Every so often, I question whether I am using the best tools for the job (of writing), and none more often than when it comes to journalling. For me, a writer for wellbeing, the backbone of what I do centres around journalling. Whilst I engage in other forms of writing, this is the one that I aim to do every day, even when I am doing absolutely nothing else in the way of writing. I am aware that it is often dismissed by many writers, but that doesn’t change my relationship with it.
And so, in the last week, I have been looking at recommendations for specific journalling software. I waded through reviews, recommendations, anecdotal evidence and any reference I could find to the world of journalling software.
Prior to doing this, I was using a combination of a stylus with Nebo software on a tablet and Microsoft OneNote, none of which was in any way customised software for journalling. Prior to the stylus/Nebo/tablet combination, I was using a pen and paper before then transferring that on to OneNote, which upon examination seems like a bit of a convoluted way of going about things for both the pen and paper option and the Stylus/Nebo/Tablet option.
That may be true, but there is something different between handwriting and keyboard entry that makes it worth doing both sometimes. And I did discover along the way that a huge number of people seriously engaged in journalling, often don’t use journalling software, but do anything that ranges from scribbling on scrap paper to using traditional word processing software for the most part, and most don’t do anything further with such material. The people who do seem to use journalling software seem to be those engaged in writing memoirs or personal essays or educationalists of varying types, although there may be many more that I don’t know about.
Eventually, of the many products available, I chose three to look at, those being ‘Penzu’, ‘Day One’ and ‘Journey’. I quickly settled on ‘Journey’ as it seemed better developed for Microsoft and Android, with more features that worked on those platforms and, to my eyes at least, a more comfortable user experience (but obviously that is a very subjective view).
I don’t want to write a review of ‘Journey’ as I’m sure there are many of those out there in the world. In any case, my experience was one of not knowing the extent of how much I did not know about modern day journalling…..and not knowing how much I wanted features in journalling software that a day previously I knew nothing about.
So, ultimately, I have decided to keep using Journey, but I am not shelving my other methods…..just in case. I have been enamoured by software before now which I have later stopped using, reverting to the previous method shortly afterwards.
I would like to tell you about all the other exciting things I have been doing in the last week, but there hasn’t really been any. I guess I could tell you about moving on from writing group, but whilst that is impactful for me, it would mean nothing to anyone else.
Other things that I found impactful were the shocking details of Storm Milton, the escalation of the war in the Middle East and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, but these are all stories that belong to others to tell.
In the meantime, I will explore Journey a bit more, which may take a bit of time for this old man, but will keep plodding through with it.
Fraser
October 2024
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