A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about migrating my journalling data away from popular application Day One, and where I was planning to move it to. However, I have stopped journalling, and I’ll go into why in this short post.

Repetition

As I spoke about in my post about using the daily hashtag #ThreeGoodThings on Mastodon, I don’t have an exciting life. Although spending a minute reflecting this as I write yet again about how a highlight of my day was listening to music or cuddling a cat is fine, it doesn’t feel fantastic having to sit down at the end of the day and face writing that out in some sort of extended format. It was this repetition that slowly began to gnaw away at me, and I began to dread journalling in the evenings.

Finch

Another thing that drew me away was using Finch, which I have written about pretty extensively at this point, but to quickly summarise, is an Android/iOS wellbeing application to improve your mental health through various activities, but centred around the idea of writing reflections throughout the day, and when you feel you need to. As such, I am writing about all sorts of random things at random times, prompted by the app, and I prefer answering these short questions than having to look at a blank page and struggle knowing what to write.

For example, here are some standard questions I answer every day:

• What stood out most from your meals today?
• Are there any recurring themes in your dreams?
• How did your body feel when you woke up?
• What is something you can look forward to this week?
• What is impacting your energy today?
• What made you most excited today?

I can cycle through the questions as well until I find one that resonates with me, and I also like how the questions are adaptive to the mood that I logged when I open the app, so on “bad” days the questions are more supportive and prompt gentle exploration of the low mood.

Furthermore, the entries are assigned a sentiment, as either positive, neutral or negative, and these go towards how the day overall went when looking back on past days via the calendar. I also like how you can filter entries by certain aspects, so I can quickly see all the entries about a person, subject or location if need be.

Drawbacks

Of course, one negative aspect of Finch is how the data is locked in. I can create a .JSON exported backup, and the app encourages you to do so on a regular basis as no personal data leaves your device, so if it gets broken or stolen, there is no cloud from Finch to get your data back from. However, as for as I am aware, I’m not currently sure if that data can be imported into a different application and useable.

But I’m not sure if I care. After all that hassle migrating my data away from Day One, I’m not bothered if I lose access to the old entries. I know I don’t care about reflecting back on those days right now. I do care about losing my “birb” Nova on Finch, but the actual entries? While it is interesting to look back at a glance, seeing which days or weeks were good or bad periods for me, I don’t spend time meticulously reading past entries. In fact, I’m not a huge fan of looking backwards, it’s not somewhere that brings me joy, I often only feel distraught afterwards.

Stopping

Late last year, I found myself just skipping the notification prompting me to journal. In the New Year, I tried starting again, but quickly gave up only after a week or so. Since then, I still get a daily notification telling me it’s time to journal, in hopes I would be inspired to do so, but it simply hasn’t happened after nearly six months. So today, I’m going to uninstall Joplin and remove the notification from Finch about journalling. Maybe one day I’ll return, but for now, I feel better.