Book or Computer? The Best Place to Keep your Journal

This is the second installment of a multi-part series on journal writing. The first post described the benefits of keeping a journal. Here, I’ll share thoughts on where to keep your journal: paper or digital.

For most of my adult life, I’ve kept a journal. I’ve always felt a calling to record my life, perhaps some homage to my love of books and reading. My earliest journals were blank hardback books, the first of which took nearly a decade of sporadic writing to fill. After I became more convinced of my journal keeping ability, I bought lovely leather-bound books with acid-free paper and a silk ribbon to mark my place. I figured I could splurge on a book that I might carry around with me daily for a year or more. I now have a shelf full of these beautiful books after two decades of near-daily writing.

How I Started Keeping a Journal

My journaling habit really took hold when I moved to Vashon 20 years ago. Vashon is an island in the middle of Puget Sound in Washington State, accessible only by ferry, so my daily commute to work each way involved thirty minutes of driving on back country roads and thirty minutes of combined waiting and sailing on a ferry boat to the mainland.

Vashon is known for many odd things, but one demographical fact is that a significant proportion of island inhabitants spend more than an hour each way in commuting to work. According to the 2000 census, only eight other zip codes in the nation have longer commuting times. Vashon shares its unique status with other towns in upstate New York and Connecticut, well known for long train rides into New York City. But Vashon? Weird fact.

With a two-hour daily commute, I had time each day to read and write. I listened to audiobooks during the driving part and turned to journal writing for the rest. With aspirations to be a writer, I figured keeping a journal would be a safe way to practice my craft. Plus, I felt compelled to record what was going on in my life, having just started a young family, moving from Seattle to a somewhat odd island, and scheming someday to leave my corporate job for a life aboard a sailboat with my family bound for unknown shores.

So I took pen to paper and kept a regular journal during this daily commute. Very soon after, my dreams of writing a great novel were dashed, having to accept that just about everything I wrote in my journal was awful. No one would want to read any part of it. After picking myself up and dusting myself off, I discovered something wonderful: it didn’t matter. The process of writing down my thoughts was helping me in other more important ways. I was soon hooked on daily journal writing.

The Delight of Paper Journals

Keeping a paper journal has its charm in today’s digital world. The feel of a real book in my hands as I prepared to write seemed to elevate my thinking, knowing whatever I wrote down would be permanent, everlasting. Before beginning to write, I would scan back over the prior entries, reacquainting myself with the recent past. This review promoted more continuity in my journal writing. My handwriting is not great, but my personality comes across better in cursive, from the emphasis I add or the hurriedness of my strokes, a sign that the words are racing out of me. I also enjoy deciphering the scratched out sections (what was I hiding from myself?) and my quirky little drawings and illustrations.

Paper journals do have their downsides. Once you fill one, access to those words is locked away. I have a dozen of these volumes stored in a box somewhere, collecting dust (more on how I solved this in a future post). Security is also lacking unless you’re careful to protect your journal from prying eyes. I once came home to my upset spouse after she found an old journal of mine which described an event which occurred long, long before we were married. She was too mad to be embarrassed at reading someone else’s journal and we quickly made up. The lesson remains. Finally, the types of things you can put in a journal are pretty limited: your handwriting, perhaps a drawing, a taped in picture or memento. It’s not practical to transcribe special emails, social media posts, or all the photos we now take with the ubiquitous smartphone cameras in our pockets.

As a technology fan, I always felt that a computer-based journal would make sense for me. I tried many different solutions over the past 15 years, from simple word processing tools to dedicated journaling software. None of these stuck for two main reasons: first, these solutions required a computer for the writing, and even a smallish laptop is still a lot less portable and convenient than a small journal. Paper and pen are hard to beat as a proven technology. And second, I found my writing style at a keyboard was too business-like from years of professional writing, and I got stymied by a blank screen and blinking cursor. None could replace my precious journal, trusted blue pen and the lap desk that I stowed away in my truck during my ferry commute.

The iPhone, the iPad, and one beautifully designed writing app changed all that.

Day One Journal Software

About six years ago, I switched over to a digital journaling platform called Day One. I started with this app on the Mac, but my electronic journaling flourished once I began using iPad. Here was a device that I carried with me everywhere, and when paired with a keyboard, was a terrific writing tool, small yet powerful, and for me, omnipresent. Day One deserves a dedicated post, but I’ll summarize why this app is so fabulous here:

1. Pervasive Input. It’s so easy to get words into my journal. I can write, dictate, copy and paste from an email or the web, from my iPhone, my iPad, or my Mac. Wherever I am, I have one of these devices at hand. Great quotes from books I’ve highlighted in my Kindle can be inserted without laborious rescribing. I can even automate journal entries from social media posts.
2. Access and Security. I have thousands of journal entries stored in Day One; some transcribed from paper journals going back over thirty years, all tagged and searchable. These journals are encrypted and secured by passwords.
3. Photos. Photos are easily added to a journal entry, either as a standalone entry or to augment a longer one. About half of my writing in the past year has an accompanying photo. A picture tells a thousand words, literally.
4. Tagging. Every entry is tagged with meta-data: location, weather, what music I was listening to when I was writing, where I was in the world, and keyword tags I’ve defined to help search and group entries.
5. Syncing. Day One uses a proprietary and encrypted sync service that lets me start an entry on my iPhone, say with a photo, and update it on the iPad or Mac. It also means my entire journal history is available on every device.
6. This Day in your History. Day One has a unique feature which shows me what I wrote on this day over my entire journal history. I’ve been keeping a journal a long time, and its such fun to revisit entries from years past.
7. Export Tools. I can export my journal to lots of different formats, including plain text, so I don’t have to worry about losing my writing if this software ever goes away.
8. Design. The app itself is stunning. You can tell a lot of time was spent thinking about how to bring the focus of the application to your writing, and doing away with the fluff and gunk of typical mobile apps.

There are a few drawbacks with Day One. First, it’s only available on the Mac, though both iOS and Android app are available on mobile devices. Second, an annual subscription is required to take advantage of its power and functionality. A lot of folks grumbled about this, but I was delighted when Day One made the switch to a subscription platform. I will gladly pay the $35 per year for software I use every day, knowing the company is now on solid financial footing in the crazy and non-sustainable app development world. Third, with all my journals in the cloud, there is a chance someone could hack into my account and gain access, despite the fancy encryption and passwords, to every personal word I’ve ever written. This is the new world we live in, and I grudgingly accept this risk.

I can share now after five full years of daily journal writing in Day One that I am a complete convert. I think better now at a keyboard and write without hesitation, even with a blinking cursor to taunt me. I believe my writing quality has increased without losing the intimacy and honesty of my pen and paper journal writing. I’ve lost the rhythm and practice of writing by hand, though I’ll admit I sometimes miss the tangible benefits of writing in a real book – the heft of the book, the personality of the pen strokes, the perceived longevity of text on paper.

With three decades of constant journaling behind me, I relish the ability to look back on private musings I wrote so many years ago, all from my iPhone. In fact, one of my morning rituals is to open Day One and read over the half-dozen or more entries I wrote on that day over the past decades. What an incredible gift it is to re-ignite those memories each morning. I can’t think of a better way to reflect on this amazing journey we’re all taking.

So Which Is Better?

The answer depends on which format best supports your writing habit. For me, the transition from keeping a paper journal to typing on a keyboard took years before it finally clicked. It was definitely a journey. Now I can’t imagine going back to a paper journal. But the best journal format is the one that keeps you writing, or at the very minimum, doesn’t stop you from writing. Find one you feel comfortable confiding in and write. And write again. Simple advice, maybe hard to implement.

If you’ve found your journal muse, what do you use, book or digital? I would love to read your feedback in the comment section below.