A journal is typically structured by date. I often find it more useful to have it by theme / project to see the progress easily and find things.
Unfortunately I end up having a date journal because not everything fits in a project and more or less one journal for every project. I want access by date and project at the same time. How do others handle this?
Tags. In the paper journal I write dates but if I create a section for a project, I add page number(s) of it to the alphabetical index at the start of the journal e.g. R: Renovation: 12-15, 25, 49-52. In the electronic journal I have a directory structure like ~/Journal/YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD.md and use tags. Tags not a part of the Markdown but I use convention from Bear app.
I have been using plain old email as my first point of contact for all of my journalling, todo and personal information store. Each new topic gets a new email with a date in the subject line to remind me when it started or how overdue something is. Updates become replies on previous emails to myself. When a thread gets too wieldy, I review it and re-format or delete or promote it to git. I take time to analyze, introspect, cross reference and index stuff in my personal git wiki.
They key to journalling for me has been 1) consistency and 2) reviewing what was written. The oh-so-obvious secret to consistency is to reduce friction between the thought ('I should write this') and the act. I got rid of my friction by using a separate email account and a dedicated email app with just this account configured on it. And keeping the inbox small is a good incentive to keep reviewing what I write. I take my git repo seriously. I keep reviewing it anytime I get a chance or when I need to refresh my thoughts and memories.
This simple method has worked wonderfully well for more than a year.
I have toyed with leaving journal-like blurbs of thought in my regular notes system, sort of like Architectural Decision Records (https://adr.github.io/) for my life, but the habit never stuck. The format never felt free and unconstrained enough to facilitate the sort of raw thinking-on-paper that tends to be useful a year later. I found myself self-censoring much more than I would in a regular journal.
A key benefit of using a date journal is that many tools (incl. Day One and Dabble.me) have a "remember this day" feature that surfaces entries from the past. While the simple act of writing does clarify one's thinking, I find further benefit from the regular review and opportunity for reflection this sort of feature provides. And while I do sometimes deliberately seek out a particular entry, 90%+ of my review comes automatically from this sort of feature.
If your journal is digital wouldn't this be solved by some sort of tagging system and some helper scripts? Journal primarily by date, but tag entries with a project name, and have a script to filter on tags.
Yes I tried this with org-mode, but my tags should be hierarchically nested 3 or 4 levels since some projects are quite large and need structure. This gets unfeasible with tags.
todo.txt has `+project` and `@context` fields, you could either follow that format (different leading characters) or use `@main@sub1@sub2` or `@main/sub1/sub2` for hierarchial project tags.
I mean, anything that's well formed and won't clash with typical project names is going to work.
Or rely on the file system. `journal/` as the root non-project folder and then `journal/project/sub1/`.
