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I'm Rubbish at Journalling

ยท 3 min read
Andy Reid
Andy Reid
Andy the Muppit

I am rubbish at keeping a journal.

There, I said it. After years of buying notebooks, downloading apps, and telling myself "this time will be different", I finally admitted it. I am simply not built that way.

At the end of each year I create a year in review mindmap. They always take weeks to complete. I find them incredibly valuable though. Connections appear that I had forgotten. Insights emerge that I didn't notice at the time. Patterns reveal themselves only when you see everything laid out on a single canvas.

This month I sat down to create my 2025 review.

I had captured zero information. Not a single note about the books I read, the shows I watched, the runs I completed, or how my health tracked across the year. I was sitting in front of my computer, forcing myself to go through emails, calendars, photos, streaming history, and fitness apps.

I needed a process that me, an evidently lazy person when it comes to journaling, could actually follow. Not a system that required daily discipline. Not another app promising to change my habits. A system that worked with my laziness, not against it.

But the mindmaps I create have issues too. They are not mobile friendly. I can visually see the changes but not the trends in health, fitness and mood.

I wrote down four criteria:

  1. All information must not be locked into any application or cloud service. I need to own my data in a format I can read without any tool, and move it whenever I want.

  2. Don't reinvent the wheel. If something already exists, test it and adopt it if appropriate.

  3. Must be able to import my existing data from many different sources and represent it as a cohesive set.

  4. Only visualise for year-in-review once the majority of data is imported. Not before.

My direction was influenced by Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, specifically how he uses his own vault. I had already been using Obsidian in my workflow to create The Muppit Sphere and my private sites, but there was much more to it.

The last 2 weeks have been intense. What started as a simple journaling system for lazy people became a personal data hub. Books, shows, health, fitness, and more in a single queryable knowledge base.

All running from any of my devices. All stored in plain text files I own forever with every change to documents tracked and backed up locally. Long live markdown.

But it has become more than that. I have created all my own plugins, scripts and browser extensions to meet my needs. For example, I created an Obsidian plugin to provide a calendar view, colour coded by show, book, health and workouts with filtering.

This is part one of four. Next up: the hunt for my scattered data.

What data do you wish you had tracked last year?

Series: A Journaling System for Lazy People (1/4)

Read more: Personal Data Hub