I’ve been journaling for as long as I’ve been working on myself, my writing, and my development.
This hasn’t always been in the same way, moving from notebooks to digital formats and back again, from bullet journaling to freehand. However, one thing has remained constant…
The benefit I’ve gotten from the practice itself.
After journaling about whatever the topic might be, I always feel more composed and calm, ready to sleep or tackle the day or anything between these two extremes.
Recently I looked into TfTHacker’s Obsidian vault JournalCraft designed to teach and facilitate journaling to see what I could take away to enrich my own journaling practice.
What the vault contains
The vault comes with a selection of templates for any reason for journaling from daily reviews to gratitude journaling, mood tracking and more.
There are instructions for how to start using the templates in the vault and in-depth content about how to start journaling even if you haven’t ever done so before.
Everything is set out in a very simple-to-understand format, usable for someone who might be new to journaling and Obsidian at the same time.
How to use the vault
The vault has been set up with plugins and templates to help you start journaling, including daily notes for your daily journal prompts. There is also templates to help you insert prompts straight into your notes so you can get started writing and exploring your feelings and life events straight away.
At the same time, the vault hasn’t been overdone. It uses only simple plugins only and encourages you to modify templates and adapt the vault to your preferred journaling style, with prompts that stimulate your best thinking.
I like this approach because it encourages the ‘personal’ side of personal knowledge management. In my own Obsidian vault template PARAZETTEL, I too emphasised theory takeaways. I want the user to develop their own protocols for working, taking them with them to however and whatever they use them for in the future.
You can use JournalCraft as a home for your journaling or, as I did, take away some interesting points to integrate into your own journaling practice. I have my own Obsidian system and I don’t even journal in it, preferring to work on paper, so I used JournalCraft as a learning resource most effectively rather than as a place for the journaling itself.
What I took away from JournalCraft
The above preamble about different ways of using the content being said, let’s have a look at some of the personal takeaways I gained from the JournalCraft vault…
- It’s good to have some actionable steps to take away from what you’ve written down. Sometimes, I struggle with this. I use journaling simply to empty my mind when I could use it to plan a route forward as well.
- I liked the idea of journaling about skill mastery. After all, this linked a lot to what I’ve written recently about the real reason we work towards goals of arbitrary numbers. You can read my thoughts on this here.
- I can be quite censored in what I share day-to-day, but journaling doesn’t have to be a place where this is continued. Nobody’s going to read your journal and judge you for it. Embracing the stream-of-consciousness approach to journaling, just go with the first thing that pops into your mind. I’ve noticed the further I get into this the deeper the things that I write about are.
So far, I’ve been very impressed with TfTHacker’s JournalCraft vault and am looking forward to implementing more of the things that I’ve learned above.
It’s an interesting challenge to take on creating a vault that helps with something that is so personal but JournalCraft has done a great job and you’ll likely find something to take away whether you’re new to journaling or have years of experience under your belt as I have.
If you want to investigate JournalCraft for yourself, you can head to the link below and learn all about it…
Thanks for reading!
One thing…
At the time of writing (2024–09–10), I’m releasing V3 of my own Obsidian vault template PARAZETTEL on the upcoming weekend.
As the name suggests, it’s all about a unique fusion that I’ve developed which combines Zettelkasten and Tiago Forte’s PARA Method.
V3 includes brand-new content about using Obsidian and PARAZETTEL effectively on mobile. If you’re reading this short message then you’re still in with a chance of benefitting from the goodies I share at launch.
For more details, go to the page below…