LifeJournal

The benefits and the shortcomings of paper journals

When I started college, more than 30 years ago, I started keeping a journal. I wanted to record things I needed to do, keep notes for my school work, and integrate musings about my personal life into one notebook. Keeping a journal was a great way for me to keep track of my life and to sort things out. It was a place that I could come back to and mull over ideas, puzzle out sticky situations, and help me clarify my goals.

I liked the idea of integrating my life into one notebook: one place where ideas, dreams, goals, notes to myself, and class notes would be unified. Somehow I felt that both the process of reflecting and the product of the journal entries would be excellent tools in my personal and professional development.

I continued to write in what became many, many notebooks, over the years, and through my journal writing years I was aware that the process was soothing: I almost always felt more relaxed and ended a journal writing session with a more positive attitude than when I started the session.

But, as I wanted to keep my writings private, I hid my notebooks. With the journal out of sight, too often it was also out of mind, and I wrote less consistently than I wanted. I also found that in these notebooks tucked in closets, with notes on scraps of paper stuffed in folders or stashed in random corners of my house, my words lay dormant. And, when I did choose to re-read journal entries, it was difficult to find specific writings that held nuggets of truth; they were buried in the stacks of prose. So, drawing conclusions, seeing my life trends and patterns, making connections between different entries--indeed learning from my years of thought--took hours, and rarely did I take the time to search.

In the mid 1990s, I was looking for a change in career. Using my journal, once again, as the bootstrap to pull me back to myself, I reflected on the shortcomings of the paper journal. After 25 years of keeping a journal, I knew there had to be a better way to write, reflect, and learn from my life experiences. I experimented with computer-based formats such as word processing documents and MS Outlook's journal. I tried journal software that turned out to be little more than glorified word processors with indexing calendars, or which required that I restructure my writing style to fit their software.

A better way to keep a journal

I knew that with the power of computers there could be a better way to insure privacy and security in journal writing. A better way to track the important things in my life. A better way to inspire me to write more consistently. A better way to highlight, uncover, and remember the meaningful passages that I had written. A better way to help me see new perspectives and spark my thinking. A better way to juxtapose writings to help me see connections and patterns in my life so that I could learn from my experiences.