Just curious if anyone here keeps a journal. If you do, what is your ‘why’, when do you write, how long have you been at it, do you ever read back through it, or have you gained insight from your earlier entries etc?
It was recently recommended as a process that might be beneficial to me, and like anything else in life, I won’t try it without taking the LR’s temperature on the subject first…
I have at various times. I wish I did currently. I found it valuable as a method for digesting and focusing. I never went back and read what I wrote. I found the point to be in the moment and the clarity it brought.
I don’t know because of time and energy. If I had the time and the energy I would. But i don’t Which probably means I should.
Kind of like the idea that if you don’t have time to meditate for 20 minutes you should immediately meditate for an hour. I also don’t have the time and energy to meditate.
I do and I have done so for years and years. I have boxes of journals and training logs.
I just use a regular spiral notebook and at the end of each notebook, I’ll go back through it and note things that come up a lot.
I do not journal every day, just because sometimes I can’t get my ass out of bed to do it, but I try to do at least a compilation once a week of what’s been going on. I also like to make a lot of lists and note ideas for poems or other writing.
This hits home for me. I’m probably too busy for my own good right now. I’m on my last evening of a few days skiing, with my last full day and night being solo. This is the first time I’ve been away from my family since my second kid was born around a year and a half ago. One thing I noticed on the many quiet chair lift rides today was holy crap, my mind is just a tornado of a anxious thoughts these days. I feel like this is the first time in a while I’ve had a chance to just decompress from the day-to-day grind, and it would probably help to take a moment each day to sort through all that.
As you say, when you least have the time is probably when you would benefit the most from the practice.
That is impressive!
I’m also great at making lists. I’m less good at accomplishing everything on those lists 
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Good article in The Athletic about journaling.
Thanks!
As I’ve posted before; Slowtwitch IS - in many ways - my journal/diary. Both the Main Forum AND over here … when the time comes, if anyone wanted to write my biography, or 3rd person memoir, there’s plenty of material here
Just search on my username, copy & paste, and delete the duplicates — or KEEP the duplicates, to see how many times that I told the same story in different ways
Since The Snap, the Search function is kinda wonky, but I do use what I’ve posted here, for alternate uses around the “world” and even to fact-check or timeline myself (and self-plagiarize myself, of course)
But - like @ironclm - I also keep physical notebook/scrapbook/sketchbook, for non-digital adventures in pencil/pen/ink and paper
I made a remark today on the 100/100 thread
I never use the same color of pen. New day, new color. I think that comes from way back when when I worked at a hospital and we had to chart in different colors, depending on the shift and I had the four color pen.
did it for about five years, high school through college.
then became a grunt in the mechanized infantry, journaling would have gotten me killed 
still have those journals though can’t read them anymore… they did help at the time.
my Dad journaled off and on throughout his life, but he was a playwright and novelist, so those weren’t journals, those were the gold (or possibly salt) mines…
read those after he passed and it was hard.
currently I have a text file as a training log, the workouts go in every day and occasional thoughts, so it’s a kind of journal.
It’s been helpful to find previous injuries mental and physical and what I did about them.