njbrown.com

I wrote a journal entry for every single day in 2024

Writing 74,484 words sure does take a long time.

Happy New Year! I feel pretty accomplished right now. I wrote 366 journal entries in 2024—one for each day of the year. This habit of daily journaling is the best habit I've ever developed. Let me tell you more.

what did I use?

I used Vim to type all of my journal entries in plain .txt files. For me, this has significant advantages over classic pen & paper journaling:

  1. I can type at 100wpm and handwrite at 10wpm. Therefore, given a constant amount of journaling time, I can write 10x as much with a computer.
  2. I can back up my journal entries in 2 min. How? Well, it is trivially easy to do so with one Terminal command.[1] How would I back up a physical journal? Take a picture of every page? That's so lame and inefficient.
  3. I can instantly search through my journal entries with grep, which is the holy grail of search functionality. Can't use grep for paper.

did I give myself any rules?

Yes! I gave myself only 3 rules on Jan 1, 2024. All journal entries:

  1. must have a filename of the form yyyy.mm.dd.txt
  2. may only contain characters available in Windows-1252 (no emojis)
  3. must contain at least 280 bytes[2]

The rules were intended to be minimally restrictive. They did a good job at that: I wrote 74,000+ words in total for an average of 200+ words/day. Here's a chart:

A scatterplot with 366 distinct blue dots. X-axis displays the day of the year, and Y-axis displays the number of words written.

I spend 5-10 minutes per day before bed writing a journal entry. The habit has become so ingrained that if I go to bed without writing an entry, I'll realize before falling asleep that I've forgotten to write one.

why even do this?

This habit of daily journaling has been "the best habit I've ever developed" for several reasons:

I consider myself to have a good memory. But in reality, my memory isn't very good. If you asked me what my life was like in high school, which was only about a year ago, I would be able to paint a picture in broad strokes. I took some fun classes like AP Computer Science A, AP Calculus BC, and Linear Algebra. I played many card & board games to pass lunch break, and occasionally played volleyball with friends in a school alleyway.

But that's all my poor memory can handle. My journal entries "remember" the wonderful small things in life that my brain can't:

If I hadn't written these memories down, I would have almost certainly forgot them. But because they are in writing, I will functionally be able to recall those memories for the rest of my life. I find that awesome.

Will I continue to journal daily in 2025? Yes. I am more than willing to spend 5-10 minutes per day writing a daily journal entry. Because in years, or even decades, I can read those journal entries and recall in spectacular detail what my life was like.

  1. bash/zsh: cp ~/Documents/journalEntries/2024.* /Volumes/path/to/flash/drive/folder ↩︎

  2. Why 280? On Jan 1, 2024, I used Twitter, and I decided to write at least one tweet's worth (280 characters/bytes) of content every day. ↩︎