[em-bee]

i am confused by the prompt i am getting: "Write about a time in your life when you struggled with a choice and made the right one"

i understand journaling to be about today, not something eventful in the past. that prompt i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay.

the key for me for journaling is habit. the habit to do this every day, and not to skip. the prompt doesn't matter. i just write about anything noteworthy from that day.

with a plain text editor, into a file.

it's not ideal though. it's the last thing i do before going to sleep, and once in a while i miss an entry. and on some days, i feel there is nothing to write.

[kuehle]

> and on some days, i feel there is nothing to write

This is what I was trying to fix for myself.

And I found that creating a new text document is just an additional friction.

> i'd be tempted to answer with a multi page essay

This is what I visually restricted the input field for as I also feel like some questions would otherwise suggest a long answer. Trying to answer them in a brief way is a feature for myself.

[em-bee]

it's not just that the question suggests a long answer, but it is that i like writing and i have a story to tell, so i want to tell that story. i would not even want to write a short answer because i already know what the short answer would be, and it's not very interesting so there is no point to even bother to write it down.

what i am trying to say is that, for me at least, the prompt itself would have to limit the scope to today or maybe this week. (but then i would not be able to write anything for this particular prompt)

maybe prompts like: what made you happy this week? what made you sad? what was a challenge you faced this week?

if you come up with a dozen questions like that, and then randomly rotate through those, one each day, i think that might produce interesting results.