I’ll touch on the practical elements. Everyone is different and this is just my subjective experience.
As background: Around 2017, I found a lot of days were blending in. I started keeping a diary of the day’s events to see if my life really was that boring. I didn’t follow any methodology or online hype; it was entirely my own idea. I kept it up for about 4 years. My entries were usually quite brief (partly constrained by doing it on paper). Over time, I came to prefer not writing in a particular style, so it was just prose - and not in shorthand either.
I am glad I did though it ultimately became a chore to commit to a daily diary, and it became yet another obligation to fulfil in my mind before I could call it a day. I tried to do it with less frequency but I got less out of that. I also tried some hyped-up ideas like gratitude, but quickly dropped them. I think forcing these things distracted from what it was giving me, and the fact they were forced meant I could not actually integrate e.g. gratitude as a practice or way of being.
So after far too long, I decided to stop keeping a journal in 2021.
I have returned to the practice over late 2024-early 2025, but in TiddlyWiki instead of an annual diary/planner book. I now do it only when I feel like it, which is every week or so, focusing on the first things that come to mind.
One constant is that I have never gone back and read my journal entries, apart from a couple of instances where I wanted to see a very specific event some years ago. It was the same event both times, actually. It is just a way for me to process feelings & happenings more than anything.
For me the process of writing is a way to meditate on an event in a way that isn’t problematic rumination. Being able to read back an entry gives me almost no value, while the process of writing a cohesive thought about events in my life is very helpful.
I would also add that this is a very private document. I do not include a list of tasks to complete in my journal. I will only describe my subjective experience with them, if I feel it relevant. Again, I just let the words flow.
A usual entry will be the day’s date, and then me recounting some of the main events of the past week or two. I just let the words flow, not rewriting them too much, until I feel satisfied. I will on rare occasion consult previous entries (over the past 1-2 weeks only) but will almost never edit them - not as a matter of principle but as there would be little purpose for what I’m getting out of my journal; a subjective document of time as it is now, to me.
Do you use Journals and if so, what fields do you use?
A journal-date field as recommended by a previous topic here (you’ll have to search for it, quite a few people use it). I can then have a more human readable title. I favour DD MMM YYYY - DDD, which would give output like ‘27 December 2025 - Saturday’.
Do you capture elements like mood, energy, importance?
I did in the past, but I preferred using it for the purpose stated above, so it is free-format prose. The only requirement is a title and entry date.
I am personally not on board with ‘quantified self’ approaches and don’t do that anywhere else in my life. I found that tracking these things got in the way and created an additional obligation, which I didn’t want to put on myself.
Any other elements that I could consider?
Heavily interlink your journal with the rest of your wiki. I link names of people especially. You can then see them under More → Missing. I also have backlinks visible, so I can see the different times someone or something has impacted me in some way.
