Sustainable journaling
Often, it can be hard to sustain writing in a diary. Perhaps you get suddenly busy and lose any possibility of spare time, or perhaps it seems that nothing interesting is going on. Maybe you just forget to write a few days in a row and then the momentum is lost. There are ways to guard against this:
- Try to develop the habit of writing at the same time every day, say first thing in the morning, or last thing at night. If you’re working, could you devote a few minutes to this in your lunch break?
- Don’t beat yourself up about making an entry every day; if circumstances mean just one or two entries a week, that’s fine. You can increase or decrease the frequency of entries as you like.
- Unless your PC is always with you and ready to go, use pen and paper, and keep them with you all the time if you can so you can snatch writing opportunities as they arise.
- Use a plain paper book rather than a pre-printed diary, because you might want to write a lot some days, a little on others and sometimes nothing at all.
- If you get stuck with nothing to write, just write yourself a question, take a breath and write down some answers to it. I’ve included some prompt questions to get you started at the end of this post.
- Think what it would be like if you had started a year ago. Imagine all the detail you would be able to go back and read.
- If you do lapse for a period, don’t consider the whole thing a failure. When you’re ready, simply turn to a new page, write the date and start going again.
Look forward to the time when you will be able to look back and find out what you were doing and how you were feeling a year ago or ten years ago. What memories you are preserving for your future, or for your children.
Diary prompts
- How am I feeling right now and why?
- What was the best thing that happened today?
- What is worrying me?
- How will I spend the coming weekend?
- What ambition have I had for a long time?
- Who are the people that matter to me and why?
- What is my earliest memory?
- Where have I travelled and what did I see or do there?
- If I could do anything with my life, what would I do?
- If I won or inherited a fortune, what would I do with it?
- What values do I want my children to hold?
- How will I celebrate my next major birthday?
- What would my ideal holiday be like?
Ray Blake
7 Comments
Reader Comments (7)
I really like #6. I will probably always think that I could've written more details than I do! :-)
great post by the way.
Number TWO is very important, its easy to become discouraged if you lose a week or a month of journaling. What I do is remember any events that may have happened in the time i missed, list them in point form and move on.
The trick is to not stop or become discouraged regardless of the length of the gap.
Been journaling for 12 years i can tell you what i was doing this day for any one of those years! its a lot of fun at times. :)
Nice post!!
As an journal-writer since 1988 up until now(almost 20 years), I cannot tell you how invaluable being able to write at least once a week does to the go, to the self and to the intellect.
I go back a few years at times and laugh at the sheer stupidity of some of my ideas. I am also very blessed by the very fact that I have my OWN time travel machine--my mind. I have always written the time, location, and mood when I was writing an entry. Being a blogger since 2005 has helped me improve the depth of my writing. All great stuff!!!
Yes. Very good site! worth to visit!
Thank you.
As a kid I kept a journal every day for months, then fell asleep one night without making an entry, and beat myself up over it and stopped.
What I should have done — had I had anything like a good philosophy — is looked at that as an opportunity to build my perseverance.
I'm leaning towards starting again... just deciding now. Am reading your post while I make my decision.
I haven't kept up either of my blogs over the last two months. But I have started some awesome daily disciplines like waking up right away when my alarm goes off, reading aloud my statement of purpose upon arising and before retiring, taking a small amount of nutritional supplements, exercise, etc... I'm thinking that adding the daily discipline of writing...
... whether in my journal, one either of my blogs, or somewhere else like on a book I want to write for myself, a speech I want to give, an article I want to publish... all three of those last things would be new for me...
... would just be an awesome daily discipline to add to my list. And if I miss that or any other of my daily disciplines for a few days... why... now I can journal/blog about it and use it as an opportunity to build my persistence and perseverance.
I am so leaning toward following your suggestion... still deciding.
Let me know how it turns out!
Ray
I just bought a soft textured-covered bound brown journal — it even has the word Journal printed on it and a ribbon bookmark, which are nice touches — and decided to go. In fact, over the next day or two, to give me time to journal I will archive my business blog, which was a fine concept but there's no way it will produce any revenue for me in the near term:
ChristophDollis.com's Productivity, Growth and Sales Blog
I will simplify that site to a static "brochure" type site and change it as my business goals change. I'll keep up my vastly more important personal blog:
Loving Jacqui
... which has an audience of, literally, one person. One very important person in Australia I dearly want to have beside me in Canada soon. While I'm not going to bring it to her attention this directly, I'm binning my blog and not hers because I love her very much.
Ray, I have recently been working on a list of 9 daily disciplines following some teaching on the subject by Jim Rohn (actually, 8.5 because one, reading aloud my "Statement of Purpose" and visualizing, appears twice), and I'll add journaling to that list for a total of 10.
Writing one sentence in my journal in a day is fine, even if that sentence is, "I'm not writing much because I'm busy."
Which, come to think of it, says a lot.
If I miss a day — and I expect I will — I'll look upon that as a wonderful opportunity to develop my persistence and perseverance as stated above. Also, to overcome my past tendency towards unproductive perfectionism. In fact, I've trimmed down and defined this project as:
If you want to know how it "worked out", put my Loving Jacqui blog in your tickler file or calendar for six months out. If we're together in person, it worked out beautifully and I'm living by most or all of my daily disciplines including this one.
If not, it didn't.
Thank you very much for your part in inspiring me to take this step.