Hey everyone! 🙋♂️
This last month, I’ve been working hard during my (very sparse!) free time on a passion project: find a way to get more people journaling. Check out journi.day to learn more
Why do I care if you journal?
Journaling is a great way to better understand how you spend your day, take a moment to understand all the thoughts and emotions running through your head all the time, and take the time to make concrete steps on how you want to spend your life. I recognize journaling as a cheap and effective method that we all have at our disposal to better our health, and I want people to gain from this easy activity!
If you want to hear it from the experts, you can take your pick — everyone seems to agree on this one: Kaiser Permanente, Univ. Rochester Medical, NY Times, Greater Good Magazine from Berkeley, WebMD, and a bunch more here.
There are so many ways to journal, and it’s easy to fit custom to your lifestyle.
You can get a notebook from a local shop (Rite Aid, CVS and Target are my typical go-to’s) for <$10 that will last you a while — you can write whenever you want as long as you have your journal and a pen! More sophisticated journals exist out there, offering daily prompts, comparing your answers over the last 3-5 years, and more! There are also countless journaling apps, that will remind you to sit down and spend time reflecting. Journaling has never been more accessible. Especially during a pandemic, journaling is an incredible way to slow down, think about your life and what you can do to self-improve.
What would I journal?
This is the best part — anything you write will help you reflect on your life. You can write a poem, draw some comics, write a list of all the things you’re looking forward to, detail all the frustrating parts of your life, come up with crazy ideas — anything! Your journal is for you and you alone. If you want to talk about your boss / partner / best friend / parent / kid without them finding out, this is the spot. Talk about habits you want to accomplish, small thoughts you want to save — whatever you’d like!
Why are you doing this?
I’ve been keeping a journal on and off since 10th grade (8 years ago!!) where I write down what I did each day. I have a goal of finishing 1 page for each day, which takes me between 20-30 minutes to complete (depending on how tired I am, and how much I end up thinking about my day while I write 🤔). Most of my page is a list of activities I did during the day (excerpt: “…read more of my book, walked to work / made it in 25 minutes, put food away / got on call…”) with room at the bottom for reflection (“really excited to have the weekend to relax, felt like I was 100% on this week. Made so much shakshuka I shouldn’t have to cook this week if I don’t want! Happy I called Idan today, turned my day around”).
I currently have 1332 consecutive days written down (my last 3.5 years of life!), and I do it because it helps me with memory retention and better understanding my emotional responses. It gives me structured time to let my inner-introvert recharge and time to think about what I should be doing next. I can’t imagine not keeping a journal at this point: it’s helped me improve my diet, given me word-ammunition to cheer up other people’s days (people love when I write about them), and helped me find items (when was the last time I had that book?).
When people see my journal, I hear the same thing over and over again: I wish I could journal (and I’ve tried a couple times!), but it’s never stuck.
“Why didn’t it stick?” “I could never set aside the time.”
Maybe 20+ minutes a day doesn’t work for you.
What if we tried 1 minute of journaling at a time?
meet journi (previously shari & journal.it)
journi is the journal you text. If you’re walking to work, stuck in the elevator, waiting for a friend, or just trying to fill up some time, you can send a quick text and have it save to your journal.
At the end of each day, you’ll get all of your journal entries shared with you in your daily entry.
There are a few more features to supercharge your journaling ability:
Want to know when you wrote about work? text “get #work” and you’ll receive an email with all the days and entries where you used the word “work” — you can add hashtags to your messages if you want to easily access them later!
Set your daily focus by texting “set focus:” and what you want to focus on (eg. “set focus: getting outside 🌞”). You’ll receive a morning reminder to set your intentions! You can remove it by texting “end focus”
Pictures you send will also be saved to your daily journal! You can snap your best moments and attach them to your thoughts by sending images during the day.
How can I join?
I’m working on making this the best tool it can be to help people get into journaling, so it’s free for everyone who’s interested in trying it out right now. You can sign up here to get first access to the service — takes 3 minutes to set up. You’ll receive an email + text on next steps once you sign up!
How can I help?
If you’re looking to help out, here are the two things you can help with:
Share this with people you think would benefit from this! I’m trying to help people be more intentional through journaling. If this is something they might like, have them try it out! The link is https://journi.day
Tell me about your journalling experiences, and how you’d make this service better. Goal here is to make this a system worth using!
Thanks for listening y’all! Next personal updates to come out around April, before Pesach 😎