thoughts-system

This is my system for keeping track of thoughts and goals. Local text files, tracked with git, and scripts to analyze/generate them (bash and node.js). All to support:

• journaling (or morning pages)
• daily logs of tasks and achievements (try using this as your 'home' page instead of your email inbox)
• weekly goals
• monthly and yearly reviews

Getting Started

First, fork this repo:

git clone git@github.com:scottnonnenberg/thoughts-system.git .

Then set your EDITOR environment variable, by putting something like this into your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile (be sure to source <filename> for this terminal session if you make changes):

export EDITOR=subl

Now, start your first journal:

./journal.sh

You should see a nice, new journal file in your editor with the day of the week and start time at the top, generated to YYYY/MM-MONTH/YYYYMMDD.txt. Add some of your thoughts. You might consider installing a word count tool in your editor of choice. It is recommended that morning pages be about three pages, or about 750 words (thanks, Buster).

Now you can start using some of the analysis tools. You'll need node.js installed to use them...

npm install

# how many days in a row of your journaled?
./streak

# what percentage of this year so far have you journaled?
./rateOfJournals

Generation scripts:

• log.sh - generates a log file for today and opens it, or opens today's if it already exists
• journal.sh - generates a journal entry file for today an opens it, or opens today's if it already exists
• week.sh and nextWeek.sh - generates a weekly goals file and opens it, or generates a new one. If today is a monday, creates it for this week. If not, the weekly file for next week will be created.
• month.sh - generates a monthly review file for this month then opens it, or opens the existing file
• year.sh - generates a file for a yearly review, using monthly review as template

Note: all of these support a date as the first parameter, in the form 2014-06-23

Analysis scripts:

• streak - (supports --help) starting with today's journal, looks at every day, counting backwards, until it finds a day with no journal. Then it reports the number of days with journals.
• rateOfJournals - (supports --help) by default, calculates the percentage of journal entries so far this year.
• thisDayInHistory - (supports --help) with no arguments, lists all the journals on this day of the year, as far back as 1997.
• find_tarot - (supports --help) finds tarot readings in your thoughts files, summarizing the cards found. Just use the templates in info/tarot-templates.txt!
• emotions - uses the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (via ridict node module) to analyze today's journal entry. Or, you can provide a path to a file as the first argument.
• markov - generates a markov chain-based gibberish string based on today's journal entry (via markov node module)
• dayOfWeekInHistory - (supports --help) fun little script that tells you the day of week in history for this date

Other files:

• commit.sh - adds all changes in the repo and then commits it with the message 'autocommit for '. I use this in a cron task to commit my changes every half-hour.
• info - I use this for all sort of reference information. It starts with the three templates: day.txt, week.txt, month.txt
• src - javascript source
• package.json - node.js dependency list

License

MIT license

Copyright (c) 2014 Scott Nonnenberg scott@nonnenberg.com

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.