#topic/life-tracking

Journal systems

I have always been a person to keep lots of different journals for many different purposes. I'm going to use this page to explore my written (analog) and digital journal systems over time and see if I can find any intersections or similarities in how I use them. Partially to reflect and understand and discover a thing about myself, but also because I think I can use that knowledge to better utilize Obsidian as a digital garden setup that works for me.

I think I've always kept a "garden" of sorts with my notes before I started getting online - and later, while online, expanding the "plants" and "flowers" to digital journals and places of expression, exploration, and knowledge-gathering. What it was missing was tags and links and paths to keep each other connected; it wasn't a garden, it was the wilderness.

This page will probably get big since I'm going to go through boxes of old journals to see what I find. I do have gaps in years where I felt it was more true to my experience if I didn't date my entries or books. I mean time isn't real, today could be any day. Does it matter when I'm writing this or when you're reading this? Very philosophy.

However, in retrospect and from an archival perspective, a tiny bit annoying! In Obsidian I don't have to date everything because it keeps a version history automatically. In journals I have to hope I have at least one entry that isn't my deepest innermost thoughts and explains something I did where I can place a timestamp on it.

Getting started with some best guesses.

Written journals timeline

Digital journals timeline