So, I've been keeping a journal for 17 years, off and on. I don't know anyone else who does it my way, so here's my method.

I made a dedicated email account just for the journal. I personally chose gmail but if you distrust google you could use any other provider including self-hosted.

At the end of the day, or when I feel like it, I log in and email the account from itself with a message about whatever happened that day and whatever I'm thinking or feeling, and use the date for the subject line, like "August 12, 2025". I never, ever send emails to anything else from that account nor connect it to anything or use it for anything else. It is a total island.

The result is 17 years of easily-searchable journal, password-protected, backed-up, accessible from anywhere that has internet, can't be "lost" like a physical journal (yes I know I'm trusting google, but again, go self-host if you're worried about that), can't be "found" by someone looking through my things.

I can't even tell you how much value I've gotten out of it. You forget things you don't even know you forgot. So many little moments and days in life. You'll be shocked at the things you used to think and feel sometimes. You'll be shocked at whole magical days that you haven't thought of in years and years and likely would never have thought of again. It's a record of me changing over time and the phases I've gone through. I can't recommend it enough.

And it doesn't take much discipline, either. It's not something I "have" to do. I do it when I feel like it. There are years where I have only 25 entries, and others where I have 200. It depends how much I felt like writing. I find it spikes in years where I'm feeling very emotional, usually during bad times. But I've written down many great days too.

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iLemming 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I do a similar thing when I walk my dog. I have this primitive audio recorder app on my Android phone - the only requirement I had years ago when I found it was to be able to record directly into mp3 files, but that is no longer relevant. Anyway, I would just walk and talk into my phone. It records. I have collected numerous such recordings over the years, but they were pretty much useless. Until relatively recently. These days I have Resilio (for a stupid reason, not Syncthing, which is also a viable and perhaps better alternative) to sync my audio notes, and then I have a script with whisper.cpp hooked up. The script simply turns that into text - technically, it creates a subs file. Why subs file? With the .srt file I can not only grep through those notes, I can play them karaoke style in my editor - Emacs has subed mode that allows you do that. I can also easily hide timestamps and other metadata to focus purely on the text. I can correct wrong text recognitions, add my own comments, etc.

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ChrisGammell a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A message in a bottle, thrown into your own swimming pool every evening. I like it.

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dotancohen a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love this take. I do something similar, in that my journal is completely isolated

For journal entries I record voice notes. I can do it quicker, and I can do it while I'm e.g. driving or walking. I feel that I capture a bit more emotion with it too. I've been doing this for about 20 years, but only in the last year have I been writing a python application to organize and transcribe the notes.

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uux_pacioli 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve been journaling on and off since the early 2000s — but never for long. A few weeks in, I’d usually stop. Often because what I wrote felt too trivial to be worth it.

Then, while reading some productivity book, I stumbled on a trick: set the bar for success absurdly low. So low that even on my worst days I could still clear it.

Enter The One-Line Journal: the goal is to write just one single line each day. And, as it turns out, most days that first sentence is quickly followed by a few more — sometimes a lot more. I’ve been doing it almost every single day for 2.5 years now.

In the spirit of keeping the barrier low, I deliberately start with a blank slate each morning by creating a new file for that day. The fresh page lowers the threshold even further. Everything is done in Vim with this little alias:

oneline='printf "## $(date +"%Y") \n \n#" >> /path/to/folder/year/$( date +"%Y-%j-%b-%d" )_ol-jrnl.md && vim +$ /path/to/folder/year/$( date +"%Y-%j-%b-%d")_ol-jrnl.md'

Nothing fancy. Just works for me.

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windowshopping 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I should do that more, the one-line thing. I figured out the "absurdly low bar" trick myself for a lot of other stuff in my life but I hadn't thought to apply it to this. Good suggestion!

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codethief 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Would you mind sharing where else in your life you have applied that trick? I always find it quite fascinating to hear about practical use cases because, while the idea of "Start simple, start small" is so simple conceptually, it's hard to get out of your head sometimes, so hearing actual real-world examples can be quite inspiring.

In my case I wanted to get back into working out more but the pandemic had completely messed up my existing workout routines, plus I travel a lot, so it's not easy to build new habits, either. So I decided I would just do one single exercise every day – doesn't matter when or what, as long as I do something.

I ended up doing the exercise usually right after getting up in the morning to build as strong a habit as possible. Also, I usually do 4 minutes instead of a fixed number of reps because 1) this way I can fully focus on perfecting the movement, 2) when it's early in the morning I often forget to count anyway, 3) this way I always know how long it's gonna take, so even on busy days I can make time.

Then once I had mastered that habit, I decided hey, why not try to do two exercises per day whenever possible? It's only 5 minutes more (including a 1 min break) but 100% more impact!

Now, recently, I've started doing 3-4 exercises because why not, it's only 5-10 minutes more for another 50-100% increase in gains! I think this – (up to) 20 min every morning – is probably my sweet spot. I get a decent workout, yet I can still squeeze it even into the busiest of days with relative ease, as long as I've made it a habit and don't waste time thinking about & hesitating to do it and instead just do it.

	▲	windowshopping 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure! Number 1 is, as you said, exercise. If I can't get myself to do a full routine, I reduce it to "just go do bench press for today. nothing else." Because doing a bench press set beats not exercising at all! Likewise I found getting myself to run a mile regularly was not happening. So I reduced it to running half a mile. That's pretty doable. That's 5 minutes of effort. I do it with my coding projects. If I can't bring myself to really seriously spend hours progressing on my code, I'll do the absolute bare minimum just to move the needle forward a millimeter - write a boilerplate react component template that isn't much more than a div with the right class on it, or write the skeleton for an endpoint (like its function signature) but none of the actual logic, or simply write out a quick pseudocode of the steps for what i need to do the next time i work on it. I do it with chores. Can't get myself to do laundry? Ok, instead just move the laundry to be sitting next to the basement door. Next time I go down for something else, I just take it with me and stick it in the machine since it was already right there. Same with dishes - don't want to do all of them - ok, just load the plates for now and leave the rest for later. I do it with mail that requires a response, like bills. Don't want to go through all of them? Just do the one on top and do another tomorrow. (I don't get enough mail that it piles up faster than I can keep up with.) I do it with guitar. Don't want to practice for half an hour? Okay, just do chord switching for 3 or 4 minutes. When I describe it all this way, it makes me sound like someone who barely gets anything done, but the reality is I actually get A LOT done because of these tricks. Once I'm playing guitar for 3 minutes it usually becomes 30. Once I pseudocode a function I usually just write the whole thing. Once I put away the plates I usually just clear the whole sink. And if it gets put off for a day, that's fine. It's all about tricking myself into being disciplined.

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PhilipRoman a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you do any edits for previous days? Seems like it would be difficult with email.

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windowshopping a day ago | parent | next [-]

No. But editing a handwritten journal would hardly be any easier. It's a matter of what features you care about, I guess. I have never needed to edit past entries - that would be historical revisionism. It's not a feature I personally need for my journal. If I cared about that for some reason, I suppose I might use a different method.

If I realize I forgot something from yesterday, I just add it the next day.

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k4rnaj1k a day ago | parent | prev [-]

You could theoretically reply to a previously sent letter from either your main or "journal" email to "update" an entry.

	▲	windowshopping 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I have done that on occasion! No idea why this comment is flagged.

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NetOpWibby a day ago | parent | prev [-]

WTF wish I thought of this 17 years ago

	▲	dotancohen a day ago \| parent [-]
		The best time to start journaling is 17 years ago, or today.