JournalLife Online (JLO) by Feature

Home: Navigate back to the LJO program.

Account: You can change your password or change credit card info on file.

Preferences: Here’s where you can create and set up your Notebooks. Also, you can set up how you want your LJO to start up and display your date and time formats.

Logout: Click here to log out of LJO securely.  This is the best way to maintain your security.   Remember this!

Notebooks: Click a button to open a journal entry in the notebook you select.

Tools: Click a button to access a journal tool. More specifics are discussed below.

Writing

Open an entry by clicking a Notebook button on the left side of the LJO Toolbar.

Entry Toolbar: The entry toolbar has tools special for journal writing.

Close and save an entry by clicking the Save & Close button  on the Entry toolbar.   Autosaving is taking place often.

But before you close an entry, ALWAYS click this Save & Close button.

• Timers:

Keep track of how much time you want to write. You can use the stopwatch to keep track of how long you have written.  Use the Timer to set how long you want to write.

• Journaling Techniques:  Vary how you write a journal entry.  Learn new journal writing techniques! One of  LifeJournal’s distinctions– information about journaling is built in to the software. Click on this if you want to shake up your journaling a bit.
• Handwritten or Typed: The icon looks like this  normally, when an entry is Typed, but when you click it turns to  showing that the entry is Handwritten.  We know sometimes you just want to forget about the keyboard and write by hand!  Use LJO to catalog even your handwritten entries.

Tips:

• Enter the title, date, notebook type and tag topics of the handwritten entry.
• In the entry body, describe the location of the handwritten entry, such as “page 32 of the green spiral notebook.”
• Perhaps include an important paragraph from the handwritten entry into the LJO entry.
• Daily Pulse Values:  Click this button  to see all your Daily Pulse Values for that day. It gives you some context when re-reading an entry:  Oh!  I was working on just 3 hours of sleep…I see why I was so impatient!

Entry Editor Controls: The bottom controls with the gray background gives you a wide range of word processing tools for your entry.

Tip:  Note this Maxmize button  , which expands the entry into the full screen.  And also, you can use this collapse arrow   in the bottom right corner of the editor controls to hide them entirely.

Topics: To the right of each entry is the Topics List where you can tag or assign one or more topics to an entry. Later you can search entries by a particular topic(s). To tag an entry, from desktops and laptops click and drag a topic from the Topics List to the Entry Topics box above. Clicking the green arrow to the right of each topic also will tag a topic.

Of course, you’ll want to make sure the Topics reflect your life. Click the Manage Topics button, then select a topic (or subtopic) and you can Add, Edit, and Remove.

Tips:

• When using a tablet, you can nly assign a topic to an entry by clicking the green arrow.   The drag and drop function doesn’t work on tablets.  
• Once back in the entry, click the refresh button   in the Topics area to see the Topics List modifications. You can change these topics all at once when you set up LJO, or modify them over time.  

• Click the Expand/Collapse button  to show/hide subtopics.

Click the Journal Explorer button in the toolbar to open the Journal Explorer, a combination of a directory of your entries and a simple way to search for your entries.

On the right side of Journal Explorer: The results of any searches are displayed here. Note the Show All button, which is a kind of search (that is, a search for ALL entries). You’ll also see the numbers of total entries you have in the bottom right.

 Double click an entry title to open or use the open button. Use the print button to  print your entries.  A circle under the Pulse, Topics, or Handwritten columns lets you know if you have have entered a Daily Pulse, tagged an entry with a Topic, or createda Handwritten entry, respectively.

 Tips: 

• Click an entry title to open the entry. 
• Click the column labels to sort A-Z, Z-A.
• You can open multiple journal entries by selecting (checking the box to the left of the Date column and then clicking the Open button at the bottom of the Journal Explorer.
• Save a journal entry to your local drive by clicking the Print button   and then click the Save button.
• Delete an entry here (but think twice before you do that). It’s hard to predict what gems you’ll find in an entry years from now.
  

On the left side of Journal Explorer: Perform simple searches, by just one search criteria.

Click on the blue bars: Journal Notebook, Lister (by the last chunk of time, [for example, the last week, the last month]), Calendar (by date), by Topic.

Tip:

If you want to use multiple criteria in searching rather than searching by a single element, click the Search button on the LJO Toolbar.

Pulse Input: Enter your Daily Pulse values by clicking and dragging the slider, or entering the number. Write Pulse Notes which elaborate on the values you have entered.

Click the Manage Pulse button to customize your Daily Pulse scales. You can create 10 or less scales that you want to track.

Tips:

• Use the Daily Pulse Notes to give yourself more information about your day.  Energy high? Include a short note here that you recent promotion is boosting your spirits.
• You can enter info for any date by clicking the Show By Date button.

Daily Pulse Graph: See line graphs of your Daily Pulse Input, making trends visible.

Tips:

• Click the legend at the bottom of the graph to display/hide different scales. Display two scales that might affect each other—say, stress and sleep, and learn more about your patterns.
• Click a point on the graph to display in the Journal Explorer any journal entries written that day. By cross-referencing between the Daily Pulse and entries, you can be a detective and uncover trends. Figure out, for example, what was going on right before you got sick, or began to sleep less or had a burst of productivity.  

View/Insert: Click on the Prompt button to view a prompt or question.  A random prompt appears initially. You can select a particular category on the left.
Tip:

Click the Insert button to insert the prompt into a journal entry. Then start writing a response.

Manage Prompts: Click the Manage Prompts button and you can add your own prompts and prompt categories!

View/Insert: Click on the Quotes button to view a quotation.

Tip:

Click the Insert button to insert the quote into a journal entry. Then write about your thoughts triggered by the quote.

Manage Quotes: Click the Manage Quotes button and you can add your own quotations!

Tip:

Use the Find button to find quotes by theme (for example, “courage”) or by author.

Click on the name of an expert on the left and click the Play button to listen to a one minute piece of advice about journaling from the best journal writers around.

Tip:
If your journal writing is feeling stale, this is a great way to juice up your journal writing.

Click the Search button in the JLO toolbar to open the Search section. Select which search criteria you want to use (Journal Notebook, Word in Entry Title, Date, Topics, and/or Daily Pulse) and click the Search button.

The results of the search appear in the right side of the Journal Explorer, which opens automatically below the Search section.

Select multiple criteria to find sets of entries with common threads.  When you perform searches you can learn from your life.

For example:

(1) Want to get a big picture of your relationship with your father?

Within the Search dialog select all of your writing areas—Notebooks, Daily Pulse Notes and Handwritten. Select the full date range, and select the topic “Father,” “Dad,” or “Joe” however you may have him listed in the Topic List. Then click the Search button.

In the Journal Explorer you’ll see journal entries and Daily Pulse Notes listed that meet your criteria. You may want to select them all and open them.  You’ll be able to read dreams where he was a character, read stories you remembered when you were five years old which included your dad, as well as conversations you had with him last week. Finding and reading these juxtaposed entries will certainly shed new light on both him and you.

(2) Trying to learn what factors help you maintain good health?

Within the Search dialog select all of your writing areas—Notebooks, Daily Pulse Notes and Handwritten. Select the full date range. In the Daily Pulse column, enter “7” in the Min area and “10” in the Max area of the Health scale.  Click the Search button and all entries and Pulse Notes which meet the criteria will appear in the Journal Explorer. Read those entries and you’ll find out about who you are when you are healthy.

(3) Writing a report or a book? Keeping track of a project? Making a gift for your child’s birthday?

Create notebooks and topics that you can use to quickly pull out the information you’ll need for a particular book chapter or character in the book. Perform a search of just the notebook(s) or topic(s) or date(s) that are relevant, and your entries

In short order you’ll have all the information you need within the Journal Explorer.

Tips:

• When you are deciding which Topics, Notebooks, and Daily Pulse Scales to create, think about what common threads you may be looking for when you perform searches.  
• Craft your searches wisely to see yourself in new ways.
• You can search Pulse Notes as well as entries.
• You can also search for cataloged Handwritten entries within Search.