Day 365: One Year of Journaling

writing

As of today, I’ve written a journal entry every single day for the past 365 days!

I want to write down my thoughts on this process (why I did it, the effects of doing it, how to do it, etc.), but I’m struggling with some mad brain fog today so I’m going to do the much easier task of presenting the numbers behind writing in Road to Ramen this past year.

Time

Total time: 280 hours and 20 minutes

Daily average: 46 minutes

Methodology
  • I use Toggl to track my time and it lets you generate reports based on project/time

Topics

When I started writing Road to Ramen, I thought most of my posts were going to be about the process of starting an indie business (e.g. engineering, product, marketing), but over time, it’s become a personal journal that happens to include those things only when the handle of the Big Dipper intersects with the moon’s poles at a degree of 137.5 degrees and I happen to have eaten at least 3 ounces of sweet potato that day.

Methodology
  • I scraped my blog using Browserflow, put the numbers in Google Sheets, and generated a pie chart

Words Written

Total words: ~175,000 words

Daily average: ~480 words

Methodology

I scraped my own blog using Browserflow, but the results aren’t accurate because Notion sometimes loads longer posts in multiple chunks which means some posts aren’t fully scraped.

I could add a hacky solution where I wait 5 seconds or something before getting the post text, but that means the whole scraping job would take 30 minutes (365 posts * 5 seconds/post = 1,825 seconds = ~30 minutes) and I don’t have enough patience for that right now.

A much better solution would involve something like waiting until network requests are idle for a certain amount of time so I’ll probably add something like that to Browserflow. For now, these results are good enough for giving a rough estimate.

Other stats that’d be interesting to look at but seems like too much effort right now:

  • Distribution of when I started writing
  • Most common words / phrases used
  • GPT-3 generated text based on my journal entries

I’m pretty sure for the last one, it would sound something like:

oh man, i’ve been talking about launching browserflow for 8 months and i really should do it soon but boy i’m sleepy i really gotta fix my sleep schedule