How to Start and Grow a Journaling Practice
“Right now, you’re trying to decide how to feel or what to do about something. Whether it’s a minor detail or a major life-altering issue, what you decide will make a difference. You can consult everyone you know, even pay for professional guidance, but ultimately, the right answer must come from within you.” - Monica Gomez, Write Answers
Journaling is a great way to generate insights about your life experiences.
Regular journaling can help you to identify your emotions, orient yourself to new circumstances, plan out ambitious goals, gain clarity and understanding of a situation, create a stronger sense of identity and purpose, and increase your competence and understanding of an idea. It can also be an incredible tool for learning and changing your behavior.
Starting a journaling practice is easy and requires no prior knowledge or experience.
All you need is a notebook and a pen/paper or the LearnChangeDo Notion Journaling Database.
How to Start Journaling
Here’s how you can start journaling right now:
Grab a blank sheet of paper or open a blank document on your favorite writing application.
Write about whatever is weighing most on your mind right now. Use whatever words you want to use. You might write about things you’re grateful for or a challenge you’re currently going through. Describe it. Consider different perspectives and angles. Find connections to your goals or values. Continue to write as long or as short as you want. Pay no attention to how the writing sounds or how you organize your ideas. Just write. No one will read this but you.
Stop writing when you have nothing more to write.
That’s all there is to journaling.
How to Stay Consistent with Your Journaling Practice
Like a mindfulness practice, the benefits of regular journaling compound over time.
For this reason, journaling is most beneficial when it‘s part of your daily routine.
Here are some strategies for making journaling part of your daily routine:
1. Make It Easy
As with any other new behavior, making journaling part of your routine starts with making it easy.
Here are a few strategies for making your journaling easy to do:
Decide where you'll write ahead of time. Pick the most comfortable place in your home where you can sit and write. Use this same place every time you journal unless you're traveling or in a different location.
Keep your tools nearby. If you choose to write using a notebook and a pen, keep the two together at all times. Put them in the place where you'll be doing the writing, or keep them in your bag with you when traveling.
Don’t worry about how many pages or how long you can write. The goal is never to write a lot. Instead, focus on capturing your authentic thinking in your writing. Whether it's a few sentences or a few paragraphs makes no difference.
2. Determine Your Optimal Journaling Practice
Use one of the practices below to create space for journaling in your current routine:
Time-Based Journaling
Insight-Based Journaling
Time-Based Journaling
The simplest way to make journaling part of your routine is to do it at a specific time.
For example, you can journal:
Mid-day before or after lunch
During a specific break in your workday
First thing in the morning after waking up
Last thing in the evening before going to sleep
The key is to choose a specific time of the day when you can journal for a few minutes.
After you‘ve identified the time of day when you can journal for a few minutes, create a prompt for yourself. Use your phone or your computer to create a time-based reminder for when it’s time to journal. Make sure that the reminder is a repeating reminder and will remind you at the same time every day.
Each day, when the prompt reminds you to journal, go to your writing space, open your journal, and begin — journal for as long or as short as you want. When you're finished, close up your journal and continue your day.
Insight-Based Journaling
An alternative method is Insight-Based Journaling.
This method works best when you can access your journal within a few seconds. Use a notebook, an app on your phone, or a computer program you can open with a few clicks or taps.
Insight-Based Journaling is idea-driven. Instead of journaling at a specific time of day, you let the ideas lead your journaling practice. This method helps you capture the insights that you have throughout your day. Here’s how it works:
Go through your regular routine like you always do
As you go through your day, you’ll come across an idea, an insight, or a thought that you want to capture
Open your journal and capture it
With Insight-Based Journaling, your entries will be shorter but more frequent. It’s all about capturing quick, concise ideas that you can return to later on for further exploration.
3. Curate and Create Journaling Prompts
Beginning with a blank page is great for open-ended reflection, but another alternative is to use prompts.
Journaling prompts help guide your thinking in a more organized way. They can be simple questions-and-answers or visual mind maps that you can fill in.
Prompts are great for working through a specific situation or challenge. For example:
If you need to make an important decision, you can use the Hard Choice Model
If you‘re unsure if you’re jumping to conclusions, you can use Ladder of Inference
If you’re trying to flesh out an idea, you can use the Productive Thinking Model
There are an endless number of journaling prompts you can find online. A simple search will give you tons to choose from.
But while existing prompts can be helpful, you’ll find that creating your own is best.
Your journaling practice should be unique to you and your rhythms of life. Start by curating and using helpful prompts, but over time, challenge yourself to create your own that you can return to when needed.
4. Review Your Journaling Regularly
Over time, you’ll write hundreds of pages of your private thoughts and ideas.
For this reason, consider revisiting previous journaling to reflect on your thinking.
At first, reviewing your previous journaling might make you uncomfortable. It can be challenging to revisit difficult periods or experiences in your life.
But reviewing your journaling has a wide range of benefits:
Identifying your sense of self-purpose
Analyzing gaps in your logic or beliefs
Revealing unhelpful patterns of thinking
Improving the quality of your decision-making
Reminding yourself of how you got to where you are today
Here are a few strategies for reviewing your journaling:
Review Your Journaling Weekly
Once per week, read all your entries in the past seven days. Circle, bold, highlight, or add any extra reflections you have while reviewing. Use a weekly review as an opportunity to:
Identify personal blind spots
Reflect on your recent thinking
Pick personal areas of growth to focus on in the coming week
The 1.3.6.12 Exercise
For longer and more in-depth reviews, you can go further back in time.
The 1.3.6.12 Exercise is reviewing your journaling from one week ago, three months ago, six months ago, and 12 months ago.
Use tags
Adding searchable tags to your journal entries makes it possible for you to search and catalog your journal entries.
Most digital writing apps will allow you to add tags to any journal entry you write. If you're using the LearnChangeDo Journaling Template, add tags and other properties to add context to your entries.
When creating tags, think about search inquiries you might use in the future to review your journaling. Create tags for common themes, situations, challenges, people, experiences, keywords, or emotions.
Download the LearnChangeDo Journaling Database for Notion and Start Journaling Today