The Advantages of a Digital Journal
Now, I'm all for paper as much as the next guy. But after more than two decades of consistent journaling, I can say with confidence that there are significant benefits to using a digital journal.
It's hard to compete with something that can sync between all your devices, geotags entry locations, incorporates images, and can instantly search and filter many years worth of entries...
Perfect Searching and Indexing
One of Day One’s greatest assets as a journal is the ability to search through its archives.
Your entries can be tagged and starred for easy access to important dates and important information. Entries are also automatically geotagged with the location, creating a mapped archive of your travels (even if just around town). Also, entries can include photos, which adds a visual aspect to a journal.
Indexing and archiving physical journals for future reference is the great bane of paper journaling. Sure, you can keep a journal with neat writing and organize those journals in a pleasant organization scheme, but going back to those journals and finding a specific piece of information has always been difficult.
Day One eliminates the stress in indexing and archiving. Day One is searchable. Every entry can be searched with a fine-toothed comb, providing direct access to any and every entry within seconds. Entries can be tagged to provide context in your search. And, most importantly, your Day One archive is digital; no house fire or torrential flood can tear your archives from your hands.
Day One’s ability to quickly search all your entries is what makes digital journaling so much more useful to your future self. The challenges you are working through today need not be repeated. By having easily accessible journal archives, you can look up past entries in moments and learn from the challenges you’ve already overcome.
Create Limitless Entries
With a journal, quality is often found in the quantity.
The things we write down now that may seem inconsequential can become clues of revelation when we look back at them in a year or a decade from now.
Day One can simultaneously serve as a photo-log, a professional journal, a productivity journal, a personal diary, a commonplace book, and a log of daily activities, among other things.
Sarah Kauss, the founder of S’well Bottle, journals every day. In an interview with Fast Company, Kauss said one of the rewards of journaling daily is being able to look back and see the challenges she was facing a year ago and realize that now it’s no problem at all. This ability to look back with perspective can summon an incredible amount of momentum and confidence when moving forward.
Because of its excellent searching, indexing, and tagging, you should feel no hesitation or restraint when adding entries of all sorts to Day One. You will be able to easily view and sort those entries based on different tags, separate journals, locations, or other search criteria.
Our Lives Are Digital
So much of our lives involve the digital now. Correspondence is done through email and text message. We communicate with our friends over Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We read interesting and inspiring articles online. We’re constantly snapping photos with our phones, and we’re “checking in” at our favorite restaurants, parks, and other locations.
Because Day One is a digital tool, it interacts natively with the same mediums we are already involved in. All the digital aspects of our lives (photos, website links, locations, status updates, emails, and more) can be put into Day One.
Backed Up and Restorable
If you lose your phone, you won’t lose your Day One entries. In fact, if you were to simultaneously lose your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, your Day One entries would still be safe because they are backed up to the cloud.
Getting them back is as easy as re-installing Day One on your new device and then syncing it with Day One’s own search engine. (In the chapter on Sync, we’ll tell you how to make sure you have Day One sync set up.)
Omnipresent
Day One has apps for all your (Apple) devices, not least of which is the smartphone you keep at arm’s reach all day. You can create a new Day One entry any time you have a free moment.
And, as stated above, because of Day One’s incredible indexing and search abilities, you need only to add even the slightest updates (sometimes, just a photograph). Not to mention, because Day One also adds location, weather, and activity data, your “simple” updates are also tagged with the geolocation, the current weather, and if you were being active or not at the time.
