One of the things I have long believed is that it is important to document your own life. In service of this, I have basically always been about keeping task lists and posting blog entries. I have been using OneNote for tasks and to record some snippets of daily life for several years, but what I found recently is that it was being used purely for more practical purposes, to hold URLs and to-do lists. It is extremely good at these tasks, but I felt as though I was missing out on some more free-form journal/diary style writing.
This is especially true because like it or not, this blog suffers from a certain amount of posturing. When I have something negative about myself to post, I tend to talk about it in a way that increases the amount of positive impressions that the article creates. For example, posts about my being hospitalized tend to be framed in a light of self-reflection on the fragile nature of our lives, rather than about my own cavalier attitude toward my health and my chronic disease. Either that, or things tend not to get mentioned at all. In addition, I try very hard to restrict the amount of posting I do about my work at the university as a result of some previous lessons learned.
And so, without anywhere to put it, it had become easy to just ignore or not acknowledge problems, and I think it had started to affect my overall productivity and attitude.
I had recently heard of DayOne, an application for iPhone, iPad and Macintosh from The Verge and started looking into it. On its surface, the application looks pretty similar to the concept behind OneNote, Evernote, SimpleNote, PlainText, and even just putting text files on a disk. However, it supports tagging in a different way from most of these applications, and there's a very big focus on the "timeline." In addition, it supports only very minimal MarkDown formatting and one picture per post.
Does that sound familiar? Instantly, I made the connection: DayOne is what FaceBook or Twitter could have been. It's a totally private, inward facing "social network" feed. The applications on all three devices (I had incidentally just set up my Mac mini again) sync via Dropbox and my typical workflow is that I'll post smaller observations from the day on the iPad or iPod Touch, and then when I get home, at some point in the evening I'll probably write a larger post about the day on my Mac mini.
The results so far have been interesting. I feel like forcing myself to write every single day has had a positive impact on my writing skills, even though it has only been a few weeks so far. Right now, most of my posts are about similar things – daily activities, living in Julie's house with her kids, my Internet connection with CenturyLink, and incidental (not blog-worthy) thoughts about technology. I think that continuing on this path will mean that I have other things I could start writing about, though. The other thing I noticed is that free of the "journal" premise, my task list could move into my Exchange server (and sync with my phone/ipad/computers) and OneNote was available for keeping track of my project and other things that happen on days, such as interactions with CenturyLink technicians.
The unfortunate thing is that it also means that posts to my main blog here have been slower. My hope is to make time for posting to both, and possibly use DayOne as a source of inspiration for my blog.
The hard part about public blogging becomes two-fold when I'm using an application such as DayOne. The first part is that it can be difficult to come up with subject matter and produce a reasonable post on that subject matter in a reasonable amount of time. The second, and the aspect that's somewhat unique to doing both a private journal and a public blog is allocating time to both types of writing.