Voice Journaling

Journaling is a wonderful daily practice. It has many benefits, like helping solve problems and calm the mind. The benefits have been covered thoroughly, many times, in many places. This article covers the benefits well. But how many people do it? It seems rare. I wasn’t able to quickly get a rough estimate from the Internet, but I’d guess no more than 10% of people do it.

Why don’t people do it? It seems hokey or something. It seems like an embarrassing thing somehow. That’s a problem. Another big block is probably that it’s writing. Many people are hesitant to write outside of work, email, and texting.

The only cure for the embarrassment aspect might be just for journaling to become mainstream. And perhaps the path to mainstreaming journaling is clogged by a million individuals’ mental blocks about writing.

Lately I’ve been trying journaling by recording myself speaking into my phone. I tried it once because I was running out of time to both my daily exercise and journal, and wanted to do both at once. So that evening, I turned on a voice recorder and talked through my day while on my exercise bike. It worked great.

I looked around a bit and found that there is actually an app built around voice journaling, called Journify. It looks pretty user friendly and simple. Of course, there are many apps that can be used to record your voice and even automatically transcribe it. But it’s probably a good idea to have some kind of dedicated space for journaling, much like a traditional notebook used for journaling.

Consistently journaling seems like an easy upgrade for individuals and humanity in general, so tools that support solid journaling practices are very valuable.