How to Maintain a Diet Journal for Life. So many of us start a food diet journal, but give up after a few days.This article provides some suggestions from someone who has successfully kept a diet journal for over 30 years. On day three of my journaling experience, I stumbled upon a software program called Day One (not an affiliate link). This is a beautiful minimalist writing tool that reminds me a lot of ByWord, the program I use to do most of my professional writing. Day One sports: A simple, uncluttered writing area. ICloud and DropBox sync to iPad and iPhone.
You might notice you didn’t do as much one day in comparison to another. This will help pinpoint areas of growth so more can be done to maintain consistent progress, even on a bad day. Diaro is a multi-platform diary, journal, notes & planner app designed to record your activities, daily events, appointments, experiences, thoughts, feelings, secrets & ideas throughout the day and sync data across all your devices & PC. It helps you organise your daily diary/ journal entries or notes from the past in the easiest way. Preserve your special memories, store personal moments. The popular, award-winning journaling app is now available on Android! Our daily journal app will keep track of every chunk of your memory in a convenient and secure way and it’s versatile too. It can be your calendar journal, memory journal, travel journal and it’s great for both men and women. ? Simple Memory Calendar From once-in-a-lifetime events to everyday moments, Day One’s.
This piqued my interest.
Like many people, I’ve always wanted to journal daily, but like most people, I’ve struggled with consistency.
This wasn’t because I lacked the self-discipline to write; it’s because I didn’t know what to write about. I wasn’t a fan of writing stream-of-conscious thought; I wanted consistency in my writing…
I wanted a template.
So, I did what most people do: I turned to Google. I varied my search terms, but my results left me less than satisfied.
Spectre 1 9 2 download free. When I wasn’t met with “listicles” like, “7 Ways to Keep a Journal”, or encouraged to, “Just try it”, I was left with little to go on in terms of journaling templates.
I was left with one option: to draft my own journaling template.
Here’s what I came up with.
Free Download: Get immediate access to my free Evernote journaling templates so you never miss a day again.
I currently journal once in the morning and once in the evening, and since using a journaling template, I’ve been consistent. I use Evernote to record my entries and use two tags: “Planner” for my morning journal and “Journal” for my evening Journal.
This is what my morning journal looks like:
Note: “TK” stands for “to come”. [1]
Every morning, I copy and paste the above template into a new note, date it and answer the following three questions:
1. “I am grateful for…” According to Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, writing down three new things that you’re grateful for, for 21 days in a row, can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to work more optimistically and more successfully. [2]
2. “What would make today great?” I “borrowed” this from The Five-Minute Journal. Here, I write my five most important tasks for the day. This helps me distinguish the vital few tasks from the trivial many, and reminds me that only a few things really matter and I can’t do everything. [3]
3. “What’s ONE Thing I must accomplish today?” This is my focusing question. This, as Gary Keller argues in his book, The ONE Thing, is the best approach to getting what you want. If you want to achieve extraordinary results, you need to narrow your focus and allow what matters most to drive your day.
In the evening, my journal is more thorough:
This is an opportunity to review my day and improve what is already working. I have an alarm on my phone to trigger my journaling habit, and every evening, at 21:00, before shutting down my laptop for the day, I answer seven questions:
1. “What did I achieve today?” This question helps me identify whether I actually achieved what I set out to accomplish in the morning, or if I got sidetracked. One lesson I’ve learned from answering this question is it’s easy to overestimate what you think you can achieve in a day, but I remind myself it’s not what you achieve in a day, it’s what you achieve eventually. This is what really matters.
2. “What lessons did I learn?” This is my favourite question to answer. This is where you journal your “Aha!” moments. Answers can range from personal, “I learned how to say no to dessert”, to skill-based, “I learned how to remove plosives in an audio recording using Audacity”. The more thorough you are, here, the more you can return to it again and again and learn from it.
3. “What am I thankful for right now?” This is similar to Question #1 in my morning journal but with a rather unorthodox twist: I thank my problems and ask myself what’s great about them. This is an exercise I learned from Anthony Robbins in his book, Awaken the Giant Within and it’s called “The Problem Solving Question”.
Last week, for example, I accidently deleted an audio recording I had made. “What is great about this problem?” I asked myself. “Nothing!” I replied. But when I meditated on it, when I really thought about it, I realised my problem was great because I could make an improvement on the original. As Laura Ingalls Wilder writes, “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.”
4. “How am I feeling right now?” This is an opportunity for me to be vulnerable, to let my guard down, to be open without censoring myself. I’m generally pretty happy, but if I’m feeling a negative emotion, I’ll identify the cause by using a why drill. I’ll ask myself why I’m feeling the emotion, in question, five times. This helps me be at the cause, rather than the effect of my concern.
5. “What did I read today?” This pertains to any blog posts I clipped and/or books I’m reading. This helps me track my weekly goal of reading a book a week. [4]
6.“What are 3 amazing things that happened today?” I think it’s important to bookend your day by focusing on your “small wins.” “I said no to a dessert.” “I resisted the urge to give into temptation.” “I didn’t sleep in.” “I achieved my most important task.” … These tiny advantages build forward momentum and remind us that bigger achievements are within reach.
7. “How could I have made today better?” Many of us, when dissatisfied with our day, prefer to write it off, to move past it as quickly and quietly as possible. But by asking yourself how you could have made the day better, you’re forcing your brain to look for improvements. Your day may have been stressful, but don’t write it off until you’ve learned something from it. Look for ONE Thing you can do, either prevent it from happening again or to help you deal with it more effectively.
Conclusion
This has been a departure from my usual writing style, but I wanted to write something personal, and give you an insight into how I journal and what I’m learning from it.
I consider it to be one of the best approaches to understanding your own psychology and documenting the changes you’re making in your life.
You might argue it’s not for you, but I invite you to try, using my template as a model, before disregarding it completely.
Free Download: Get immediate access to my free Evernote journaling templates so you never miss a day again.
Footnotes
[1] This is a writing lesson I learned from Neil Strauss in his Creative Live interview with Tim Ferriss. You can watch it on YouTube here.[2] Shawn Achor talks about the research-backed benefits of journaling in his entertaining TEDx talk, The Happy Secret to Better Work. You can read my key takeaways here.[3] This is a lesson I learnt from Greg McKeown in his wonderful book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. You can read my Kindle notes and highlights here.[4] I explain my whole approach to reading in this article: How to Read a Book a Week (It’s a Lot Easier Than You Think).
“This superb journaling app remainspleasant to behold, easy to use, and a tough act for any rival to follow.”
-Macworld
Day One is an award-winning journaling and note-taking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This app allows you to easily add date-wise entries along with attachments like images or any other file format. Just like a physical journal, you can write about what you plan to do later in the day, things that bother you, or jot down some notes related to your work.
Theuser interface is simple and hassle-free. In fact, it is one of the tidiestjournaling apps I have ever used. One of the reasons to download this app todayis, they have a free version which provides almost 70 percent of the featuresof the premium version. So, feel free to install it on your iPhone, iPad orMac. You have nothing to lose.
Introduce producer
Paul Mayne is the designer and founder of an organization called Bloom. The Day One app was developed by the hard-working and talented team of this company. In an interview with LifeHacker, Paul described how and why he decided to work on this idea.
Paulhimself had struggled to keep a personal journal and wished there was asoftware that would make his life several times easier. So, he began working ona basic version of this app for Mac computers. And since, he and his team ofsoftware developers have made plenty of enhancements to make it one of the bestin the category.
“Day One makes keeping a journaldelightfully easy.”
-Wired
Here I have listed 3 features ofDay One that make it extraordinary.
1) Reminders and Notifications
Remindershelp you be consistent with your journaling habit. Reminders are for you if youconstantly find yourself forgetting or making excuses to write. On setting up areminder, its date and time, the Day One app will send you a notification toyour iOS/ macOS device.
Here is how you can set areminder in iOS. You can customize it however you want.
Youcan add a message that will display when the reminder appears on your screen.It also allows you to set the time and frequency at which you want thenotifications. When you receive the notification, all you have to do is tap onit and add the entry for that particular time of the day.
To create Reminders, go to Day One > Settings > Notifications & Reminders > Add Reminder.
Here is how you can set a reminder in macOS. To set remindersin macOS, the same procedure applies as that of iOS.
Click Day One > Preferences (in the file menu) > Reminders. Click to enable reminders and then click the + icon to create a new reminder.
2) Convert your journal to a book
DayOne Apps book printing is a perennial favorite among writers and publishers.This feature allows you to convert your journal into a book in a matter ofseconds.
Here is an example of how the bookwill look like.
Youcan preview the entire book to see if the content, book cover and page layoutis to your liking. Once everything is perfect, you will have to add it to thecart and checkout.
Thisfeature is available in iOS and macOS devices. But, as of now, it is notavailable for Day One Android. They are working hard on bringing it to Androiddevices as well.
Day One 1 9 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Impact Factor
3) Powerful rich text formattingwith Markdown
Day One App supports Rich Text Format. Adobe xd 24 2 22 8. For content writer not well versed with HTML and other languages, writing code can be a very difficult and time-consuming process. To solve this problem, John Gruber of Daring Fireball has created a free tool called Markdown.
Markdownis a markup language that converts a plain text to HTML. All you have to do islearn a few tags used in this and you are ready to create web pages without anyknowledge of programming languages.
DayOne App has Markdown already integrated into it. This app allows you to writeplain text which will get processed into the desired format.
This is how the document lookslike when written in Rich Text Format.
After processing, it gets converted to a standard web page.The following is a virtual compiler window to help you design your page better.
Day One 1 9 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Articles
What I like
Thereare plenty of things I love about this app. I have installed it on my iPad,iPhone, and my Mac computer. The app has a lock screen, so in my absence, Idon’t have to worry about secrecy or someone peeking into my journals.Moreover, the user interface is amazingly designed. All the entries I have madeuntil now are available to me in a single click.
What I don’t like
Thisapp has some sublime features but there are a couple of key elements missing.It would have been remarkable to have these features in this app.
Onedrawback of the free version is that you can only add one image per entry.However, the paid version allows you to do so.
Anoption to maximize and minimize the screen is another thing the designers ofthis app have not considered. I can’t hide the sidebar when I want to focussolely on writing. I hope the makers of the Day One App fix these trivial issues.
My recommendation
“If you’re looking for a fantasticjournaling app or a great app for logging and recording various events andmilestones of your life, then by far and away the best pick is Day One.”
-The Sweet Setup
Idefinitely recommend using Day One for your journaling and note-taking needs.They also have a free version. So, you can try it out for a few days and see ifit suits your requirements.
For me, features like book printing and markdown seem surplus right now. But, who knows, I might decide to print out the whole thing in a book format to pass the information on to my future generations. It’s a small investment that will deliver tremendous benefits.
Pricing
TheDay One App has both, a free and premium version. If you are really seriousabout journaling, then there is a free 7 day trial for the premium version. Theprice is $2.92 per month. You’re paying for quality. If you choose to go withthe premium version then you will be billed annually.