giraffe

Giraffe is a (Non-Violent Communication) NVC-based journaling app.

Why NVC?

NVC is simple and powerful because:

• science: it's based on Rosenberg's background as a clinical psychologist,
• learning curve: it's meant to be practiced by people who have not mastered it, instead one learns by using it,
• accessible: it keeps technical jargon to a minimum.

Why do NVC-based journaling?

NVC requires practice, a lot of it, and there is only one way to practice NVC, which is using it. You can practice it with other people or by yourself, and I'd say the best way to the practice by yourself is journaling, because you can do it whenever you want and you can do it everyday.

How does NVC works?

How we usually think and talk?

In Western culture, we make facts out of judgements, we see a thing we dislike and assume it shouldn't happen, so we come up with inflexible strategies to stop it from happening again.

What's wrong with that?

It hinders our ability to make objective, unbiased observations. When we focus on judgement instead of observation, it's harder to think about why things happen, and if we don't know why things happen it's harder to change them. This is true for things that happen outside of us and inside of us. If we can't make an objective observation of our own feelings, it's harder to deal with them.

How NVC fixes that?

NVC separates our internal observations (how we are feeling, whether we dislike something or not) from external observations (what we have actually seem or listened to that affected our well-being). From our internal observations we figure out our needs (this is the internal aspect of our planning), and because we're no longer focusing on a single strategy (to eliminate what we dislike), but on a broad human need, we can come up with multiple strategies which can be negotiated with other people (this is the external aspect of our planning).

To-dos:

• Write "how to" section.
• Persist notes using SQFlite.
• Show past entries on History view.
• Editing screen for past entries.
• Show overview (most used feelings, number of entries) by week.
• Implement backup on Google Drive.

Will not implement:

• User accounts: this is an offline app, but a Google Drive backup is planned.