by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
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| OhLife |
I’ve always loved keeping a journal and started keeping one when I was in fourth grade.
There's nothing fabulously interesting in my diaries, but it provides snapshots of long-forgotten days.
I wrote daily as a teenager. I read those posts now and I can barely identify with the content or the person who wrote the entries. Was that me? It’s a horrifying, fascinating read in a
deer-in-the-headlights kind of way.
Since having children, my journaling has
been sporadic. I would love to say that
I have a wonderfully detailed account of my children’s early years. I don’t. And I've meant to journal more.
While reading blogs last month, I came
across a post by Hannah Braime on the Lifehack site: 5
Killer Online Journaling Tools You Should Try Out. One of the journaling programs they mentioned
was the free site OhLife. She hooked me when she used the word simple to describe it. Who has time for complicated when you’re trying to establish a new habit?
Once you sign up, the site sends you an
email every day (at whatever time you specify) and asks “how did your day
go?” You email it back and it stores the
information privately on a cloud. At the
bottom of the emails they send what you were doing that time last week (or last
month or last year, if you’ve been with the journal that long.) OhLife also encourages you to write only a
sentence if that’s all you want to write…and to
skip days, if needed.
You can attach a picture to each post, if
you want to enhance your post.
You can also download a .txt version of
your journal if you want to make sure you have a backup in case for some reason
the site discontinues. I ordinarily
wouldn’t even think about this possibility much, but the sudden discontinuation
of Google Reader has made me a paranoid user in all aspects of my online life.
I've really enjoyed OhLife and have recommended it to several of my family and friends. I've apparently become an OhLife evangelist.
Getting the emails seems to do the trick
for me in terms of keeping up with it. I haven’t missed a day yet. I type
quickly and it’s much easier to remember to write an entry if I’m being
reminded each day. And it’s not like I
don’t check my emails. :) Although I
like the idea of writing in a physical
journal each day and I still love pen and paper…it just doesn’t seem to come
together for me or fit into my busy schedule like it used to.
Journal uses for writers? For one, establishing a daily writing habit, if you’re
not a daily blogger. Journaling can help
you warm up, too, if you write afterward. Introspection. It can be therapeutic, if you sometimes
have stressful days. You could also use
it to track progress on various projects…meeting your daily word count goal or
looking into finding a cover designer and formatter, or tracking queries.
Or, if you’re like me, it’s nice to have
a searchable memory. :) My memory is abysmal and is certainly not
getting any better the older/busier I get.
One thing I know as a lifelong
diarist—don’t try to catch up. It’s just
too frustrating to try to cover everything
in a journal. Just jump in where you are
now. Sometimes simply making a list of the day’s highlights is a nice change,
if you don’t have much time.
Do you keep a journal? Ever used an online journal? If you do journal, what do you get out of it?