Welcome to the first ever English-language community about Journaling on the Lemmyverse.
What is journaling?
For the purpose of this community, journaling is the use of a paper or digital record of daily (or less frequent) tasks, activities, events, thoughts, goals, habits and other things that you wish to keep a record of in your personal or professional life.
Journaling serves many purposes; it can be a productivity tool, an aid to good mental health, a method of memory-keeping for those important events in your life, a repository of personal knowledge, or a creative outlet.
For productivity, you may wish to keep a bullet journal, a weekly/daily planner, a record of your goals and projects.
For self help and mindfulness you may wish to keep morning pages, stream-of-consciousness writing, a dream or mood diary, or a spiritual journal.
For a personal knowledge repository, you may have a Commonplace book, or use one of the many digital knowledge-management tools such as Notion, Obsidian or Logseq. (Just don’t expect any tech support for those tools here; if you need assistance with your software, you’ll be better off asking for it on a platform dedicated to your chosen software).
Journaling doesnt have to be all words and numbers though; if you’re creative, an art journal or junk journal may be just the outlet you need.
What journaling isn’t
A blog is not journaling, unless you’re using it for one or more of the purposes outlined above. If you’re writing a blog to network and grow your brand, promote articles and create content intended for others to read, that’s not a journal. On the other hand, many people do use public blogs for personal journaling (I had one on Livejournal for many years) and if you’re using a blogging tool for your personal journaling, that’s welcome here too.
What sort of posts are welcome here?
Just about anything related to journaling. You can chat about your techniques and practises, you can share pictures of your spreads, share journaling prompts, ask questions, ask for advice, even share great journaling products and resources that you use and love.
Feel free to browse older posts and comment on them as well as post something new of your own; if something inspires you to comment, there's no such thing as "too old".
THE RULES
There aren’t many rules here but they are important; they help to keep content relevant and interesting to community members. For this reason, all posts should have some relation to the topic of journaling.
No NSFW content - If the pages you want to share contain anything NSFW on them (including nudity, sex, violence, gore) please blur it out.
No spam - Sharing journaling products and resources that you personally use and love is great, but this isn’t a marketplace. As a general rule, if you are the person selling or profiting from the product or resource, then don’t post it. Also, we don’t need to see it more than once, no matter how much you love it.
Be nice - If someone asks for constructive criticism of their pages or spreads, then by all means offer suggestions for improving them, but don’t just tell someone it sucks. If someone journals in a way that differs from the way you do it, don’t tell them they’re doing it wrong. There is no right or wrong way to journal; only ways that are right or wrong for you.
Absolutely no racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Posts that denigrate or are hateful towards any group or individual will not be tolerated. For this reason, I am also not allowing any form of religious evangelism (though posts about a spiritual type journal are fine) and absolutely no political content at all. I have enough experience of online forums to know that it’s not possible to have a discussion about religion or politics without offending someone. We’re not here for that. We’re here to talk about journaling.
If you have any concerns about any content in the community, send me a private message rather than engaging with the OP. That’s how flame-wars start.
If the community grows significantly, I’ll be looking for more moderators, who I shall choose from the pool of active contributors.
Finally, have fun, and happy journaling!