Cool Idea of a Journal Format

Sascha

FernandoNobel

Thanks for the recommendation. I really like the simplicity of this workflow :-)

I think the video's workflow can easily be adapted to a digital journal (even a digital journal within a Zettelkasten). But, doing this has some costs:

• On the one hand, we lose the ease of being able to draw whatever we want/need.

• On the other hand, writing in a physical journal can be more convenient in many situations, e.g. writing your journal before going to sleep.

GeoEng51

I kept a Bullet Journal for a few years - this is very similar. I liked keeping a paper Bullet journal but eventually migrated to digital, using NotePlan. One area that is worth including that wasn't specifically mentioned is to write down one thing you are grateful for each day.

Sascha

@GeoEng51 said:
(...) One area that is worth including that wasn't specifically mentioned is to write down one thing you are grateful for each day.

I like this to be a communal thing. To me, this elevates the experience to a great extend.

GeoEng51

@Sascha said:

@GeoEng51 said:
(...) One area that is worth including that wasn't specifically mentioned is to write down one thing you are grateful for each day.

I like this to be a communal thing. To me, this elevates the experience to a great extend.

Yes, I agree. My oldest daughter gets her family together before bed and they go around the circle, from youngest to oldest, sharing their favourite part of the day and something they are grateful for. It creates a good feeling amongst the group.

tjex

I've been tempted a few times by the 'quantified self' approach to life; tracking habits, weight, fitness and other metrics. Overall I feel like it puts too much pressure on one's self to constantly be critical of progress in any domain. It can very easily become a distraction from being present as much as possible in each moment, which brings a stronger feeling of quality to my life as it moves on.

It also takes a lot of time an energy to keep track of.

That being said, if someone has a specific goal they want to achieve (weight loss or better sleep), it's of course a great idea. As progress can be easily overlooked if you're feeling not so great over a course of some days.

Sascha

@tjex

The quantified self approach has similar traits to veganism. One of the traits is that it almost cancer-like in its effect on one's way of living, pretending that it can provide the answer to all questions that life asks from us.

So, your experience is pretty natural.

Btw. The Lucifer-Effect by Zimbardo explains imho much of the problem.

I don't think that it's the pressure that creates the negative effect, but the single-mindedness that it creates. (another book: The Master and His Emissary)

(Anticipating @Andy to throw in some other books that I will put on my list... )

Andy

I have been summoned by @Sascha in response to this issue raised by @tjex...

I haven't heard much about Quantified Self in the past few years (I heard more about it around 10 years ago), but I admit that I am sympathetic to it, not as a panacea that "can provide the answer to all questions" and not as "a distraction from being present as much as possible in each moment", but merely as a hobby driven by curiosity (or by any other motive) that may or may not have utility.

In "For some, self-tracking means more than self-help" (2019), Joseph Reagle said:

At the inaugural Quantified Self Show & Tell, in Pacifica, California, in 2008, the first presenter was unsure about what he had learned. As Quantified Self co-founder Gary Wolf wrote on the following day, the presenter "had a beautiful graph of his work, sleep and other activity, based on data he had been tracking for three years. And he was at the meeting to get ideas about how to extract more meaning out of it." "Meaning" can mean a few things. Among those at the first Show & Tell, there was a focus on utility: how to make the data meaningful toward some useful end. But, for some, the practice of self-tracking is compelling in and of itself. As Wolf himself confessed, "The utility of self-tracking in achieving some specified goal doesn't fully explain its fascination. There's a compulsion, a curiosity, that seems to operate in advance of any particular use."

This "compulsion" or "curiosity" (they are not the same—choose whichever one seems most relevant to a particular case) generates information, but the information itself does not tell you what to do, how to act. The presenter that Reagle mentioned had a ton of information but seemingly wasn't sure about how to make sense of it.

To make sense of self-tracking data for changing your life, you still have to go through the same process of reflection that anyone else has to do when thinking about their life. Perhaps it's possible to aim for a happy middle between pure information and pure reflection?

In "How to use data-driven insights to accomplish 'the Informed Self'" (2016), Francis Wade (in my interpretation of him) called this happy middle "the Informed Self" (instead of the Quantified Self):

At McKinsey & Co, the approach which involves collecting all the data possible and sifting it for meaning is known colloquially as "boiling the ocean." It's a temptation faced by many of their new consultants: to find and sift through as much client data as possible in order to find nuggets of insight. At the very beginning of their careers, at the start of their first project, they often engage in such intensive explorations. It's a typical mistake when they are short of training. Fairly soon, they are taught the inefficiency of this approach. Over the decades, the firm has learned that it's far better to spend time structuring the problem in a sharply focused way. They do so by creating a particular hypothesis and then looking for the data required to defend or deny it. If other unrelated issues crop up during the course of the study they won't be ignored. But the harsh reality of the business world is that time is in desperately short supply. The client is looking to solve a bottom-line problem they already know they have: it's the surest way to get an ROI on the fees they are paying. This idea of focusing your time and resources on known problems is not a bad model for the average person to use.

Of course, this is just another way of saying what @tjex already said above: "That being said, if someone has a specific goal they want to achieve (weight loss or better sleep), it's of course a great idea."

But having said that, I still want to defend those people who want to collect data just because they are curious. It is possible to do this in a way that does not distract from the present moment (because it is automated) and does not pretend to be a panacea for all problems. Personally, I track most of my time use. All that data is also transferred into a calendar where I can see exactly what I did at any time in the past. Sometimes this data is useful for troubleshooting and for giving me a more precise understanding of time, but it's also just a little hobby that generates data that I think is cool and interesting but that other people may think is weird. There is nothing wrong with this, but there will always be haters.

Further reading:

• Btihaj Ajana (ed.) (2018). Self-Tracking: Empirical and Philosophical Investigations. Cham; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65379-2
• Matthew J. Bietz, Gillian R. Hayes, Margaret E. Morris, Heather Patterson, & Luke Stark (2016). "Creating meaning in a world of quantified selves". IEEE Pervasive Computing, 15(2), 82–85. https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2016.39
• Chris Elsden, Abigail C. Durrant, & David S. Kirk (2016). "It's just my history isn't it?: understanding smart journaling practices". In: CHI '16: Proceedings of the 34th annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, California, USA, May 7–12, 2016, New York, 2016 (pp. 2819–2831). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858103
• Amon Rapp & Federica Cena (2016). "Personal informatics for everyday life: how users without prior self-tracking experience engage with personal data". International Journal of Human–Computer Studies, 94, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.05.006
• Stefan Selke (ed.) (2016). Lifelogging: Digital Self-Tracking and Lifelogging—Between Disruptive Technology and Cultural Transformation. Wiesbaden: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-13137-1
• Shannon Vallor (2016). Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190498511.001.0001

Edmund

@Andy said:
Personally, I track most of my time use. All that data is also transferred into a calendar where I can see exactly what I did at any time in the past. Sometimes this data is useful for troubleshooting and for giving me a more precise understanding of time, …

Do you also use data from Zettelkasten for your ‘quantify self’ approach? Time spent? Insights per year? Or other collectable data?

Andy

@Edmund said:

Do you also use data from Zettelkasten for your 'quantify self' approach? Time spent? Insights per year? Or other collectable data?

No, I don't quantify my Zettelkasten nearly as much as other people in this forum do. I have a set of annual smart folders in DevonThink (one of the apps I use) that shows how many Zettels I've created per year since 2008. And I have time-use data recorded back that far, so I could filter the time-use data for note*, sum the hours per year, and divide by the number of notes per year, but I doubt that would be a meaningful number, and it would badly overestimate because I often combine note-writing with other related activities within a recorded time block.

Jvet

That's practically the BuJo method, particularly the Monthly collection. I do this every month, and I track daily by hand the habits or stuff that I need to improve on. It's pretty good!

Edmund

My Zettelkasten is a Bullet Journal and my Bullet Journal is a Zettelkasten.