Figured it might be a good discussion question. Crossposted to [email protected].
Especially as someone who wants to help grow [email protected], and to participate to help it grow, but in the end I come from [email protected] and I think of what I have far more as a Personal Knowledge Management System than a journal. I spend far less time on personal feelings and thoughts and “what did I do today?” and a lot more on making it a knowledge repository for Future Me. And if what I do is actually pretty separate from journaling it would be cool to know so I don’t invade threads I shouldn’t be talking in.
I have seperate systems for other thoughts. Like I have a notebook just for my takes on media, and a git repo for technical things I’ve learned. On top of that I’m a diarist, so my diary entries are often more like letters.
But I specifically try to avoid just listing out what I’ve been doing and instead try to pick out a couple events and how I feel about them. For me it’s much more about documenting feelings.
It’s as different as apples and oranges in my opinion.
However, journaling can be part of a PKMS, if you link it in a meaningful way.
There can also be different kinds of journaling as you mention. I write a personal journal (mostly everyday, going on two decades). However I also have a separate “domain knowledge” type journaling thats less feelings and such but discoveries and insights.
If you haven’t heard of the concept of Zettlekasten, I’d suggest looking into that. As a neurodivergent it was a breakthrough that matches how my mind works when it comes to curating a PKMS in a relational manner.
I think of what I have far more as a Personal Knowledge Management System than a journal. I spend far less time on personal feelings and thoughts and “what did I do today?” and a lot more on making it a knowledge repository for Future Me.
My journal is a mix of both but it’s still an untangled mess of entries, contrary to my pkms where everything is neatly separated and indexed. That said, I’ll index whatever part of mu journal I consider potentially useful in my pkms.
And if what I do is actually pretty separate from journaling it would be cool to know so I don’t invade threads I shouldn’t be talking in.
Reading your question made me realize I never really considered the question myself. I mean I thought I had, but nope. I would say I consider journaling as way to capture part of my flow of thoughts and memories focusing on my daily live, and as a way to step back from it. Where the pkms is the place I would step in (while also stepping back ?!) to deal with ideas and thoughts that are not related to my daily live. That’s not much clearer… I would like to get other’s point of view.
I think the organization thing, indexed vs not, might be a tendency but it definitely would not define PKMS vs journal, as I can imagine some people have very neatly indexed journals with a table of contents page and every page gets tossed on the table of contents once it gains contents.
I do think intention has to do with it. Indexing knowledge for future you, or just getting out personal thoughts for now to help you deal with them? Although that does not feel good enough right now, because some people also put things they think they’ll care about later in their journal, and some people review entries to try to figure out tendencies in their moods and habits, also known as they put down today’s knowledge for review later which sounds like a PKMS thing…
but it definitely would not define PKMS vs journal
Not my intention either. To give you an idea I will index in my pkms entries from my journal where I wrote my thoughts about such or such book I’m reading, or a movie or some event, or whatever. But only as far as I think that entry may one day have interest outside of them being my (personal) thoughts on whatever. So, most journal entries, because of the way I write it, don’t enter my pkms. I value them almost equally, though.
Sorry if I came off as aggressive or “you are WRONG,” definitely meant this more as discussion. I was just spitballing thoughts. Thanks for sharing how you do it, and what differentiates your PKMS from your journal :)
Sorry if I came off as aggressive or “you are WRONG,”
You did not ;)
