[ccooffee]

An important part of journaling is the composition process. I have to explicitly structure a thought for it to make any sense in a written form. This is a slow, intentional process. I've had one-page journal entries take over an hour to compose and write, though I usually average 20 minutes per page.

In the limited number of attempts I've tried with audio journaling, it always comes across as stream-of-consciousness. I like to think out loud already, so I end up removing my anchor -- the written document -- and just chase one thought after another after another. I don't see how I'd be able to maintain the quality of my journal (or other written works) if I didn't have my easily re-referenced existing document.

Have you had success with audio/video journals? Any tips?

[vlark]

Sure, there's a difference between stream-of-consciousness note-taking/idea capture of brain babble and composing cohesive thoughts in a coherent manner.

But the nice thing is that a journal can be either or both, often at the same time. I think the most important thing about writing a daily journal is that the act of writing things down itself is a way of processing the thoughts and attempting to make sense of them.

I'm talk to myself too much to even attempt an audio or video journal. Speech to text certainly has it's usefulness, but I can't help thinking that video journaling borders more on performance than capturing/expanding/exploring ideas and thoughts. I'm sure there's lots of filmmakers and documentarians who'll disagree with me on that, though.

[eep_social]

I use this workflow for capturing design ideas: phone voice recorder -> whisper -> hand cleanup -> outline or second draft, depending where I am in the problem space. I have a major to-do to get a llm set up to do a first cleanup pass but haven’t had the urge since I got the first parts working. I could also stand to write automation glue to replace some shell history but it functions remarkably well for me.