I was thinking about journalling and the lyric "I don't look back much as a rule" came to me. It’s from the song "Pink Bullets" by The Shins. Go ahead, take a listen while I write up the rest of this post.

Reducing clutter

I’ve been wanting to reduce clutter lately, both physically and digitally. I was looking through my journals and daily notes and marvelling at how much I’ve captured over the years. Journaling is something I’ve done so much, yet I still don’t seem to have a strong, opinionated system in place, which occasionally bothers me at how scattered it can feel. Here’s what I’m working with right now:

Analog notes

I’ve kept a physical journal on and off for several years. My favourite things about keeping a paper journal are:

• It’s a screen-free activity
• I can draw as well as write
• It’s more enjoyable to pick a favourite pen and ink to write with
• Flipping through a journal both brings back memories faster, and is more pleasant to look back on.

I’ve accumulated about nine or ten journals, probably. They don’t take up much more space than a single crate (which is also packed with a few sketchbooks). Somewhere down the line, I’ll consider scanning them and putting them through OCR, but that’s an activity for later.

Digital notes

I’ve been using Obsidian for a few years now and it offers a very pragmatic and useful way to keep notes. The best features of a system like Obsidian are:

• It’s searchable
• Note embeds ("rolling up notes")
• Using Dataview to query your vault

Note embeds are a feature of obsidian where you can embed one part of a note into another. I got this idea from this blog post. The idea is fairly simple in practice:

• Every day, create a daily note (Obsidian does this automatically for me, with a template).
• In that template, fill out what happened in the day under the #Summmary heading.
• At the beginning of a week, I create a week template that embeds every day for that week. By the end of the week, I have a summary view of what happened in a week. Once the week is over, I write up a #summary of that week, which will then get pulled into the monthly note’s template.
• And then do this for a year!

By the end of this setup, I’m able to go see what happened in a month at a glance, or even all the super important things that happened in a year.^[1]

The important thing, is that this is a low-friction system. The bulk of the work is done daily, taking 2 minutes, with some additional work done to create a week, month and year template.

When do I look back?

The song lyrics that popped into my head that inspired writing this made me realize that I really don’t look back that often. Journalling and capturing what’s happened in a day, a week, a month, all seem to be things that I write but rarely read. Every now and then I’ll go back and look at what happened in a month in one of the Obsidian "roll-up" notes. Even more rarely, will I go back and read one of my paper journals.

Self-absorption

Sometimes I feel a bit self-absorbed in that I’m so particular about the notes I keep. It can be feel a bit naval-gazey. But, I also have to remind myself that more than anything, this is a cathartic, messy process, and that’s fine. Being interested in the how of things is also totally fine. If I’m trying to rule out feeling like a narccisus, at least I can feel at ease that I don’t lull myself to sleep reading my own journal entries.

An ideal system

I think my ideal system would look like this:

• I write everything into a paper journal with lovely crisp paper, and my favourite pen. I can add doodles and drawings, and spend time releasing what happened in a day onto paper, without having to look at a screen
• Maybe once a month, I scan a month’s worth of notes, run them through a handwriting recognition script and send the contents into each day note in obsidian to keep that system running smoothly too.

That would give me the best of both worlds, albeit with the monotony of scanning things. Down the line, I’m sure I’ll find a balance of what’s excessive and what works for me. Who knows, though, maybe someday I will do none of this!

Footnotes

1. I must say, having this sort of overview of time passing is existentially unpleasant at times. ↩