Those Entries in Your Journal Are Useless
Unless You Are Doing This
“An introspective man who doesn’t keep a diary consigns himself to a special hell” ― Tim Lucas, The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula
You heard and read about the benefits of keeping a journal, and you made the resolution to start keeping one this year. And you successfully wrote every day in those pages assigned for each day. Maybe you missed Saturdays and Sundays, but you wrote almost every day.
You have been writing for a few months or years now.
In the best case that I am striving to achieve: you got almost addicted to writing a journal. You cannot fall asleep without talking about your day in the pages of your diary. On the exceptional days when you did not have access to your diary, you wrote the entries in some app in your phone to be transferred to your diary when you get time.
Your awareness has improved as you see certain events going as entries in your journal and you try to make it a good entry. The quality of your sleep enhanced as you recalled everything before sleeping and may be noted down what to do the next day.
But nothing outstanding happened.
You kept making the same mistakes, you kept wasting time on online, you continued with your addictions, you kept eating unhealthy, you kept seeing your goals in some blurry vision, you kept moving to your goals with the same pace.
You got some advantages but not all that you expected.
One night after completing your journal you start asking yourself:
- Where did you go wrong?
- Are those people who claim that keeping a journal drastically improved their life telling you a lie just to get some likes on their posts?
- Is there a critical element of journaling that is missing?
The answers to the second question is No, the answer to the third one is Yes, and the rest of this article will answer the first question.
Over the weeks, months, and years you have written pages and pages filled with your emotions, your failures, your success, your dreams, your hopes, your moments of distress.
Those pages are sort of your autobiography, a novel with the story of your life.
But who is reading it?
As I explained here, you need to revise a great book about once a month if you want to keep benefiting from them.
Are you revising the book of your life?
Are you going back to the entries on the last week, month, or year to see what changed?
Are you using your diary to track your progress?
If you are just using your journal as a dump of your daily events and never going back to it, it doesn’t have much value.
Now that you know you need to revise your journal, make sure the entries are easy to revise.
Use different colors to mark what you liked and did not like.
Keep a section to track your progress towards your goal or your struggle with your addiction.
Add new insight with each revision to those entries.
“Please read my diary, look through my things and figure me out.” ― Kurt Cobain, Journals
Read your own diary to figure yourself out.
And most importantly: develop a routine to revise the entries of the past week, month, and year.
Think of your journal as a gold mine that you are building, you won’t get rich if you just focus on building it and not mining it for the gold.