SĀJ Self-Awareness Journaling

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  self-awareness journaling challenges

Inspiration

Alongside my work in IT, I've spent over eight years studying psychotherapy as a second profession. I know from experience that journaling is a powerful tool — it can deepen self-awareness and support real breakthroughs in the therapeutic process. That’s why I created SĀJ: a directory of guided journaling challenges designed to help people reflect more clearly, prepare for therapy more effectively, and improve their inner life.

What It Does

On the website, one can choose a journaling challenge that matches his or her needs. They are designed not to take more than 20 minutes of time daily. There are elements of gamification to motivate people to go to the end. This is a privacy-first app, which means we do not store any of the client's entries on our servers. Once the daily challenge is complete, the client can download answers in a DOCX format to review their progress later and possibly add more notes or changes. The challenges are not just general but also topic-specific, such as: Family systems, Values, Vision of the future, Resources and limitations, Grief and many more to be added.

People can come to the site to address their own needs, or be offered a challenge by their therapists as part of homework.

Some challenges will be forever free; others will offer a one- or two-day free trial, followed by a $1-5 paywall to unlock the full challenge.

How we built it

I built SĀJ using my go-to stack: React, Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase and Zustand. This time, I also created a full PRD (Product Requirements Document) up front to help guide a single-shot build process with AI support.

Challenges we ran into

Well, still I did not get there with a single-shot. I've encountered some hallucinations and had to revert the project more than once, or save some of the changes locally, revert the big change and apply the good stuff later. There were some typescript build errors when I started deploy to AWS, but overall things went good.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This project came to my mind just 4 days ago, so I did not have time to develop the idea and add a proper amount of challenges. But I think what I managed to do is pretty amazing. The app is working, it looks nice, and I can't imagine how I could have built something like this in 4 days before the Bolt and AI era.

What we learned

With a PRD things go faster, and even in a few days it is possible to build a working site.

What's next for SĀJ Self-Awareness Journaling

• Payments – For now, all challenges are free.
  
• AI-powered challenge recommendations
  
• Email notifications to encourage daily engagement
  
• Landing pages for each challenge
  
• Anonymous leaderboards for added motivation
  
• Collaboration with psychologists to expand and refine content
  I have a lot in mind, but I need to validate the idea first.

Built With

• next
• react
• supabase
• tailwind
• zustand