Capture it all mentality
During the last two or three weeks I have been reflecting on my journaling routine more and more. I guess I got to a point where I have severe doubts if my current journaling routine fits my mental needs or if it needs an update.
Since the beginning of 2024, my morning journaling routine roughly looks like this:
Hobonichi weeks:
- weekly: 3–5 bullet points about sleep quality and health issues
- monthly: headline of the day
yearly journal:
- fill habit tracker
- to-do lesson of the day for the day before
- events + lesson of the day
- update finance tracker
Bullet journal (new one each month)
- filling 3 tracking spreads
- finalize to-do list for the day
- long — form journaling
Overall, this takes like 30 mins… Add like 10 mins for prepping 2 cups of tea and I am at 40–45 mins before I can start with breakfast and getting ready for the day.
This feels overwhelming, so I´ll be streamlining these points and discarding a few items to save a bit of time before heading to work.
During my 9–5 I journal for 3–5 mins a few times a day when all the stuff I am learning as a newbie feels overwhelming.
When I get home, I tend to journal for like 10–15 min in total in very small increments before it´s time to head for bed.
There I journal for 10–20min again, including writing my to-do list for the next day before I read before sleeping.
In total, this roughly makes 1h of journaling per day. The time for taking notes during a webinar or brain-dumping adds up to this. During off days, this can pile up to two hours when I am in a very reflective mood.
The questions I am asking myself these days are like this:
- Do I journal as part of procrastination sometimes (a psychologist friend and my boyfriend think so)
- How can I shorten the amount of time with journaling to live more? I´ve already braindumped this question, but haven´t concluded yet.
- Should I write more in bullet points and diagrams instead?
- Why do I journal? Out of habit? To fulfill my “I want to catch it all” tendencies?
- Where is the sweet spot between documenting my life and living my life?
- Is there a point where I´ve externalized my brain to my journal to a point where I have memory issues? A few close people who have known me for a long time consider that. I´ve been noticing my writing-for-thinking tendencies regularly for months…
After several months of thinking I am working on getting rid of the “a well-documented life is a good life” mindset. I am aware that the number of words written about something only means that I have a lot to observe and reflect on, but it isn´t necessarily a quality indicator.
Take yesterday as an example: My boyfriend and I visited my mom and her kitties, went to a famous indoor swimming pool in a small town nearby, had lunch at Subway at 3:30 pm, and cooked meat and delicious bean-heavy meal for dinner.
If the amount of journaling would be a quality indicator, I would have written 10 pages in my A6ish-sized journal. But I wrote 2, as I was focusing on my boyfriend that day and journaled when I couldn´t help him with cooking only. And it felt like enough, as that day was one of the most calming and relaxing days with my boyfriend in several months. I could have written how often we were in which pool or in the steam bath and all these minor details… but for what?
I think I need to prioritize writing down what matters more and actively develop an abbreviation system / an updated key for my Bujo, maybe for my digital setup as well.
Even more important is that I focus roughly on time tracking, but more on tracking what is meaningful.
And finally: reflect on that stuff more actively and use this information to live a better life and focus on what matters to me.
A journal should be a tool, not a destination in itself.
It´s like knowledge management: It´s not about how much you collect, what you make out of it.
