There’s a pretty massive gap in my journaling system in that it’s not suited to handle long term action. I can catalogue thoughts and feelings over time and correlate them with tags but I don’t have a clear way to ponder something for a few months, come back to it, and then take an action. When I write a note, it’s dated and then I don’t want to touch it again after a week or two.

I don’t have a pipeline from “I should do this” to “here’s a list of the things on my mind that I need to do.”

maybe it’s as simple as having a big mind map going from notes to actions I want to take as a result back to notes pondering the results.

@dfxluna I have this exact problem. I tend to procrastinate and avoid things, so rereading old journal pages can be pretty painful for me just because it reminds me of a lot of stuff that I want to pressure myself to do, but I also want to avoid, which is a bad combination

I have a system that kinda helps though! I have a section called “rewrites” which are just thoughts that I rewrite by hand about once a week (it’s more of a rolling thing though, so I rewrite some of them every day and get through all of them about once a week, then start from the beginning of the new list)

sometimes I just want to internalize them, so I rewrite them exactly as they are. other times I want to process and refine them, so I rephrase them with every rewrite to try to distill them into the shortest/simplest essence for me to internalize. sometimes it’s more like a question that I have, so I’ll rewrite them each time trying to explore the question from different angles until I find a good answer. sometimes I feel like I’ve internalized them properly and I choose not to rewrite them anymore. and of course I’m always adding new things to the rewrites as well. I try to always keep the list manageably short, which naturally causes me to think about what I really value being there

but recently I’ve added a new type of rewrite, which is essentially “here’s something that I can do, and here’s all of the good things that it would do for me”. so instead of it being a task that I pressure myself into doing, and then avoid in a spiral of self-imposed stress and pressure, it just becomes a positive statement of “it would be great if I did this, and here’s why!”

and often while I’m rewriting something like that, I’ll get the sudden urge to Do The Thing, and I try to always follow that urge as soon as I get it. which works really well for me!

but with all of this said, I can also find myself procrastinating/avoiding rewrites as well, because I think that they’ve become too much of a list of “I’m not doing this well enough” things instead of “here’s what I like about myself” things, so it’s a negative experience for me which makes me want to avoid it. so I’m trying to balance it more with more positive self-esteem-building things as well. I think I focus way too much on how I can improve, and way too little on how I’ve already improved, or what’s already good about me. and focusing on the latter is an important type of self-improvement too!

I’m ngl this kinda makes me want to write more about how my personal bullet journaling system works. but in order to do that I would either have to retread a lot of stuff about how bullet journaling works in general, or assume that the reader already knows about that stuff. hm or I could try to give a simplified explanation and then direct folks to bullet journaling resources if they want to know more

idk but I’m thinking about this now. I feel like I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons from refining my own journaling system that folks could benefit from if they have the right kind of brain to also be able to keep a journal updated consistently

RE: https://cryptid.cafe/objects/689435e8-74ce-4aea-ab21-e6d5d1ab77e8

@kasdeya thanks for sharing! I think I probably have a bit of an easier time of Doing the Thing as long as I Remember the Thing, so for me it ends up being more about Recording The Thing and taking notes about my progress on The Thing so I can kind of come and go as I please.

This morning I put together a little system that I think will help towards that where I journal/take notes as normal, but I added a step where I drop that note into a big mind map to connect it to actions I want to take as a result of that note and then progress / results from those actions

@dfxluna ooh, I see! I hope this ends up working well for you. it’s interesting how different our needs from journaling are

@dfxluna yeh my journal is largely cyclical, but that makes sense if you use it for catharsis. Do you have an agenda? Like with dates to check off.

I keep an agenda (blank notebook) with weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly sections.

The agenda is mostly for tracking plans and actuals, and the diary/journal is for how I feel about / the messy view from living in days instead of years.

@hwll sorta? I schedule stuff that needs to be done in my calendar but that’s more appointment-y, obligation type stuff and reoccurring things instead of “stuff I wanna do”.

I was considering adding some agenda software to my life but it’s a surprising amount of work to get something open source working

I do also know that I don’t work well with a lot of structure so there’s kind of a limit to what I can get out of it

@dfxluna I get that. I don't like feeling obliged to check-in to anything, so I like to kind of leave different empty pages about that I *could* jot things into *if* I felt like it.

Like I find having some super broad pages just labeled "2026" and "2027" useful for long term like high level stuff.

But my system has been honed by me over several uh decades, so what's ergonomic to my mind might not fit yours.

just find the problem you describe really interesting, and the same kind of thing I'm always trying to solve.