Is Journaling A Thing Again?
This alternative to diary writing may be what you need to try next
With the new year, a lot of new resolutions are laid on the table. Resolutions that start with great intentions and that you and I won’t probably fulfil.
It’s always the same. You start the year full of good intentions, changing things that didn’t work in the past, you will stick to your new plan for a bit and then eventually you will feel that the new plan is not working for you. More often than not you will go down the road of procrastination in the middle of a task.
To feel better about it all you’ll either fall on the cushion of “at least I’ve tried” or you will give up your business plans altogether because you have overwhelmed yourself with too many actions that don’t seem to be bringing much.
Kristina God in her article Writers, Here’s Why You’ll Fail To Reach Your Goals in 2022, talks about how “overestimating our goals and failing to achieve them can make us feel crushed”. This is the full article:
As I am reading this article I am thinking of ways of avoiding that feeling so well known to me. I am one of those who will pile huge amounts of work on myself without a well set up organisation plan and will suffer for it in the end. I guess this is what happens when you are your own boss.
In my article “Let’s Start Wrapping Up The Year” I listed most of the activities, work, tasks and projects that I carried out last year and by doing that I realised how much of that I didn’t monitor very well at the time. This is the full article if you want to read it:
So for this year, I’ve already taken some organisational techniques to avoid the feeling of failing miserably achieving the goal of “making a living of what I love doing the most: writing”.
Some of the steps I have already taken that you could also find useful are:
Organise all your scattered notes
- If you write for Medium put your notes or ideas in the draft section. It doesn’t matter if you only have a sentence, a picture, five quotes or almost the whole text written. The important thing is to have them all in one place. Do the same with the ideas written on your phone, on Word documents, notepads, agendas or any other similar place. Put them all together and you’ll see how much you already have. This is something that I read in one of Tim Denning’s emails a while ago and it really makes you feel better about yourself. It’s what I call “Creating Awareness”, and no, I haven’t invented this, but I’m happy to say that it works.
Recycle your old content
- Go over your Canva presentations and see how much of that content can be turned into courses, articles, PDFs or posts. You will be surprised to see how much you have produced during the course of one year. Seeing all the work at a bird’s eye view will help you see a pattern of the topics that you tend to have a predilection for. This will tell you something about the type of content you should keep producing, how that content has been performing for you and therefore if that brings you the outcome you are expecting.
Start a journal
- As per enciclopedia.com journals and diaries “date back to the 15th century in Europe and earlier elsewhere”. These were both ways to keep track of feelings, events and recollection of thoughts and discoveries that served both to leave an imprint and to record information that was of importance to the writer. I have personally been writing diaries since I was eight, stopping and starting at different times in my life for different reasons. But journaling is something I am starting to put into practice this year, to keep track of what I am not being productive with.
Your scattered notes and your recyclable content can both be traced in your journal. You can note down when you start an activity and when you finish it. This will allow you to see how long it takes you to complete each task as well as how many activities you achieve in one day.
Two journaling techniques to experiment with
Looking for information to put this article together, I realised that there’s already some content about journaling here on Medium. I found two ways of journaling that are very interesting. They are different in their outcomes but you might find that you can interconnect them. As always I’m trying to take into account both my mind and my soul, without neglecting either of them.
The two articles have different approaches but I think I will be able to blend them and adapt them to my personal needs. You can read about the first approach in the article called Replace Your To-Do List With With Interstitial Journaling To Increase Productivity by Coach Tony.
What I like the most about this idea is what he calls “The minimum journal entry” and the exercise of “Emptying your brain”. I’m a very busy person both cognitively and physically, and I tend to stop frequently to look at my phone, go to the kitchen, do some ironing, cook lunch for me and my husband and intertwine all the activities, but not for long periods of time. Being aware to “police me” by noting down every time I switch activities I think can do the trick.
As per my inner destructive and negative thoughts, I am going to follow Richard Ragnarson, MD, Psychiatrist technique called “Cognitive Journaling”. If you want to read his article Cognitive Journaling: A Systematic Method to Overcome Negative Beliefs, this is the link:
What I really like about this technique is that if done right it will help me “open up to a broader perspective” on how I see and perceive the world around me, as well as to help me “change my views” so I can get “more perspective” on things.
I truly think that the combination of both will help me create awareness on my Gothic journey, solving all the dark corners that my brain takes me to sometimes when I feel a bit down for different reasons.
Conclusive observations
Since journaling and diary writing were activities well known and carried out in Victorian times and I’m a huge fan of the Brontës who are also famous for their diaries and journals, I feel this is a call I need to listen to, to put into practice and to learn from.
Are you thinking of writing a journal this year? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Maybe together we could create a new way of approaching journaling.
Final Thoughts
Still don’t know where to start with the Gothic? Why don’t you watch my free presentation below and find out how it can help you learn about your own identity?
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