How Do You Organize and Save Your Material (All of Your Journal Entries)?
HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE AND SAVE ALL OF YOUR MATERIAL AND JOURNALING ENTRIES?
The answer depends on if you journal by hand or do digital journaling.
Let me be frank now. If you want to truly capture your life on the page, and have all of the benefits of journaling, you will not hand write your journal. Not any more. (Wait! Keep reading. Don't let me lose you.) After all, you have the capacity to keep all of it in one place, online, and keep your journaling permanently, where you can share it with future generations. You can save your journaling permanently and not ever have any of it lost. Moreover, you can save space in your house, your domain, because you will not need several bookcases for your journaling. Digital journaling, journaling on your computer, laptop, tablet, and cell phone is simply the only way to journal. It saves space and makes organization easy. Also, digital journaling costs far less than paper journaling.
DISCLAIMER AND TIP FOR PAPER JOURNALING AND HAND WRITING YOUR JOURNAL
That being said, if you will journal no other way than via hand writing, type up your journals EVERY single week so you can have a permanent journal. Do not skip typing them out one week. Trust me. If you do, you'll end up "meaning-to-do-that" and will have a year or two sitting there to be typed up before you know it. (Trust me. I've been there, done that. Typing it up as I go, the first time, saves a lot of time and makes organizing and saving my journaling a snap.)
So, how do you organize and save your digital journaling? That's a good question. The answer is, it depends on how you do your digital journaling.
There are several ways to do journaling digitally and online. However, I will cover only four of them.
1 PENZU
2 Google Docs and Drive
3 Blog (Private or public)
4 Email Journal
PENZU
I recommend PENZU. It's by far the easiest way to journal, never mind organize your journal and search your journal. Once again, you find it here: http://penzu.com/home#sthash.UMmPMvpx.dpuf
Again, I am turning forty in 40 days from today and I've journaled for over three decades. I've tried every type and every way to journal--via paper and digital journaling. Penzu is by far the best. To be honest, no other journaling platform compares. There are so many options, and search options, that it makes everything about Penzu the best and without hesitation., It's not perfect, but it's close.
JOURNALING TIP AND PENZU: In fact, I would say not to do any other type of journaling but Penzu. This is especially true if you have not ever kept a journal before or have never kept a digital journal before. If I were you, I would go straight to Penzu and not bother with any other types of journals or journal platforms.
Even if you use the free version of Penzu, which is more than adequate, you have several easy tools at your fingertips to organize your journaling and do your journaling. And, one of the easy organizing tips is: it does it for you. It puts it in chronological order for you. How simple is that?
Also, you can use the search feature and find anything you want to find. Again, it's nice and simple where you don't have to do anything extra or special.
Another nice feature about Penzu is that it saves all of your journal entries online, no matter what device you use. You can use someone else's cell, tablet, laptop, or computer, and as long as they have an internet connection, you can get to your Penzu journal. All of your journaling is then in one place. (I have shelves of paper journals, documents on my computer, several blogs, etc. In essence, I have my journals all voer the place. It's a complicated system. But, since November of 2012, I've tried to get everything saved on Penzu. I still need to type up about three hundred books of my handwritten journals, (remember that's AFTER I lost about twenty years of my journaling--maybe 25 years in our last move) but I at least have all of them and can put them on Penzu when time allows. So, you see, my journaling system is complicated--except for what I have on Penzu.)
Another nice feature of Penzu is you can upload all of your blog posts to it as well if you want. The problem is it doesn't keep the original date of the blog post, though. At least you have each saved though.
There is something that is problematic, though, if you don't know how to do work-arounds with Penzu. I can teach you the work-arounds so Penzu will end up being by far the BEST journaling platform you can use, hands-down.
So, what's the catch with Penzu? You won't know there is a catch until you've used them for years or unless you download thousands of journal or blog entries. But, when you do, you will see the problem. If you have too many journal entries, you cannot see all of them when you open up Penzu. It only goes to 80 pages on the screen, but you may have far more than that. I have a total of 3,330 journal entries as of this moment. I add ten to twenty per day on average Monday through Friday, less on the weekends. So, not seeing all of them at the bottom of the screen tends to make me panic. However, they are all there. I just cannot see them at the bottom of the screen.
How do I find all of my journaling entries on Penzu if they don't show up on the screen? I can search for them via date through their custom feature.
However, that being said, the Penzu Pro Version offers even more organizational tools, which I really like.
If you want Penzu Pro for $19 per year - 20% off from this code:
I tag all of my entries in a very specific way. I tag my journal entries with a separate tag for each of these categories below and do this for each journal entry:
1 Month
2 Year
3 Topic(s)
I can then do a search for each/any of those tags. This is how to organize your journal and journal entries.
Also, if you do get Penzu Pro, I recommend having a new journal for each year. I had one journal for all of it up until three days ago and now see my error. (Aha! I justt realized how I can rectify that problem and will. I can search the tags, and the dates, and move the entries to the specific year. Huh. thanks for helping me solve that problem.)
I can save my journal via a pdf or a txt file. I save them both--on my computer and on my online storage, along with my eternal hard drive. Just in case.
So, I would use Penzu if I were you. It is simple and it simply makes sense. Now, pardon me while I reorganize my Penzu files.
(Journaling How-To and Journaling Stuff (2014-08-05 14:27:02))
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