The other day, someone commented on a social network about his joy at having been able to open an old software with which he wrote his personal diary as a teenager. Beyond the technical details that I do not comment, because he did it with a Mac, What was interesting was the introspection exercise that led him to compare his dreams and projects as a young man with his present.
When we talk about writing programs in this article, we are not talking about letters and business documents (LibreOffice handles that well) or applications to write the next best-seller. We refer to applications that make it easier for us to write for ourselves.
Why write for yourself?
From childhood we are taught that writing is something that is done for others. A description of vacations in elementary school, an essay on Don Quixote for high school, or a thesis for college. Much of working life is spent writing emails, contracts, memos and proposals and, free time is divided between doing something and telling it on social networks.
However, according to experts, writing for us brings great benefits
Mood improvement
Various investigations report that the act of writing something affects our mind. According to specialists, Putting problems and fears in writing helps reduce stress, while writing dreams and achievements make people healthier and happier.
Leave a record
It is a common place to say that words are carried by the wind. Talking is easy, as easy as forgetting and contradicting yourself. It is true that we can erase what we write, but that implies taking the trouble to do it. Putting something in writing is a way of making it harder for us not to keep the promises we made to ourselves.
Maintaining focus
Kodak and Polaroid were in the business of making it easy for people to remember happy times and loved ones who were gone. The way to do this was to manufacture devices and supports that by means of optical and chemical means allowed to preserve them. At some point they ended up confusing the medium with the objective and believed that their business was the sale of rolls of photos and films. This prevented them from betting on digital technology.
El Keeping a permanent record of our goals acts like a compass. It allows us to realize if we were so excited about doing what we did whenever we strayed from the path and forces us to wonder if these goals are still valid.
Three programs to write for yourself
Red Notebook
In this case we have an app that allows us to record our annotations chronologically and assign keywords to them, which facilitates their retrieval using both systems.
Some features include:
- Allows you to insert images, files and images.
- Spelling check.
- Smart search.
- Automatic saving.
- Backup in compressed file.
- Content protection.
- Cloud with the most used words and tags.
- Templates.
- Export to plain text, HTML or Latex.
Lifegraph
This program it can function as a note-taking app and a private diary at the same time. In both cases in offline mode. In addition to its desktop version, it has one for mobile devices.
It has a simple interface and the following features:
- Journals can be encrypted with the AES256 standard.
- Powerful and intuitive label management.
- Creation of basic to-do lists.
- Automatic format of titles and subtitles.
- Use of rich text.
- Text search and replacement tool.
- Spelling check.
- Possibility of creating links between entries.
- Automatic copy.
Journey
Our last mention It is not for privacy freaks as it involves the use of the cloud.
Journey allows us to add journal entries using the mobile app, desktop app, or your website. Synchronization is done through Google Drive.
Some of its features are
- Automatic insertion of date and place.
- It allows incorporating photos and videos to the entrails.
- Search for tickets by places, calendar or timeline.
- Protection of entries using a PIN.
- Export of entries in .docx format and print to PDF
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