I wrote a journal entry for every single day in 2024 [#67]

Happy New Year! I personally 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 about this project of mine.

1

I typed all of my journal entries in plaintext files using Vim, which has significant advantages over pen & paper journaling.¹

1. I can type at 100wpm. I can handwrite at 10wpm. So I can type 10x as fast as I handwrite, which is obviously an advantage. I also use Vim, which makes me even faster.
2. I can back up my journal entries in 2 minutes. It is criminally easy. I just plug in my flash drive, and then run cp ~/Documents/journalEntries/2024.* /Volumes/flashDrive/appropriateFolder. It would be much more tedious to back up my journal entries if they were written on paper.
3. I can use grep. This command is the holy grail: grep -r "[term]" ~/Documents/journalEntries. Grep runs so quickly and just works all the time. Obviously I can't use grep or any form of search if my journal entries were written on paper.

2

I set three rules for my journal entries on January 1, 2024:

1. All journal entries must have a filename of yyyy.mm.dd.txt, where yy = year, mm = month, and dd = day. As a result, all journal entries must be .txt files.
2. All journal entries can only contain characters available in Windows-1252.²
3. All journal entries must contain at least 280 bytes.³

These rules were intended to be minimally restrictive. They did a good job at that, because I wrote an incredible amount. I wrote 74,000+ words in total for an average of 200+ words per entry.

Here's a chart with the number of words of each journal entry I wrote:

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.

3

Why has this habit of daily journaling been "the best habit I've ever developed"? There are several reasons:

1. I believe it's a good idea to build a daily writing habit, regardless of what I'm writing about.
2. It's a great way for me to sleep at night. Before I wrote journal entries consistently, I sometimes found trouble sleeping because my mind would keep running. There's something about writing down your thoughts that makes it so much easier to fall asleep.

But the main reason is that I want to remember what my life was like.

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:

• "I had a toasted waffle with FROZEN sliced banana! (Dad froze the bananas because they were getting pretty ripe.) It was quite good. It might even be better than my normal toasted waffle with regular sliced banana." 2024.04.15.txt
• "I watched the Orient Express movie with Hannah! It was surprisingly good. I wish there was a little more shooty-shooty bang-bang, but I don't mind a good detective movie every once in a while." 2024.02.24.txt
• (discussing differences between the US and Istanbul) "The elevator floors actually make sense! They have negative numbers, whereas the US has crap like 'B1, B2, etc.'. I'm glad that Turkey is not scared of the 'strange' concept of negative numbers." 2024.02.16.txt
• "In other news, we went to Barton Springs today! I swam a 61-second 50m in the water. It was very difficult and I have renewed respect for the Olympic swimmers who swim it in like TWENTY-TWO seconds." 2024.08.17.txt
• etc etc.

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.

Footnotes

¹ I admit there is an appeal to pen & paper journaling, but I think the efficiency of plaintext file journaling is unmatched.

² Windows-1252 is a standard one-byte ASCII encoding. Even though Unix supports UTF-8 for .txt files, using emojis and Unicode characters in text files feels very wrong and weird to the programming part of my brain.

³ Why 280 bytes? On Jan 1, 2024, I was still using Twitter, and I decided I wanted to write at least one tweet's worth (280 characters/bytes) of content every day.