I’ve done journalling in the past, but mostly in fits and starts. I started after my grandfather passed away – I didn’t want to let the things I think go flying off into the ether of memory after I’m gone. However, when journalling, you’ve got to do it long enough for it to become a habit, and I never did stick with it. I tried again after each kid was born, but there’s enough turmoil in a new dad’s life that trying to build a new habit is nigh-impossible, so journalling never really happened.

Enter Day One, and their associated Mac and iOS applications. This application makes journalling easy – fun, even! I like the fact that I can jot down quick thoughts anywhere, at any time. Day One’s got a neat feature on their iOS apps, too – it captures the local weather, and your location (pulled via Foursquare’s database). Not that it’s necessary for journalling, but it’s a nice way to add a context-based flavor to your journal.

The really awesome part of this came when I stumbled on Brett Terpstra’s project, Slogger. In a nutshell, slogger can pull from all kinds of social sources and add those entries into your Day One journal, automatically. It’s not for the faint of heart to install, as it requires a fair amount of hacking around to get it running, but once you get it, you can have slogger automagically slurp up your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other entries, then push them to your journal. It’s neat to run back through the entries and see what you were doing and thinking at different times.

Thanks to Day One, I’ve been able to keep up the journalling habit, and it’s becoming ingrained now. Next up is writing ‘letters’ to loved ones here. Thinking it might be neat to write ‘letters’ to my kids, to be read at some time later.

Oh, and I imported all my old blog posts and social networking junk into Day One too. Rather scary… it found 11,530 entries, spanning 1260 days. Yikes. Some day, that data about my life might be important… or at least if it can’t be important, I hope it’d be interesting… to someone.