Journaling apps
I've been journaling in Obsidian for the past four years. A lot has happened in that time. It's pretty cool to be able to trace my thoughts across the pandemic, ups and downs in marriage, very different stages of parenthood, why I joined and left prior jobs, magical vacations, and so on. I can imagine the cool factor will only increase as I stick with the practice.
Lately, I'm feeling a pull to dabble in Day One and Apple's Journal app. This is partly due to getting back into reading other blogs, where I've seen that several people use Obsidian for notes and Day One for journaling.
Day One and Journal appeal to me primarily because they so seamlessly integrate with images, they are much easier to use on mobile, and, admittedly, they're new and shiny.
But, after some back and forth, I've decided to stick with Obsidian for the following unsorted reasons.
Markdown. I'm a big fan of Markdown. Since journaling is a long-term endeavor for me, keeping all my entries in a simple, portable format strikes me as pragmatic. Moreover, since I also blog in Markdown, I can keep my blog posts right alongside my journal entries for posterity. And since these are all just files on disk, I can back them up in whatever way I want.
Simplicity. The more I use Obsidian, the less I have to hunt around to find things. I don't have to guess at which app I used to write that one entry about that thing. I don't have to worry about migrating journal entries someday when an app disappears or goes downhill.
Linking. Sometimes I'm journaling in response to something I read or some other concept I've already written about previously. In Obsidian, it's trivial to link directly to those things. That's the core idea of the app. I can also quickly get a URL to any entry for external linking, since Obsidian has a URI scheme. And, I've built handy little Alfred utilities to copy and paste browser tabs as Markdown links into my notes.
Availability. Obsidian is cross-platform, and I already pay for their sync service. Day One is also cross-platform if you pay for their Premium tier. It's only $3ish/month, and that's practically free relatively to my income these days. But there's still what I'll call an "anxiety weight" to these subscriptions. We, like many modern households, have too many of these little subscriptions. Each time I add another one, even if it's cheap, I feel some anxiety about it. And I feel it again when I see the bill come each month or year. The questions nag: Should I be paying for this? At what point do these cheap subscriptions aggregate to "not cheap"? I'm wary of adding more to this pile.
Meanwhile, Apple's Journal app is only on iOS right now. I don't enjoy journaling on my phone, nor do I want any more reason or justification for staring into that mesmerizing device. I want the opposite. I assume they'll eventually roll Journal out to macOS, but who knows when.
Out of time. These are my thoughts for now. Have you gone through a similar mental tug of war? I'd love to hear about it over email!