Hey,
I am a big proponent of writing in a journal - I think it really helps me unload the scrambled mess in my brain. The thing is though, writing in my journal takes 1-2 hours of my time - not to mention the time it takes to get into the mood to write for 1-2 hours a day. How do you guys write daily / regularly? When I’m on vacation it’s super helpful to write in there, and I wish I could do that during the week. Typing is a solution, but I feel like I write with less efficacy since I don’t have a lot of time between sentences. My sentences while writing are a lot more well formed, I think.
What do you guys do?
I can’t dedicate that sort of time in a shot generally, certainly not with the extra time to get into the right headspace. I tend to aim for paragraph-size thoughts, expounding as and when necessary.
I actively work to avoid typing, because I genuinely enjoy fountain pens and because Lord knows I type more than enough in my day job. I end up with very different outcome styles typing vs. hand writing, the former tends to be more business-ready, the latter tends to be much more true to the actual feelings/thoughts I’m trying to capture.
One of my most frequent use cases for journaling is to keep running logs of interactions with various organizations, in a mostly chronological way that I can later follow. Currently juggling a number of insurance companies, doctors, and a bunch of other related stuff and I’d be completely lost if I didn’t have a way to easily see whom I spoke to about what, when, and what documentation I sent where. That part is tailor-made for handwriting, from where I sit, if I try to type contemporaneous notes they invariably end up being closer to a transcript than to useful bullet points.
There is no right or wrong way to do this, only what works for you.