I have always been a person to keep lots of different journals for many different purposes.
I’m going to use this page to explore my written (analog) and digital journal systems over time and see if I can find any intersections or similarities in how I use them. I like to reflect and understand and discover things about myself. I’m also interested to see if I can use that knowledge to mindfully refine my digital garden setup.
I think I’ve always kept a “garden” of sorts with my notes before I started getting online - and later, while online, expanding the “plants” and “flowers” to digital journals and places of expression, exploration, and knowledge-gathering. What it was missing was tags and links and paths to keep each other connected; it wasn’t a garden, it was the wilderness.
This page will probably get big since I’m going to go through boxes of old journals to see what I find. I do have gaps in years where I felt it was more true to my experience if I didn’t date my entries or books. I mean time isn’t real, today could be any day. Does it matter when I’m writing this or when you’re reading this? Very philosophy.
However, in retrospect and from an archival perspective, a tiny bit annoying! In note-taking systems like Anytype, you don’t have to date everything because it keeps a version history automatically. In journals I have to hope I have at least one entry that offers more than my deepest innermost thoughts and explains something I did where I can place a timestamp on it.
Getting started with some best guesses. I’ll refine this page as I dive through the archives.
Written Journals Timeline
- Structured diaries like books made for kids to journal
- School journals and agendas - I had a few teachers who had us journal in class and I sometimes used my school planners as journals
- My first diary… I think I filled out 5 pages.
- Writing journals, fiction mostly
- The autobiography I started in high school (? lol)
- Embodiment challenge from Livejournal to write an entry in a handwritten journal every day for a year
- So many planners: daily planners, monthly/weekly, yearly, dateless planners
- Art journals and art journal challenges from the internet, like Get Messy
- Video game journals
- Journaling eras by brand or methodology: Bullet journals, Bookjournals, Field notes size knock-offs, Moleskine, Decomposition notebooks, Hobonichi, zines, newsletters (snail mail)
- Bookjournals from Ex Libris Anonymous
Digital Journals Timeline
- TXT / DOC files on my desktop (folders by date for journaling thoughts)
- Websites (as expression - lots of writing)
- Livejournal
- Blogs
- Newsletters (email)
- Visual social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) which I kept to share but also to archive as an album of my life - I exported and closed most of these accounts.
- Google docs (folders by date for journaling thoughts) as my first cloud solution so I could journal on my phone & computer without having to transfer files or whatever
- Evernote, Notion, Obsidian, Anytype
- Bearblog
- Hobonichi Techno App ()
Modification History
2026
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3/14: Updated with highlighted styles to match the rest of the site styling.
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3/11: Reviewed and updated for currency. Updated with highlighted styles to experiment with the new options I put in the CSS today.