Interstitial journaling is a simple, powerful productivity technique created by Tony Stubblebine. It can be done using any note-taking medium, whether digital or paper. It can be done anywhere and anywhen.

How Does It Work?

All it involves is jotting down a few notes every time you take a break or change tasks, along with a timestamp. It can be about what you just did, an idea, a thought, a feeling, a question, or anything else that comes to mind. Over time and with regular review, you can begin to discern patterns in your life and thoughts and feelings.

Interstitial journaling works exceptionally well with the modern cadre of note-taking apps such as Roam Research, Obsidian, logseq, Remnote, and the like, especially the ones that are based on atomic blocks or nodes. This is because that's exactly what interstitial journal notes are; singular bits of information. In a graph database, such notes can be referenced, searched, recombined, and queried in highly useful ways, especially if some thought is put into creating some standardization using tags or keywords.

It's the only way of journaling that has stuck with me permanently because it's very natural, especially for me in Roam, to just do all my work on my Daily Note Page and just write down my thoughts and feelings as they occur, even in the middle of doing something else. That's how my brain naturally works. Because I finally have a tool that can keep up with me, I'm able to journal while working in ways that don't interrupt me at all. I can let my ADHD brain loose at full steam without fear that I will either lose my ephemeral focus on what I'm working on or lose the ideas that constantly pop into my head. Depending on how I'm working that day, I can usually manage to do both more effectively than ever before, without either one infringing on the other. In fact, this entire series began as an interstitial note.