughts and ideas, with the audience including my future self, my kids when they will be older, and future generations.

So far, so good. Plenty of handwriting in different formats, each helping me process a different category of thoughts and exposing them (or not) to different people. What I'm curious about is how handwriting compares to digital journaling over the long run.

With a pen, I tend to leave mistakes as they are and circle back to earlier thoughts a few paragraphs later. Additionally, rephrasing isn't really an option on paper. Digital journaling changes all of that: I can go back, fix grammar, reshuffle paragraphs, and tighten things up in "post-production." If I'm feeling extra motivated, I can even hand a draft off to an AI model and ask it to polish it further before publishing.

The audience is different, too. Anyone can read this blog, even if realistically nobody does. I'd like to understand how that shifts my approach. I suspect I'll be more reluctant to share personal things while trying, at the same time, to come across as presentable as possible.

I do post micro-blog-style updates on WhatsApp and Telegram from time to time (the same content on both), but only when a thought or idea I find interesting has crystallized. I deliberately keep each post narrow (one idea, not much elaboration) mostly because typing anything meaningful on a phone is a pain. As such, that is yet another form of (digital) journaling, but hardly the type that I interested in experimenting with here.

Either way, this blog is slowly finding its purpose. A year ago I rebooted it as a place for non-technical personal updates. Now it's becoming part of my journaling journey.