I’ve been journaling and diary-keeping for many years, but I really got seriously into it in around 1998 or so. I’ve used both paper and digital journaling (I was on Livejournal for around 10 years, until it jumped the shark) but now I mostly use paper.
I have three journals on the go at the moment. My most important one is a bullet journal, though I have diverged from the “official” format and work mostly in weekly spreads. I find that it helps my ADHD brain keep track of the structure of my week better. For this, I use an A5 dot-grid book. Weirdly, although I’m quite artistic, I keep my journals minimalistic and mostly un-decorated.
I have a daily long-form journal, though in practise I only write long entries a few times a week rather than every day. I’m into the Tarot too, so I also use this one for my daily card pulls and weekly/monthly spreads. For this I use an A5 lined book, because I fill them faster and lined notebooks tend to be cheaper than dot-grid ones.
My third is a Commonplace book; this is where I keep a record of things I’ve learned that I want to remember, books I’m reading (and my thoughts on them), quotes I want to keep, notes about research I’m doing, and stuff like that. I use loose-leaf binders for this, so I can more easily rearrange pages and keep entries on specific topics together.
How about you?
I have a daily diary, I write evening pages, sort of stream-of-consciousness. I don’t do it in the morning because (a) I am very much a night owl and (b) if I wait until morning I won’t remember what I did yesterday. First thing in the morning though, I pull a tarot card and set it aside, and at the end of the day I reflect on how it applied to the day’s events.
I don’t bullet journal for tasks and productivity, all that goes in the calendar app on my phone.
And I have a Book of Shadows (cos I am a pagan) and that seems to qualify as being a very specific type of Commonplace book. In there I record monthly rituals, sabbats, as well as reference information pertaining to things like tarot, astrology, herbalism etc. In practise, this takes up more than one book; one for rituals, one for tarot and one for everything else.
yes it does seem like a Book of Shadows counts as a commonplace book. Is yours hand written or digital?
I have both; all the main rituals are hand written, but everything is digital as well. There’s a phrase passed down that says the Book should be “in your own hand of write”, but years back, the joke was “in your own hand of write, or that of your own dot-matrix printer”. I guess that has been upgraded since then (it was before inkjets and laser printers existed).