Should journaling be done in a book? I asked myself this, years ago, when I made the switch to a digital format. It felt a little strange at first. That connection that you have with a pen to paper. Feeling the tip push into the sheet. That’s an ancient feeling. Yet, a short while into typing my journals, and I realized that I hadn’t thought about it since.
Typing and writing are both extensions of your will, in the same way that your toothbrush is, or the steering wheel of a car, or any piece of sporting equipment. Our minds are very good at adopting inanimate objects into our experience. The pen and the keyboard both have that same quality. For the time that you use them, they become part of you.
The notebook has a feeling to it, particularly when reading it back. This item doesn’t just describe the moment, it was in the moment. The doodles in the margin, the crossed out words, the spelling mistakes: these are all connections to the time and place that the entry was written. Whether it sat in your backpack while traveling the world or it had literal tear drops dried into the pages, this journal was there for you when you needed it. Knowing all this, why journal on a screen?
“You know the secret to doing more pull-ups?” the man asked me in between breaths. I was nineteen years old, new to the gym and swapping in with him at the pull-up bar. I knew very little and I was looking for any shortcuts he offered. This guy was about to deliver a secret and I perked up immediately. I snapped my head around, pausing before gripping the bars. “No I don’t, what is it?” “The secret to doing more pull-ups is to do more pull-ups.”
What does exercise advice have to do with writing? It’s about reducing friction. The less friction there is to writing entries, the more you’ll do it. The two ways that you reduce that friction are to get better at writing and to limit the cost of actually starting. This is why we journal on a screen: because it’s incredibly convenient. Having a journal with you at work, on transit, at the gym, in the waiting room, in bed, means that the chances of you writing in it rise.
The more you write in it, the better you become at writing in it. Journaling notebooks can be beautiful things that evoke memories just by looking at them. I know this, I have them. What is in front of me throughout the day though? The screen. It does not mean that we need to resign ourselves to an online journal that looks like a word editor. With the right craftsmanship, the screen can still have some beauty to it.
There’s a continuity in a journal, not just to its own predecessors on your bookshelf or hard drive, but to others that have journaled. The act of writing down your thoughts, whether on paper or papyrus, goes back thousands of years. By continuing in the activity, you’re doing something fundamentally human, something that connects you with the countless generations of people who have done it before. It doesn’t matter if you journal on a computer or a sheet of papyrus. The act of writing is what counts and it needs a medium that gets out of the way. The screen does that well.
I grappled with that connection when I switched from a notebook to a digital journal. I told myself that it wasn’t the same, that the fundamental act of pen to paper had some extraordinary power. I’m still unsure if it does or it doesn’t, but one thing I am certain of, is that when I switched most of my writing to digital, I didn’t think about all that, I just wrote.