Why Journaling?
If you’re here, you’ve spent the majority of your life keeping track of very important facts, very important dates, very important thoughts. You devised all kinds of systems to keep track of all that. And now you’re wondering: Do I need to keep doing all that? The short answer is: Unequivocally Yes!
From Journaling In Obsidian, the benefits are:
- It helps you remember and document important events in your life
- It helps you reflect on your life
- It helps you practice your writing skills in a private environment
- It helps you think more clearly about your life
But I’m retired! Does it matter?
Again, Unequivocally Yes!
The biggest danger in retirement is brain atrophy. The brain is a muscle (for large values of “a muscle”). If you don’t use it, you lose it. We’ve all heard the stories of folks who went into immediate decline shortly after retiring. Let’s not be them. Let’s keep our brains functioning. Staying curious, active and organized helps keep us going.
A Journaling discipline gives us focus:
- We end up paying more attention to the events of the day, because we know we’re going to write about them.
- We stave off memory issues, because we’re writing everything down. We could go as far as using tools to create Second Brains.
- We have a repository for all our interests.
How do I journal?
Just start writing.
There’s a tendency for high achievers to spend time finding the perfect system for any endeavor. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But until you discover what’s important in Journaling for you, you’d be spending a lot of time on Form rather than Function.
As your journal evolves, it will become obvious what Form the journal should take.
Here’s Gemini’s response to the question.
Tools
Old School
Any notebook will do.
You could get fancy and get a Moleskine Journal.
You could dive into Bullet Journaling and get any one of the number of specialized notebooks.
But at the end of the day, it’s about pen and paper and putting thoughts down.
Electronically
There are any number of Journaling apps out there. Some are great. Some get you sucked into a particular ecosphere. Getting a firm idea of what your Journaling looks like is a pre-requisite to diving into the specialized apps.
Any organizational tool would work.
We specifically cover Obsidian and OneNote. But really any organizational software should work if you’re comfortable with it.
