Journaling for Productivity Over 30 Days and What I Learned

Are you someone that loves to be productive but sometimes has those days where being that way is like pulling teeth to get started? We all have them; but have you tried writing in a productivity journal to get going?

So I got this idea from a friend of mine. In fact, she writes here on Medium and did a post about productivity journals. I had a few weeks struggling with writing, in the two books that I’m finishing up, my clients writing and writing here. The writer's block seemed to be this enormous wall that pervaded the 2 am dreams and thoughts that usually woke me up to tell me to write despite needing sleep. Sleep, according to creativity, is for the weak.

Now I’m all about productivity. It’s something that I focus on every day, I write about it often, and it’s something that focuses me and drives me forward to get things done. I’ve talked about breaking things down into goals, projects, task lists, having planners, whether digital or paper, many things to keep yourself on track with getting things done.

Productivity is a different beast for everyone, and no one size fits all in how to achieve it effectively.

A productivity journal is where you can write your plans for the day to get the juices started. I have a bullet journal for this, and while the first few days were hard to get started with it because I wasn’t used to writing everything down in this manner, after about a week, I got into the morning habit of doing it. This helped me realize that despite the writer's block, I had a lot to do, and there were many ways to get started with the day.

I did this for 30 days. As you know, they say that doing something for a few weeks in a row will make it a habit. I went so far as to write it down in my planner as something I had to do every day to make sure I was doing it.

At first, I started with listing tasks I had to get done for the day, which wasn’t really helpful, to be honest. I was writing the same things in my planner, though it helped me see what things I might have missed writing in the planner for that day or week. Then I moved, instead, to listing my intentions for the day.

For example, I would write things like;

I want to sit down and write 1k words today at the very least. Why? This will help me build and continue a writing habit that will last me even through the writer's block I’m having at the moment, even if it’s about nothing but my day and how it went. Writing is writing, and that’s a successful day.

“Sometimes, things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night.”

Michael Jordan

Putting in the effort, feeling like it or not, creates a purpose. That purpose is to hone and perfect the craft that I’ve chosen as my creative gift in my life. Not everyone gets to do this, and I know that. There are fewer lucky people and cannot speak out, write as we do, and publish our own work or submit them to publications.

I found that writing in this productivity journal helped me realize my planner is great for keeping me on task and ensuring that goals and projects were getting done effectively. However, it also helped me realize my planner is just that. It’s not there as an end all be all to my productivity. There are so many other factors that go into it.

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”

Bruce Lee

While I knew this to a certain degree, I believe that writing in this productivity journal drove that home in a way that was eye-opening to the point of now making it a habit to write every morning, even if it’s not published, with writing prompts. If nothing else, this gets the juices flowing, the brain working, and the feeling of satisfaction in getting something important to me, done.

Every day, one of my goals is to listen to a bit of MasterClass as someone gifted me a year subscription. I took one with Neil Gaiman, and I’ll leave you with these last words that struck me as profound, not only in writing but in life.

“It’s better to finish your failures and learn from them, than to start something fantastic and never finish.”

Neil Gaiman