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I’m excited to begin the 30-Day Digital Journaling Challenge today.
Since the essence of the challenge is on digital (rather than writing with pen on paper) journaling, much of the discussion on the web site and the Facebook page has been about what apps and programs people use.
One of the most frequent questions has been about the need for a separate journaling program. Many people say they’re planning to use a word processing (e.g., Microsoft Word) document for their digital journaling and divide the document into separate entries with headings. A lot of writers I know use another program, Scrivener, for their writing projects. Although I have not done this myself, I can see how Scrivener could be easily adapted for digital journaling. You could have a top-level folder for the year, with a subfolder for each month. Each monthly subfolder would then contain separate documents for each dated entry. Scrivener allows users to assign key words and to color code sections, which would make organization and retrieval of specific material fairly easy. (Scrivener was originally developed for Macs, but there is now a Windows version available.)
For my digital journaling, I have used a journaling program, MacJournal by Mariner Software, for several years. (This is a Mac-only program.) I like it for a lot of reasons:
- You can protect your journal with a password
- You can create different journals for different purposes
- You can create new journals and new entries easily
- You can format text with different fonts and colors
- You can create categories of entries and color code them
- You can assign key words to entries
- You can add images, even videos, to entries
MacJournal undoubtedly has more features than these, but these are the ones I use consistently.
Some people like to keep separate journals for different purposes—a dream journal, a gratitude journal, a gardening journal, a wine journal. With MacJournal you can do that. But I like to throw everything into one journal, then pull out what I need when I need it. With MacJournal I can do this. I like, for example, that I can color code entries—purple for dreams, red for health—and then easily isolate only those entries when I want to look at them.
I will be using MacJournal for the 30-Day Digital Journaling Challenge. I’m looking forward to hearing from other participants what program or approach they use and how they like it.
Disclaimer:
I have no financial interest in any of the programs mentioned here. I purchased my copies of Microsoft Word, Scrivener, and MacJournal.