Blog Week: The search for the perfect tool for writing

[franceslievens]

The deal I made with myself somewhere at the end of December or early January, was this: first I'd write more often than I had been doing the previous year, and second I'd try to write as often as I did before. Writing used to be a means to arrange my thoughts, but there was work, children, extracurricular activities driving me nuts. So the deal became a pact: I would start writing down whatever bothered me, as I had done before, thus getting it out of my system, and clearing my head.
So far so great. Now I needed tools. Those tools had to be easily accessible at every time of day: pen and paper? I'd already mislaid the notebook I got myself for school, and I wouldn't be able to jot things down on a filled underground train. My phone it would be then. The tool: Day One.

I had noticed Day One before on the app store, but didn't think much of it then. I had my online places to play and write. I had been journaling for years, had seen it taper off and didn't feel much for starting it up again. But now, searching for the right tool to start up my journaling, I could see its appeal. Day One shows you your journal entries in the order you entered them – it is of course a journal – but it makes those entries searchable. You add tags to keep things that relate to each other together. You can add pictures, links, whatnot, and best of all, you can easily export your entry to share it with others.
You don't have to share of course, so I stopped worrying about what and how I wrote things down and wrote again. I was taking pictures with captions that didn't make it onto twitter, writing down the bad days I had with the girls, which I never shared on LJ. Best of all: I started looking for things to write down. Did I see a lady with strange pompoms attached to her winter boots on the platform? I'd take my phone and write. I started to notice things again.

Day One syncs flawlessly between my iDevices. I haven't installed the app on the Mac, but am very tempted to do so, since I started relying on it heavily this week to breath some life into my almost defunct LJ. Recently a feature has been added that lets you create a web page with whatever content you've written in Day One. This is a great workaround to let you share longer entries with added pictures on twitter or Facebook. I haven't tried it. Yet?
Day One is in the first place my private journal, where I stash ideas, worries, random thoughts. I find it is a very easy way to reflect on things. In stressful times one's mind tends to run in circles because you want to remember everything at once. Day One helps me bring order into that chaos, because I can externalise the thoughts. I have done this before in simple note applications, but they never have the strength of a journaling app, where you can go beyond the simple lists.
Maybe Day One has given me back a bit of my sanity.