Journaling on Medium? Let’s see…
By: Paul Bonneville
Tags: Journaling

Journaling on Medium? Let’s see…

The station from whence I shall write

There are so many options to consider when wanting to get back to writing, especially if you’ve ever had it as a habit in the past. Do I do it by hand in a notebook with fancy pens? Do I fire up a personal blog again? How do I, if I want to, share my posts on on other channels? Do I keep it completely personal, or do I blend personal and professional topics? Trying to answer these questions ends up potentially opening up a rabbit hole that immediately takes me off point…which is to write, specifically journal, about the topics that dance around in my head.

For me, the problem has the potential to spiral out of control even more since I am also a web & mobile programmer and architect by day. I could write my own web application to use for blogging in a variety of web technologies, giving me full control over functionality. I could fire up an instance of an open source blogging platform. I could host my blog on a variety of cloud-based services. I could also pay for a service to host it on, like Medium, which evidently, is a no-brainer place to start, which is why I am typing this right now.

One problem solved. Medium it is for now.

As a side note, Ghost, another blog platform option, and their monetization possibilities are on my mind, but I’ll save that for any more business focused writing ambitions that may evolve.

To that end, In this first entry, I do want to capture some of the answers to the questions I stated above. If nothing else, it lets me reflect on my choices around journaling as I attempt to kick off the habit once more.

Do I do it by hand in a notebook with fancy pens?

I actually did this a few months back. I had two journals. One was for personal journal entries while I used the other for business topics related to some personal projects I am working on.

Toggling between physical journals was not sustainable for me since it also meant I was context switching, which was blurring my thoughts a bit. I’d also end up crossing over the intended personal/business boundaries in the two of them from time to time, muddling the whole journaling “separation of concerns” approach I was trying to maintain.

In addition, apparently writing by hand is rather slow for me. Too slow. I’d end up staying up an extra 30 minutes to an hour to capture thoughts that I could type out in more than half the time.

Lastly, there was a physical-journaling romanticized element to it, compounded by my love of fine point pens, but in the end my inability to write legibly in cursive, and the slowness of printing, that ultimately doomed this approach.

So the answer to this question was a reasonalby explored “no”.

Do I fire up a personal blog again?

Apparently yes.

I was waffling back and forth between writing on my own company’s blog Novel Interactive, and most likely will when appropriate, but I don’t want to get back into the line-blurring between personal and professional topics on a business focused site. Every time I’ve been wanting to write lately, this has been a sticking point.

How do I, if I want to, share my posts on on other channels?

I do want to share my posts on other platforms, namely Twitter and LinkedIn.

Twitter, I am thinking, will repost automatically since I just connected my account to Medium.

LinkedIn will likely be manual posting since not all posts will be intended for a strictly business focused audience.

Do I keep it completely personal, or do I blend personal and professional topics?

I am not one to write about political or religious beliefs, nor do I delve too deeply into more intimate personal topics, so knowing that made the idea of crossing personal and professional lines a bit more conceivable. Besides, one of the goals of writing is to expand my network and business opportunities after all.

In the end though, I don’t want to have to worry about crossing those lines. So personal blog wins the day…for now.