The Art Of Not Asking Why

I’ve been keeping a journal on and off since I was 16 or so, but it’s only in 2018 that I started being more structured about it, thanks to Emacs and org-mode. This morning, I thought about some of the reasons this journal is the most effective one for me. Here’s a list, more or less in order of importance:

• It is mine (saved locally):

If you have a written journal (a physical notebook), you got this covered. However, if you rely on the cloud, be it iCloud or Dropbox or what have you to be able to write. If you don’t have a file or a physical piece of paper on your hard drive or your shelf, it’s not truly yours - you’re renting out a service. In the case of a personal journal, this is a hard pass for me. In my case, all my files are local and can be read without Emacs since org-mode files are essentially just text.

• It’s easy to write down thoughts quickly:

I always have a computer around, and if I don’t, I can use my phone to open the journal file and add to it. On my iPhone, this is a bit more tricky, so I save a quick note and then copy-paste to my journal file if I really have to. Otherwise, it’s a simple matter of 5 keystrokes, and I’m there.

• It’s Private:

A journal is private. This is another reason why I won’t have it stored on any cloud, be it iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, or whatever have you. I don’t trust anyone else to stay out of my journal because they won’t - be it the temptation to dig for profiling and ads or “think of the kids” policies. I do have a backup for my journal, a local one, and a remote one on the cloud, which gets encrypted on my computer before it’s stored away in Backblaze.

• Pictures and drawings:

This is something org-mode is actually not great at, but it works. Pictures are powerful. Memories in a flash, they also store metadata for precise location and time. Perfect for those times when you visit a location and want a quick reference to where it was and what you did. This is one area I do use the phone for and often: I can later extract map coordinates if I want to or write an address. The filename itself tells me the exact time. Pictures that go to my journal are not kept in the cloud anymore - again, I don’t trust Google or Apple with those for long storage. For my journal, it’s good enough to resize them to about 30% of their original size and compress them as a JPG, which really saves room. This is different than preserving good photos in raw forms and processing them later for printing.

• Internal links:

That’s probably the latest “essential” requirement I have for my journal, which works well in org-mode thanks to super-links at the moment. On paper, I used to write down page numbers and write in parenthesis something like “see p 128” as a comment. The entry that I point at also gets a link to the one I’m linking from - so they are linked to each other. In org-mode, I use these links to refer to my tasks and projects, which live outside of the journal. That way I can reflect on something I did in my journal and jump directly to the event to see the task itself.

• Easy to read:

Probably the second reason (the first reason is that typing is faster than writing) why I keep a journal in a text file on my computer: my handwriting gets worse as I keep writing until I can no longer read it in the future. I’m also prone to spelling mistakes, which makes things harder to decipher and makes me think I have some form of undiagnosed dyslexia. A good spell-checker is a must. Org-mode also breaks down my entries automatically to years, months, weeks, days, and then events in those days, which makes things easier.