One of my friends mentioned that at church she learned about “journaling jars”. I found this great example and description of a journaling jar at the jelly journals:

A Journal Jar is a jar that is filled to the brim with strips of cardstock that have questions printed or written on them, that are then rolled into little scrolls. These are the journal prompts. The idea is that each day you pull out one of the little scrolls and stick it at the top of a page in your journal and write your daily journal entry based on that question.

The Pyxlin Journaling System is by far the best system for typing, organizing, archiving, and publishing your personal journal. But we are far overdue for something like a digital “journal jar”. I started on the project last week. It didn’t take long for my creative juice reservoir to be completely depleted. Brainstorming for journaling prompts that are meant to help me brainstorm for journal entries was squeezing my brain. I needed to innovate. I had a brilliant idea!

I decided to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to create my prompts. I have used MTurk before for surveys and I know others who have used Mturk in clever ways as well. I am just asking each MTurker to write 5 journal prompts and then I pay them $0.05 for their work (take a look at the HIT here). So far they have come up with some fantastic prompts. In the end 1000 prompts will only cost me $11. Here are a few of the Prompts so far:

• Given the chance to give your child only one quality as a person, which would you choose? How about if that choice were unavailable, what would be your second and maybe third choices? Why are these so important to you?
• Which superpower would you choose to have if you had the option and why? Conversely, which superhero do you find to be the most overrated and why?
• Which amendment to the constitution is the most important to you and why?
• Is speech always free? When and where might it not be free?
• Put yourself in Anne Frank’s place how would you have survived?
• If you witnessed a fight at school would you report it? What could the repercussions be if you told the truth?
• What will be the first thing that you do when you get your driver’s license?
• You have one week to do whatever you want, all-expenses-paid, what things would you want to do? Where would you go?
• If your best friend came to you depressed and upset like you’ve never seen before, how would you react?
• In what ways do you sometimes wish to act to be a better friend, but don’t? Why do you find yourself unable to do these things?
• You have one hour to come up with the most interesting television show you can and describe/pitch it.
• “If someone gains, someone else loses.” How much does this reflect life, and how much does it come up short. Reflecting upon this, how could your attitudes have been different during events in your past?
• Would you be a different person today if you had a different childhood?
• Consider some of the parents others had growing up. What type of person would you be if you had those situations?
• What if you life had been harder or easier? How do you think you’d be different?
• Did I recently have an interesting conversation?
• What is a scary dream that I remember from my past?
• Who is the person that I feel has altered the course of my morals and values, and how did they effect me?
• Where do I see myself, so far as my goals, personal development, residence, or job, in five years, and do I have a plan to arrive at this destination?
• What is my earliest or happiest memory?

Liz and I were talking this morning, we are thinking to get over 1000 prompts for the Pyxlin journaling jar. Perhaps we could even ad a rating feature. Each time you use a Pyxlin prompt it would be nice if you could rate it with a thumbs/down or a 1-5 star rating. Over time has each of the journal prompts are rated thousands of times we will eventually have the best journal jar in the world.

What do you think? How would you like the Pyxlin Journal Jar to work? Let us know.

 Here are some other blogs I found interesting with journal prompts:

• Miriam at Ancestories2 does some family history prompts each week.
• Angela Booth keeps a blog on writing. Here are some of her prompts.
• Here is a Blog called Journal Writing in Math.
• Here’s one about journal prompts for kids.