Journaling - How and Why

08/25/2024
Few things continue to return to my "I need to do that better" than journaling.

Now with all the YouTube journaling porn, I wrestle with it more, and no better answers.

I do know, however, that there is likely a wrong way, if there's not a clear right way.

That wrong way was likely the way I had and in some ways, have been doing.

The first is that it was largely illegible.

This is a case for not hand writing one's journals or on the other than, writing slower and better. I probably would be in favor of the latter now.

But as I review my past journals, they were illegible. Really not that useable.

I've wondered whether the trade-off was between speed (writing at the speed of thought) or structure (if I slow down, I have to structure my thinking as a way to slow things down).

Increasingly, I think that the stream of thoughts do have their place somewhere, but not in the journal which had a primary role of being something to reflect upon later.

And I think that's what I was missing in my approach to journaling in the past: these weren't useful for self-reflectioin because I couldn't read them.

The second, which I think is a trade-off against the first, is the consistency.

My error was that I had forgone the added effort needed to think and structure my thoughts. It takes more effort. But I was typically so exhausted or frustrated that I didn't have the energy to structure my thoughts.

This writing was solely for release, and as such, spending time adding structure and clarity wasn't, at the time, useful.

However, without consistency, the ability to use a journal for reflection is pretty low. Waiting months or years between entries is largely useless.

The last part is one that I also struggle with, which is the trade-off between a public blog and a private diary.

I read somewhere that it actually is quite useful to have a space that is known to be private. That one can have entirely private thoughts.

At the same time, I think that writing something public, even if the reality is that most online blogging is into the void, adds some level of structure, creativity, or internal pressure that could add more clarity as long as one doesn't have a performative streak which drowns authenticity.

So after going through a [quick binge](Quick Binging to Unlock Action
) on journaling, I thought perhaps now is the time to do a reset, and use journaling in a way that I do think is effective: to gain clarity and structure, in this case, into my own process for journaling.

One video had different questions and goals for journaling, which I thought was very helpful. In fact, I think being able to write a journal with that intention could be useful each time. From memory, these were the different situations:

  1. Make a decision
    1. What is the decision
    2. What are the options?
    3. What would I choose in 60 seconds?
    4. Could I live with this outcome?
    5. What would it look like it easy?
  2. How to make a daily reflection:
    1. What am I grateful for?
    2. How did I move the needle forward?
    3. What drained me of energy?
  3. Breaking your mindset (obsession)
    1. Write about whimsical, imaginative things
    2. How can I make other people happy right now?
    3. What is something in my immediate environment I never noticed?
  4. Clarity
    1. Write out a mind dump and write out every thought
    2. Jot it down in a notebook
  5. Habits lifestyle audit
    1. Actions
    2. Worst Version of myself
    3. Best version of myself
    4. Add points in the appropriate column
  6. Anxieties
    1. Fears
    2. Fixes
    3. Outcomes
  7. Journaling for a to do list and direction
    1. Write everything down
    2. What is exciting?
    3. What is non negotiable?
    4. What makes the rest easier?
    5. What 20% are producing 80% results?
  8. Direction
    1. What did I want 5 years ago?
    2. What do I want now?
    3. What do I want 5 years in the future?
    4. If I knew I couldn't fail, what would I do?

I got this from this YouTube:

The Journalling Techniques that Changed My Life - YouTube

What is the right medium?

I used to have two kinds of journals, and I was unclear on which to use when.

I had a big hard-backed lined-page notebook. And I had Google Docs.

I wish the hard-back lined notebooks were readable and more portable; when I see them in my garage, I just cringe when I try to read them, to the point where last year I tossed many of them. They weren't useful.

The second were some Google docs where I tried to be much more structured; they were like small planning documents every month on projects I was working on.

I can see with clarity all the things I tried to work on, how thinly spread I was at times, and perhaps how I was getting stuck.

This type of content would be helpful to keep reviewing and revisiting.

So how do I want to work with the different mediums?

It's back to what is it that I want to do with journaling?

So here's an initial list:

  1. Clarify my thinking / prioritize activities / unlock insights
  2. Synthesizing my thinking
  3. Capture fleeting thoughts and important learnings

Alright, #1 is fairly big and I think there's room to make that more specific so that I can make that "job" part of a routine.

For now, the short version is a private mind dump where I also applying some [common heuristics](Questions That Clarify Your MInd) to reach a state of greater clarity. It's part brain dump / stream of consciousness, part meditation, and part self-coaching.

The second is probably some writing up of a private plan based on what I have learned, largely what am I focusing on, what's the direction I'm going, how am I adjusting my mindset and such.

This part I am still not exactly sure what to do, but I think the simplest thing is to write it up as a clean Obsidian document and link to it to some action or habit in Things.

This area of tracking things I work on, specifically Projects, is probably something that I can improve upon and come back to this later.

The other part of synthesizing what I'm working through probably can be written down publicly as a "note to self." This is largely to get into the habit of writing on Twitter, Warpcast, Substack, my own blog, perhaps even Medium.

Using the time reflecting on things to come up with something that I can document to create as content, to force writing something consummable and concise, is probably the exericse.

The last is probably where having a hand-written notebook will be useful. The problem is that, when using these, I need to have some kind of a process, either daily or weekly, to scan through them and write it up and then toss the notebook.

While I think writing notes down with better handwriting is largely a worthwhile exercise, do I really want to be dependent on a stack of hand-written notepads?

The question is how to structure these.

I listened to a podcast from Cal Newport, who talked about single-purpose notebooks.

So there's a single notebook for every major project or topic.

A Pocket Notebook To Replace Your Phone - Be More Productive & Change Your Life | Cal Newport - YouTube

I started to do this, but....I soon had so many notebook and I had to carry them into different situations that there were times I did get lost.

So perhaps there's a fourth use case, where I want to dream and think and reflect away from my laptop, and so then I need a single purpose notebook to do this pre-work before I go back into my laptop.

So today I made a decision to consolidate everything back into a single daily notebook that I'm going to use for everything but for this to work, I need to be much more rigorous about my note taking system to take the most important things or notes and put them into place somewhere on a computer.

What is the real goal of journaling?

I think the best, highest-use of journaling is improving my own thoughts and feelings.

Having some place to dump the noise into a single place and then sift through it to find the signal, the honing signal for the rest of my thinking moving forward, is probably the best and highest use.

This is probably something that could benefit from also talking aloud.

This is something someone told me, and I think that there's some value in this; it's leading me to think about restarting my personal podcast, a place where I speak aloud just about stuff as a way to clarify my own thinking and perhaps find other people to connect with.

Yes, it will likely be totally random, and I think I'm at a point where that should just be okay. It would likely need to be anonymous or pseudonymous, so that would take a little bit of time to get up and going, but is a good complement to journaling.

When is the best time to do this?

I think the best and most important things should be done early in the morning.

Right now, I think journaling may need to be one of those things.

On the other hand, clearing one's mind before going to bed could also be a way to set the mind, and I've been thinking about better ways to do this. More on this later.

But journaling in the morning to get clear on priorities, take the earliest thoughts or insights, do seem important.

However, what about the synthesize of the things that come from these data dumps and hand-written notes?

I have been starting to include the synthesize part as the early morning routine. This at least forces some kind of clarity, even if it is incomplete, to begin the day.