📝 Journaling - My Plain Text Journey Part IV

This is an ongoing series:

• 📃 My journey into the plain text life - Intro
• 🛠️ Tools for working with plain text files - My Plain Text Journey Part II
• 🗃️ Syncing my notes - My Plain Text Journey Part III
• 📝 Journaling - My Plain Text Journey Part IV
• ✍ Keeping Notes My Plain Text Journey Part V
• ✔ Tasks and To Dos My Plain Text Journey Part VI

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A journal is a great way to remember things that happen, or to take note of something that may be useful in the future. They also let you reflect, giving you a better understanding of your life and where you are going. There are a number of journaling apps out there, but here is how I do mine with nothing more than a text editor.

My journal

I’ve tried several different types of journals. Before I settled on the plain text life, my favorite was a password protect blog at wordpress.com. It’s still up with a bunch of entries, but I’ve found that plain text journaling works better for me.

To organize my journaling, I create a file for each year in a folder caller Journal. For example, unsurprisingly my current journal is a file named 2021.md. Some like to create a file for each day. I tried that for awhile, but it just didn’t work for me. My editor of choice is Vim, and it handles files with 10s of thousands of lines without issue.

Organizing entries

At midnight, I have a job that runs called nextday.sh. The main location for my notes is on a virtual private server (VPS), which makes it easy to schedule jobs like this.

#!/bin/bash

#Where is the journal
JOURNAL="/home/goz/notes/Journal/$(date +"%Y").md"

JDATE=$(date +"%D - %a")

# Sync, just in case
cd ~/notes
./notesync.sh

# Create a new day in the journal
echo -e "\n# ${JDATE}" >> ${JOURNAL}

# Sync, just in case
./notesync.sh

It adds the current date to the journal, along with the day of the week. I originally only put the date, but when looking back it is nice to know what day of the week an event happened. By including the day of the week I don’t have to consult a calendar.

Each entry is prefaced with YYYY/mm/dd HH:MM, which I create with an Espanso expansion, an abbreviation in Vim (iab <expr> dts strftime("%Y/%m/%d %H:%M -") lets me type dts to insert a date time stamp), or an Ultisnip snippet with the Ultisnip plugin for Vim. If you use a different text editor, there is probably a way for you to easily insert the date and time stamp.

Adding entries

I have three ways to add entries.

je function

In my .bashrc I have a function named je:

je() {
    ENTRY=$1
    echo -e "\n`date +\"%Y/%m/%d %R\"` - ${1}" >> ~/notes/Journal/`date +"%Y"`.md
}

If you don’t want to add a function you could create a script and place it in your path. To add an entry I type je "This is my entry".

j alias

For longer or multiple entries I have an alias that launches Vim with my Journal, takes me to the end of the file, and puts me in insert mode:

alias j='vim + +startinsert ~/notes/Journal/`date +"%Y"`.md'

** TelegramBot **

I wish I could share this, but it’s not quite ready yet. The bot, which I call Brantley, has several features. One is the ability to append entries to my Journal. This makes adding entries as simple as sending a text message in Telegram.

The bot runs on the same VPS as the scheduled job to mark a new entry for each day. I’ll be sharing it soon, so stay tuned!

Additional ramblings

To help with entries, I’m experimenting with adding questions to be answered throughout the day. I’m not very consistent on answering the questions, so they usually get deleted, but sometimes I do answer them. These are added to the journal with additional cron jobs.

Morning questions

At 5am, the following questions are added:

YYYY-mm-dd 05:00 - Morning Routine

    My Daily Highlight:

    I am grateful for:
    1.
    2.
    3.

    What would make today great?
    1.
    2.

Under What would make today great I only list things that I can control or do. It’s never, “I wish Jane would stop coming to my desk for chit-chat”. I write something like “I’m going to complete 3 tasks on my big project”.

Here is the script I use to add the questions:

#!/bin/bash

nl=$'\n'

#Where is the journal
JOURNAL="/home/goz/notes/Journal/$(date +"%Y").md"
je=$(date +"%Y/%m/%d %H:%M")
echo "${nl}${je} - Morning Routine" >> ${JOURNAL}
cat <<EOT >> ${JOURNAL}

    My Daily Highlight: 

    I am grateful for:
    1. 
    2. 
    3. 

    What would make today great?
    1. 
    2. 

EOT

Daily Affirmation

At noon the following gets added: I am.... I try to write something positive about myself. Here’s the script I use to add that to the journal:

#!/bin/bash

nl=$'\n'

#Where is the journal
JOURNAL="/home/goz/notes/Journal/$(date +"%Y").markdown"
je="$(date +"%Y/%m/%d %H:%M")"
echo "${nl}${je} - Daily Affirmations" >> ${JOURNAL}
cat <<EOT >> ${JOURNAL} 
    I am...

EOT

Evening routine

At 7pm the following gets added to the journal:

3 Amazing things that happened today
1. 
2. 
3. 

How could I have made today better?

As with the morning questions, I answer these as things that I did or influenced. Trying to control others never works. To add these lines I schedule the following script at 7pm:

#!/bin/bash

nl=$'\n'

#Where is the journal
JOURNAL="/home/goz/notes/Journal/$(date +"%Y").md"
je="$(date +"%Y/%m/%d %H:%M")"
echo "${nl}${je} - Nightly Routine" >> ${JOURNAL}
cat <<EOT >> ${JOURNAL} 
    3 Amazing things that happened today
    1. 
    2. 
    3. 

    How could I have made today better?

EOT

Like I said before, it’s nice to have these questions added, but it seems like I only answer them about half the time.

Go forth and journal

This is how I journal, not how you should journal. It has taken me a few years to get to the point where I’m comfortable with sharing how I do it. Hopefully there are some nuggets of wisdom that will help you along your journey!

Do you do something differently? Or is there something that’s unclear? Let me know in the comments!