Maintaining a journal or diary seemingly has endless benefits.
One of the most important, and maybe the one that wraps them all up, is Self Awareness.
There are a lot of distractions in the world today. One of the largest is judging others and how they live their lives.
It seems to be an offshoot of our human history. In the past, it was advantageous to be able to quickly judge a situation. Including situations with people.
And we’ve become really good at it. We’re very skilled at pointing out the flaws in others. This was helpful centuries ago because everything was precious. Our belongings. Our livelihoods. Even our lives.
Today…it’s still important to be able to judge others.
But not at the expense of understanding ourselves.
That’s where a diary or journal can help.
But let’s say you understand the important of a diary. You’re willing to commit to doing it and doing it for the long-term.
Here are a few tips to help you begin and to stay with it…
1. Schedule Time
With anything, especially with something new, you’re not going to do it without a schedule.
We’ve built our business model at Ghost Blog Writers around the idea of a blogging schedule. Creating titles with notes that include due dates and publish dates. Many try to blog, both individuals and businesses. Many fail for the simple fact that they lack a schedule or calendar or whatever you want to call it.
By not scheduling what you do every day, you’re giving up power over your life and time.
If you want to journal, assess what you’re doing with your minutes currently. See what you can remove so that you have the time to insert something new. That “new” being journaling.
Ten minutes for journaling may seem easy to fit in. But as your gym routine probably reflects, fitting something in for the long-term is never easy.
Assess your schedule. Find time that you have every day to make journaling a routine. Then do it.
2. Ease Into It
Start with five minutes. Maybe even with a little less. Just a few sentences about your day. Try to include a few rules or guidelines for what you’ll write about. Maybe one item for morning, another for midday and another for the evening.
There are lots of ways to journal. Reflections, memories, thoughts, ideas, etc. They’re all good. But trying to do them all right away can lead to frustration and disappointment in yourself.
Ease into it. Build up. Continue to read about journaling and how others are doing it. Adjust as you go and as you learn more about journaling and more about your journaling likes and dislikes.
The key is understanding that you’ll improve over time.
3. Build On The Detail
When it comes to journaling, detail is important. Especially for your own self awareness. You’re basically analyzing your own life by including as much detail about what you’re doing that you can.
It might mean including every little thing you did in terms of work today. It could mean documenting every minute that you spent with your family. It could mean including every idea and detail about those ideas in the diary.
Make it a goal to build detail into your journaling routine. It’s not easy, but you can get better over time and you’ll see greater benefit from the practice if you focus on improving the detail.
Final Thoughts
Every once in awhile set time aside to reflect on your journaling progress.
This is important. Most of us know that “the process” is a key to success. You have to commit to the process or routine of journaling everyday, but part of that commitment is being able to understand why you’re doing it. Allowing yourself some time, maybe 20 minutes, to reflect on what journaling has done for you is a good thing.
Say it’s 20 minutes per reflection twice a year.
That’s a great amount of time to understand the positives journaling brings you can it can help you understand tweaks you might need to make and provide inspiration and motivation for you to continue. Because it’s difficult to comprehend progress when we’re always “in the moment”.