The Journal App Making Journal: Day 42
Persistent local data, Emotional Journaling, and keep journaling on Atomic Habits
Continue to journal on three questions everyday in this Journal App Making Journal.
1. What have I learned about app design and development today?
Continue to acquire app design and programming skills through the iOS App Development course on Udemy created by Angela Yu and the London App Brewery.
Learned about persistent local data today.
Very exciting day.
For anyone who always enjoys data and used to enjoy Excel, databases and data science systems are exciting new toys. I completed a MIT online course recently on Big Data Analytics, and shared the sense at the end that database technologies today (SQL / Python libraries) are to Excel what the Excel was once to the abacus. And today, we start a module all about creating local databases within an app. So, total excitement in the air.
Today’s module on building the Todoey App, a todo list app, is also the longest in the whole course. A total of 7.5 hours of teaching videos. Embracing myself for at least a week long journey through this.
In today’s journey, the results video above shows we manage to persist / store a small array of data (todo items and their corresponding done status), locally on the device, via a Singleton instance of the UserDefaults class.
Let the fun begin.
2. What have I learned about other journal users today?
Continue to look into journal users under the #journaling hashtag on Medium.
The featured journal user today is: Jackie Schwabe
> About Jackie and her 30-day journaling challenge
In September 2019, Jackie wrote a blog on her 30-day journaling challenge, to look at a range of ideas about how to journal and their benefits. I group her ideas into the following 6 areas, and take on looking into one area per day in the coming week.
- General benefits of journaling.
- Specific ways of journaling for productivity, planning, and learning.
- Specific ways of journaling for imagination and creativity.
- Specific ways of journaling for regulating moods and emotions.
- How to establish the journaling habit.
- Journaling systems, tools, and technologies.
> Key ideas I learned from Jackie today
Today, we look at Emotional Journaling, theme no.4.
Jackie believed journaling could have a beneficial impact on our moods and emotions in the following ways:
- Being an anchor habit at night or in the morning;
- Settling the mind via a Gratitude Journal at the end of day;
- As a brain dump to allow closure via a Nighttime Journal;
- Setting select intentions at the beginning of day to increase productivity;
- Handwriting three Morning Pages to unblock creativity based on the popular Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron;
- Free writing in third person about emotional experiences to gain objective perspectives and move on from them;
- Themed journal prompts to clarify and gain insight into an issue / a topic, eg. consistently write on a set of “journaling prompts for relationships”;
- Decision journaling to work through fears by externalising it, lessen the emotional impact by clarifying the feared scenarios in our minds;
- Broaden perspectives and get unstuck via a list of unrelated journal prompts or check-in questions such as those in the Five Minute Journal.
What a busy place is the mind. And journals seem an external version of it that is hopefully more clearly seen, so we get access to a better way of managing it.
3. What have I learned about journaling products / technologies today?
Continue to look into other journaling products / technologies.
Featured journaling system today is: The implementation system for the popular book, Atomic Habit.
(This is a follow-up project after reviewing the Clear Habit Journal system on Day 35. It goes for 21 days and will end on Day 56.)
> Featured ideas from the book > Chapter 5 about the power of intention on habit changes
- The idea of implementation intention / specificity / “what gets measured gets done”, is the key message from today’s chapter.
- Being clear about what actions to take when and where is found to increase success rate of behaviour change by 3 fold, from about one third to above 90%.
> Featured lessons from Habit Academy video course > Module 4 about the impact of genetics on habits
- Behavioural genetics is the idea that our behaviour is significantly shaped by our genetics. What helps behaviour change is the categorising of its barriers into the genetic vs the environmental, and stop fighting ourselves.
- The “within person” mindset works better in habit change than the “between person”. Compare our growth to our past, instead of to others.
> Using the Clear Habit Journal for my own habit change
- So many people have expressed to me that they love reading books about continuous personal development, but that there are so many books they read and follow they hardly get to apply them all. I share that sentiment.
- Over the last few days, I have worked through all the suggested exercises from the Atomic Habits book and Habit Academy course. By simply writing them out in a journal, creating clarity and intention, I must say, it has worked surprisingly well so far.
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