AI stream journaling experiment
The experiment
During the day, I opened an AI session and named it “stream journal.” As I was looking through my email, working on tasks, responding to co-workers, texts, etc., I made notes in the stream journal.
For example, “work task: respond to the email titled ‘such and such’.” / “work task: Set up new bug templates for release notes specific to different teams.” / “work task: Figure out this warning message is appearing in the logs.” “work task: Correct this misspelling on this page of the reference docs.” / “home task: Submit something for an HSA reimbursement.” / “Thought: Working hard makes tech comm more interesting.” / “home task: Prepare food items for soccer potluck.” / “home task: Get your wife something for Christmas, etc.” / “home task: Plan travel for upcoming soccer tournaments.” Thought: “What happened to keeping a noticing journal?” And so on.
During the day, we’re bombarded with dozens of random to-do’s, thoughts, observations, and notes. I usually just write them down on paper, which I eventually lose or sometimes review later. But having a running AI session to note the stream of information has several advantages:
- AI will clean up my notes and make them more readable.
- AI can sort content with different tags. For example, all work tasks in one group, home tasks in another, ideas in another. I don’t have to think about categories—I just make quick notes.
- Digital formats are more flexible and easier to work with than pen and paper.
- AI can export the content as a CSV to make it easy to import into other systems.
I found that dumping all these ideas into an AI session allowed me to maintain better focus on my current task. I wasn’t worried that I would forget or lose track of some important task—it would be noted in my AI stream journal and would be curated and organized at the end of the day. With this method, I was able to better focus on my task at hand.
Sometimes people try to act on everything in the moment it comes to mind, whether responding to an email or doing some quick task. For example, yesterday morning as the sun was creeping through our study’s windows and making me squint, my wife suggested I move the darker curtains from the dining room to the study. I said “That’s a good idea—I’ll do it later.” Then my wife immediately started making the curtain change, explaining that “If I don’t do it in the moment I think of it, I’ll forget about it.”
This makes sense, and I definitely like the darker curtain now in the study. She’s awesome to help out in the moment. But much of her day and my day is often spent like this, moving from task to task as they come to us, without a ton of preplanning or thought. How often have we received an email and thought, if I don’t respond now, I’ll completely forget about it? Then we start responding to the email, and before we know it we forgot what we were doing previously. In my experience, this do-it-now approach often leads to a fragmented, scattered day. It can be exhausting moving from task to task like this.
The AI stream journal gives me the ability to stop worrying about these other tasks and to instead concentrate on what I’m working on in a more immersive way, without the fear of forgetting a task entirely.
AI stream prompt
Here’s my AI stream prompt:
I want you to act as my AI stream journal (similar to a bullet journal), for the day. In this chat session, I’ll log all kinds of notes: work tasks, home tasks, thoughts and ideas, and food and exercise. The point is to have an easy way to dump all the scattered information in my head into a central log that you organize and analyze on my behalf.
Tasks
Tasks will be prefaced with the word “work task” or “home task.” This is a way for me to get all the random, scattered to-do’s and reminders out of my head so that I can more fully focus on the task at hand.
Thoughts
Thoughts and ideas will be prefaced with the word “thoughts.” These are just random ideas that pop into my head about anything. Feel feel to comment on any of the thoughts/ideas I jot down. Again, I just want to make a note of these ideas to potentially return to them later.
Observations (mindfulness noticing)
Sometimes I want to note my mindfulness observations and “noticings.” These are details that I’m observing about the environment around me, taking in some detail that I might not have noticed before. It could be a small facet of a place or an activity or person that I hadn’t noticed before. I want to zero in on this detail and really take it in, like observing it for the first time, as a way to increase my presence in the moment. For these entries, I’ll preface it with the word “observation.”
Food and exercise
For the food and exercise notes, I’ll add details about the times and details of when and what I’m eating, and also the when and what of exercise. The notes will say “food log + time,” such as “food log: 6am, drank protein shake.” Or “exercise log: 11am, walked for 20 minutes.” I may also note energy levels or other moods. I’m also wearing a CGM throughout the day that tracks my glucose levels. I’ll provide CGM data at the end of the day. With both the food + exercise + glucose logs, you will then analyze food-glucose correlations (considering a ~30-minute delay for digestion), the impact of timing and food combinations, patterns and trends, and general recommendations for improvement to minimize glucose spikes.
When I log an entry about food or exercise, just acknowledge each entry briefly. Save your more detailed analyses for later, after I supply you with the glucose logs at the end of the day.
At the end of the day, I’ll also ask you to provide me with an organized list of tasks, sorted by work tasks and home tasks, and a list of my ideas.
Sound good? Are you ready to be my AI stream journal?
Issues to solve
In my first experiments, I ran into a few issues. Mixing work and personal tasks/notes in an AI session was a little tough. I didn’t want to put confidential material in an AI that wasn’t inside my company’s firewall, but if I couldn’t access that AI reliably on my phone without authenticating with a token every time, it was hard to use it. My AI stream journal needed to be available to me via my smartphone wherever and whenever I was during the day. So I used more publicly available AI tools and made any work tasks phrased general enough that they wouldn’t contain confidential information.
It was also somewhat fragmenting to have so many AI sessions open. I starred or favorited the current sessions, but because this was a daily task (unstarring the old sessions, creating and starring new ones), it was hard to keep track of the right AI session.
I also needed to store my prompt in an easily accessible place so that I could just kick off the AI stream journaling session without retyping the whole prompt. I decided to put this prompt as a separate “Document tab” in a Google Doc where I also store my food/exercise/glucose logs.
Results
I haven’t experimented with AI stream journals nearly as much as the food+exercise+glucose journal. However, so far it’s been good. I like having a single journal where I note the stream of details each day. As I said earlier, it allows me to better focus on the task at hand without worrying about losing track of other need-to-do tasks. If this method leads to greater focus and concentration, more in-the-moment engagement, that’s a worthwhile productivity technique.
Even better is the calmness that comes from living an organized life. By this I mean working on those tasks that are the highest priority so that I finish them well ahead of the needed timelines. When I organize my day like this, working on the highest priority tasks at the right times, I’m much less stressed and perform better all around.
For example, when one of my daughters was applying to college, we proceeded through all phases of the application process months ahead of time, finishing several days before the earliest deadlines. There wasn’t a late-night, last-minute crunch to crank out that personal essay, running against the clock and hyped up on caffeine to meet the deadline. It felt great.
At work, I dislike writing release docs at the last minute and pinging people over chat to do same-day reviews. It’s so much better to prioritize the right things in the right order—knocking out release notes a week ahead of time so that I can request engineering reviews with ample time, giving them 3-4 days to review and approve the changelists.
The “organized life” isn’t something that can be achieved through a simple AI stream journal—but maybe the stream journal can be one component of a larger system. There’s also a need to process the tasks at the end of the day, to export the content and import it into other systems, and then incorporate planning sessions with each day to identify the highest priority tasks. These additional components are something I’m still working on incorporating. (If I can attach them to an existing routine—something I wrote about in Routines and habit stacking, I’ll have better chances of success.)
Exporting from AI into Todoist
The tasks and other notes should be transferred from the AI session into a better system. For example, work tasks can be transferred into an issue tracking system at work (within a specific component and tags). Home tasks can be transferred into a home issue tracking system—the one I use is Todoist. Then more immersive planning can be done through these issue tracking systems.
To import items into Todoist, there’s a specific CSV template to follow, as described in Format a CSV file to import into Todoist. The AI tool can put the tasks into this CSV structure, facilitating the export and import.
Here’s a sample prompt for curating the personal tasks and exporting them in a Todoist CSV format:
I’m done for the day. Now can you list all my personal tasks? Additionally, will you please structure those tasks in a CSV format following the example in this Todoist CSV template I just uploaded? This will allow me to import them into my Todoist app.
Conclusion
There are countless ways to organize your tasks and be more productive. My stream journal is merely a tool for capturing all of these items, acting as a blank notebook, rather than performing an analysis. In that respect, it’s like using a Ferrari to drive to the mailbox—there isn’t a sophisticated analysis to perform with all the data. I’m not sure what that analysis would be, except perhaps to help organize and optimize the day. But if this technique can clear my mind and allow me to focus on the task at hand, that’s enough for now.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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