Introduction

• Alongside meditation, journaling is one of the major trends within the arena of productivity and self-improvement which so many ‘successful’ people talk about being key to keeping them calm, collected and able to sustain such busy lives.
• Being a student of productivity, it’s something I’ve heard about on podcasts, and read about in books and articles over the past couple of years, but for many reasons I never seemed to be able to talk myself into actually trying it.
• Personally, I don’t see the issue being my inability to create the habit of journaling, in fact habit creation is one of the things I think I’m best at, for more information – as well as hints and tips – check out my previous posts on habits, and habit formation.
• I decided to write this post to share my thought process in deciding whether or not I felt starting a journal would be beneficial to me, and what type of journal I would start.
• From all my research I’ve concluded the best way to convey my learning and practice is in four main sections:
  • Share the best – and most compelling – reasons I found for why I should start journaling
  • Share the top 7 types of journal I found, and which I think are most applicable to millennials
  • Share what I ended up doing as a result of undertaking this process and my experience of 100 days of journaling
  • Share the best ways I found to enhance the journaling experience
• Everything beyond this point is what I find most compelling about starting journaling and ultimately, the things that convinced me that having a daily journaling habit was the right thing for me. Due to the length of this post I have decided to publish in two parts, below is part 1, look out for part 2 being published soon!

 

What’s the point?

• After completing a significant amount of research on this topic, below are the best 8 reasons I could find for creating a journaling habit:
• Clears your head
  • This was probably the biggest reason I found when researching, and it makes perfect sense. By writing whatever is in your head down it allows you to get on with your day, without the same things going around and around impacting your ability to get the most important things done.
• Help you figure things out
  • Finding solutions to certain problems can be very difficult. Our minds can work differently at different times, and how many times have we all experienced the answer to another problem flicking into our heads when we are in the middle of something completely different? If you don’t write down the problem you might forget about it until it next comes a problem, by writing it down you are increasing the chance you’ll think about it and when in a different frame of mind, you might find a solution.
• Helps you to be more creative
  • There are too many inputs in our lives today, be it Facebook, Twitter, or 24 hr News, that our creative output skills are being significantly inhibited. Be it first thing in the morning, or last thing before bed, disconnecting from the world of inputs and finding a quiet place to unlock your unconscious will give your natural creative ideas an outlet. This was a major theme I saw when reading Josh Waitzkin’s great book the Art of Learning, you can find my full book notes for that here: The Art of Learning.
• Harness the Power of Affirmations
  • Journaling regularly will inevitability mean the thing you care most about, or want to happen most, will come up on a very regular basis, and having read about the power of affirmations from Scott Adams, you might be more likely to achieve this desire by converting it into daily affirmations within your journal.
  • Scott Adams in ‘How to Fail at almost everything and still win big‘ describes affirmations as ‘… simply the practice of repeating to yourself what you want while imagining the outcome you want.’ Adams credits affirmations with him becoming a famous cartoonist as well as other ground-breaking things within his life. Note, he does caveat that ‘the pattern I noticed is that the affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.’ My personal belief is that by writing the affirmations you are actively reminding yourself of your desire and that makes you more conscious each day of opportunities which will help you achieve the thing you want.
• Be aware of, and control, your emotions
  • Journaling will enable you to describe – and ascribe – meaning to your emotions, and as with many things in life naming the problem goes a long way to addressing it. Journaling allows you to label your emotions and respond to them in a constructive way, instead of simply supressing them for another time.
  • This can work for both positive or negatives emotions. Personally, I sometimes find that in very stressful situations I can come across short and defensive, emotions that aren’t generally productive. Therefore, if I know that a stressful situation is likely to occur any given day, then journaling about this should allow me to be more conscious in the moment and express more positive emotions when the situation occurs.
  • The opposite is true for positive emotions, if you journal about your desire to have more focus, greater stability, more positively etc, you’ll consciously look to express these during your day.
• Improves your daily learning
  • This was something that seemed so obvious when I thought about it but hadn’t really crossed my mind before. As with so many aspects of life, writing something down makes you remember it better. There are many things that cause this, be it the extra time you are actively thinking about the lesson or the visual reference which allows your brain to internalise it, the specifics don’t really matter. The important point is that by journaling on a daily basis you are more likely to remember the things that worked and didn’t work, and thus more likely to apply the things that did work again in the future.
• Unlock certain health benefits
  • I have to admit this was a benefit I was initially very sceptical about, but after reading the research I do believe it. A study in the British Journal of Health Psychology – which can be found here – concluded that ‘participants who wrote about traumatic events had significantly smaller wounds 14 and 21 days after the biopsy compared with those who wrote about time management.’
• Track your personal patterns of behaviour
  • We spend 100% of our time inside of our mind, often thinking over the same things continuously in a vicious cycle each day, so it’s no wonder that we don’t see how our patterns of behaviour change over time. A journal offers you an irrefutable account of your behaviour over a period of time, which you can look back at to have a better view of what your most common emotions and behaviour are. It then becomes an excellent evidence based way of choosing how you might want to change your behaviour in the future.

 

Journal Types

• Once I had analysed all the key benefits others have seen from journaling and validated against my own bullsh*t test – the most applicable 8 of which are above – it was time for me to assess which type of journal would be best for me personally.
• Before detailing the 7 journal types which I think would be most optimal to myself and other millennials there are three very important point to cover:
  • Firstly, what works for me might not work for you. Journaling is a very personal thing so don’t pick a method just because you like the people who use that methodology. Pick what is right for you and don’t be afraid to test. If you don’t experiment how will you know what suits you best?
  • Secondly, whatever form of journaling you ultimately choose you have to be completely honest in your writing. Record exactly what you are thinking, not what you think is going to make you look good in a couple of months or years’ time when you look back, or if someone found your journal and started reading it.
  • Thirdly, in whatever format you choose, try to describe your emotional state, not simply a narrative of your day or a list of things you’ve done. Focus on describing and analysing how the things you did today made you feel and the impact they had on your life.
• Five Minute Journal
  • I found out about the Five-Minute Journal from Tim Ferriss, but it wasn’t until I started researching this piece that I realised there was a physical book for capturing this daily journal, here.  Obviously, you don’t have to use the book, it’s expensive for what it is and you can easily re-create it with a much cheaper blank journal.
  • In the Five-Minute Journal you capture in your daily thoughts on the following areas:
    • 3 things that I am grateful for…
    • 3 things: ‘What would make today great?’
    • Daily affirmations. I am/will…
    • 3 Amazing things that happened today…
    • How could I have made today better?
  • Based on the questions the Five-Minute Journal is probably best used in two ways, either done in completion at the end of the day, reflecting on the day just passed, or the first 3 questions answered first thing in the morning and the remaining 3 questions answered in the evening.
• Morning Pages
  • This journal option is much less structured than the Five-Minute Journal, you simply spend a few minutes expressing your current mood and laying out your anxieties/worries and the other ‘unproductive’ things using up your brain power that moment on the page.
  • This is another journaling favourite of Tim Ferriss who says that, “morning pages don’t need to solve your problems. You simply need to get them out of your head, where they’ll otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull.”
  • The concept of morning pages was popularised by author Julia Cameron, as a way to help foster creativity for writers and entrepreneurs. The theory is that by capturing whatever is in your mind without any pre-planning or conscious thought, you can tap into the unconscious creativity which may have developed over night, but without a place to be captured, would be lost under the surface forever.
• Single Purpose Journal
  • While the previous two examples are focused on your general well-being and capturing thoughts, the Single Purpose Journal is very different. The Single Purpose Journal, as the name suggests, is a way of tracking one key aspect of your life, be it exercise, eating, career, travel etc. The purpose doesn’t really matter, the point is creating a single point of truth for you to capture progress in achieving the goal and can be a great way to help habit formation and follow through with areas you want to develop on.
  • In writing this I realised that I already do one of these, every day I track my spending and once a month I track my financial investments, both are numerically focused but this does not stop them being a form of journal. For more on my perspective on Personal Finance click here.
• Gratitude Journal
  • This is one of the aspect within the ‘Five Minute Journal’ but it can be a journal all by itself, the aim being to focus on all the good things – big and small – that you are grateful for and that occur in your life each day, putting you in a more optimistic and thankful mind-set. Human nature gets us focusing in on the things we did wrong or could have done better, which can cause a spiral of negativity, taking time each day to capture all the things that day you are grateful for will improve optimism and make you smile more often.
• Quick Journal
  • If you don’t have time for any of the types of journal I’ve mentioned so far – or don’t think you do – then a quick journal might be the one for you. Typically, it comes in two varieties: One sentence per day or two adjectives per day.  Gretchin Ruben is a big proponent of the one sentence diary/journal to capture the most important point for each day. Whilst Kathleen Adams, in her book Journal to Self, feels that simply one adjective that best describes the day at a macro-level and one adjective to describe how you want tomorrow to be is sufficient.
• Night Journal
  • Doing a Night Journal can be done in conjunction with Morning Papers or as your only daily journal practice. If you are doing a Night Journal as well as Morning Papers to help you reflect on what went well that day and what areas could need improving, it’s often recommended to make the Night Journal shorter, just a few sentences. Having a Night Journal as your only daily journal often works well for people who are not morning people as writing in the evening will ensure you are more focused on capturing your thoughts and perspectives coherently.
• Bullet Journal
  • This is somewhat different to the other types of journal I’ve been detailing in the post so far, but given its popularity in recent months I thought I’d give it some air-time. The Bullet Journal – or BuJo – is much more of a diary and to-do list than a journal, however it can be used to incorporate these any of the journals I’ve highlighted above. Therefore, my advice would be, if you ae already using a BuJo then incorporate your chosen additional Journal into it, but if you are not I wouldn’t recommend it as the place to start as it covers a lot more than just a journal.

This is end of part 1 of this post, look out for part 2 being published soon!

 

Photo Credit.