Journals

Writing in and of itself is valuable, but journaling becomes a very acute version of writing that captures the rawest feelings. I'm a firm believer in journaling as a coping mechanism, a stress reliever, a sort of therapy, and as a way of defogging my mind.

Over time, I've found journaling writing so valuable I have written in a journal every night for the past 7+ years. That habit began on my mission, and continued when I came home.

Types of Journals

I started writing in a physical journal, and found it valuable. I found it lacked a few things though when I switched to a digital journal. I think a good journal has the following qualities:

• it can be searched by text
• it can be stored/preserved indefinitely
• it is available and easy to write in on a moment's notice
• it can be stored in a way that is portable

The first piece of criteria makes it easiest to obtain in digital form.

These ideas led me to making my own open source journaling platform that faciliated all of this.

The different types of journals that I've found helpful (in this order) are:

1. personal journals: writing about thoughts and life events
2. study journals: writing down learnings from study of scriptures, books, or lessons
3. gratitude journals: writing down things you are thankful or grateful for
4. bullet journals: writing down bullets of things done in a given day