Journaling App Journey

Writing a personal journal hasn't been something that I've always done. Even recently I wouldn't say that I've actually been journaling, but rather just writing each day. I've been doing 750 Words writings nearly every day for the better part of the last year. While the theory behind these is to do a brain dump in the morning to clear your mind for the day, these entries have turned into more of a journal that I write at some point during the day. At some point I realized there really wasn't a whole lot of value in returning to previous entries. That's part of the process of these writings, but I felt like I could get more out of it. I enjoy the metrics (totally accurate or not) that are automatically generated and there are some methods to track some other more custom metrics. I tried this for a while as there were some other things I wanted to track, but I quickly fell out of that habit.

With my new lifestyle I decided to try out an actual journaling application. There are many options in the field and the three I zeroed in on were MacJournal, Day One, and Chronories. 

MacJournal is very well regarded and after some research seemed to be a little more robust than I really needed. Day One and Chronories were the two finalists in my mind. Those were appealing for very different reasons. Day One is a barebones, impeccably designed journaling application that also has accompanying iPhone and iPad apps. Chronories is what you might call a new-age journaling application. It utilizes technology to accumulate data as well as allowing actual journal writing.

These are two areas that appeal to me. I love minimal, focused applications like Day One and I'm also really interested in the self-analysis Chronories would allow. After more deliberation than was healthy, I decided on Chronories. In the end I thought it would be most interesting to track some data about myself as a I embark on a career change and a big lifestyle change. 

I'm only a couple days into using Chronories, but here's a basic rundown of it's capabilities. Each day's entry is contstructed from a combination of automatically compiled data along with a little manual intervention. After a bit of configuration and adjustment, Chronories can record things like the music you've been listening to in iTunes, the people you've emailed and chatted with, the temperature where you're at, your mood, the applications you've been using and several other other things. Some of these items can be manually added to and tweaked to record exact what you're looking for. Along with all of this there is also a space for an actual written journal entry.

Some standard report type views are set up so that after you've accumulated some data you can look back not only from an entry by entry point of view (calendar view), but also from many other angles. You could correlate your mood to the temperature for example. That sounds pretty cool to me and the process to completing an entry seems quite easy considering the amout of info that is recorded.

Regardless of what application or method you use a journal is only useful if you actually use it. We'll see how Chronories goes, but the combination of automatic and manual entry should make the process easier. More on this as my journaling continues on this year.