Communication|Fast Five 10.29

1. Text or Call? TEXT. I hate making phone calls!
2. Over the Phone or in Person? In person (see above)
3. Video Chat or Normal Phone Call? Never done a video chat!
4. Cell Phone or Landline?
5. Smartphone or "Dumb" Phone (also known as Data or no data capabilities on your cellphone)? Smart.

 

I used them for a bit, but it was taking up so much room that I quit. Maybe I should try them again.

 

1. Text or Call?

Text, please!! I'll get that on my watch or whichever Mac I happen to be closest to at the time. Half the time I don't even know where my phone is, and I hate having to go running around looking for it while it's ringing!

2. Over the Phone or in Person?

It depends on what it's about. Probably over the phone (preferably via text). Is email an option?

3. Video Chat or Normal Phone Call?

Normal phone call, please! I'm not sure what it is about my iPhone's front camera, but it makes me look like a hag! I shudder when I accidentally flip the camera view around while taking a photo! (And, for the record, I don't feel the same way when I see myself in the mirror...so WHAT IS IT about the silly phone camera?!?!?)

4. Cell Phone or Landline?

Cell phone, please! We used to joke that the landline was just for the telemarketers, so we got rid of it. Now they've found my cell phone (and my text messaging...I'm looking at you, MoveOn, who won't quit messaging me about the election!!!).

5. Smartphone or "Dumb" Phone (also known as Data or no data capabilities on your cellphone)?

Smart phone, please! The only think you can do on a dumb phone really is talk (or text in a very tedious fashion). The last thing I like to do on my phone is actually talk on it, so I want a phone that can do lots of other stuff, too!

 

Yeah, I bought Day One mobile app before they began offering the Premium subscription service (details here) and at that time they offered us the subscription at only $25 instead of $35 per year. It's a great deal even at $35 for someone who wants an easy way to record life. It's kind of like Evernote in its ease of use but focuses on journaling, looks better, offers printed books, and simply works well. For one example, Day One opens up much, much faster than sluggish Evernote. I've added photos of all my childhood journals and copied all my digital journaling from the last couple of decades into it.

I feel about Day One like I feel about Backblaze. It seems like a small cost to protect my journaling. We battle debt so I've considered canceling my PSCC subscription, but not Backblaze, Smugmug, or Day One. They've stated that their mission is to be a life-long app, so they're working to stick around for a long time. And to maintain an app continually upgrade it requires funds. When I started my first premium subscription last November, I actually wrote myself a reminder with an alarm, asking myself if I felt I was using the app enough to be worth the subscription. The first two years I wasn't. After starting Premium, I still struggled a few months to get into a habit of using Day One, but now I'm writing everyday. Haven't missed a day since near the end of May. The app has reminders and an activity feed and connections with IFTTT and other tools that help a lot.

Feel free to ask me questions about how it works. I started to feel so strongly about it only just this summer. Part of that is because they started the FB Community and podcast so I got to know the people that make up the company a bit. Noticing my enthusiastic participation in the community, they asked me to be one of the moderators, so I've gotten to live chat with a couple of them. And the community is quite active -- and just recently reached 1000 members -- sharing great ideas about how they use Day One. The podcast also builds trust in the company and shares inspiration, interviewing different people each week.

I should make a scrapbook page with this as my journaling. Or I could put it in my Day One journal!

Oh! I just noticed you passed 10,000! Congrats!!!

Speaking of being chatty, I have had a change of attitude related to getting into the daily journaling habit again. (I used to journal every day in high school too and it slowly dwindled away in college. I wrote more in high school than in all of my 20's and 30's!) I'm moderately a minimalist, or perhaps I should say, a minimalist at heart. I live in a big house with a basement where things can go be forgotten, with little likelihood of moving in the near future, so I it's not urgent. But this past summer I started thinking about how much space my scrapbooks take up and my journals if I print them with Day One. Then I started writing so prolifically and realized that I won't even be able to fit everything I write into one book (they have a cap of, I think, 400 pages per book) so it would get quite expensive. Plus, they only have a basic automatic design -- no customization, and I've been a bit disappointed in my 2017 book, especially where as few as ONE word got printed on a page otherwise blank because of the way their design automatically inserts page breaks between entries -- so I'm definitely not going to be printing all of my journal writing. I can use tags to easily select certain entries to print, if I want. But my minimalist heart is asking my distrusting-pre-digital-age brain to consider not even printing at all. So I don't have to lug any more books around than I already have.

 

Yes, I have exported as PDF a few times. But not since my first couple of years with Day One, so I'd kind of forgotten about it. It would be a good way to have keep a copy locally just in case Day One failed someday and I hadn't printed books. Thanks for reminding me of it. I'm going to set a reminder to do that monthly.

I also exported my 2016 Day One journal as a text file and pasted it into a book I made with Blurb. That was before Day One offered book printing and I was not writing a lot and thinking I wanted to print everything I wrote. It was awfully tedious though and I was so excited when Day One announced they would offer book printing. Then I was disappointed with the test book i had made (as I mentioned above, the lack of customization; crazy that vertical photos take up a whole page all to themselves!) and I was ambivalent. But I don't think I ever want to go through all the effort of copying it over to Blurb again. (The photos download with the text but with filenames that are long strings of numbers so it was very hard to place them in the book.) I love Blurb though and they make much nicer books!

Edited to add: I didn't say anything about how the PDF looks. I think it was fine. I vaguely recall we could choose different sizes too. I'm going to go check on that.

 

@bestcee
Curious, I decided to go try exporting as a PDF again. Indeed we can choose from 3 different sizes. I chose 8.5 x 11. It took several minutes to export and turned out to be 2087 pages. (Remember I have lots of pages from childhood journals and text journaling I did over the last couple of decades that I added.)

I didn't see a way to tell it to only print a selection of any kind. But I just realized, as I was scrolling through the PDF that I didn't see entries from some of my journals. I thought maybe I had deselected them in settings somewhere, but I can't find that. Hmmmm . . . will do more exploring . . .

 

I didn't know PS can read PDF's! Thanks!

 

1. Text or Call? I hate talking on the phone. Text please.
2. Over the Phone or in Person? I'd prefer in-person if it's really something important. See above.
3. Video Chat or Normal Phone Call? I think video chat is weird (like I'm a Jetson or something) so I don't video chat with anyone except my kids.
4. Cell Phone or Landline? We haven't had a landline in 8? 9? years.
5. Smartphone or "Dumb" Phone (also known as Data or no data capabilities on your cellphone)? I got an iPhone X this year, and it's the new love of my life (for its Portrait feature).

Bonus: Favorite Communicating App? I speak with most of my circle via FB Messenger. That way I can use it on the laptop and type the regular way vs. having to text (which I am still not good or fast at).