Take control of your life with these 3 low investment writing practices

James Suszynski
Aug 31, 2018 · 5 min read
Sunset over the Atlantic. Cape Town, South Africa.

I’ve been writing for a while. I’ve tried blogging, answering on Quora and writing more on Medium. I do have a plan thanks to Tom Kuegler to get my Medium rep up a little bit. None of that is what I’m here to talk about today.

I’ve been writing consistently for nearly 6 or 7 years now. I’ve honed my practice over that time and have been using a 3-pronged approach that has changed my life significantly. Living simply is also high on my list of life priorities, so this is something that anyone can do with a relatively low time commitment.


1 — Notes App

I use my notes app on my mac and iPhone daily. I created a folder called thoughts that I record little things throughout my day in. The entries come in the form of epiphanies, observations, reactions to things I read or hear in podcasts and even song lyrics. I record little things that make me smile throughout the day and sometimes they get turned into posts on Medium, longer entries in my next tool or just sit as short blurbs in my notes to revisit later on.

It’s very low commitment but something I do religiously. I took 2 notes just today on seemingly pointless things. But, both got me thinking convergently and when that happens, I like to come back to that if I can.

2 — Physical Journal

I didn’t figure out why journals cost a lot more than regular notebooks until about a year and a half ago, but once I did, I decided to make my nightly journal entries a bit more ceremonious. Now, with my handy fountain pen, I write a little more slowly and it’s much smoother than before. Aside from the mechanics of writing in my actual journal, it’s the type of writing I do that makes the biggest difference.

My pen-to-paper entries are usually emotion-based. I’m a huge fan and practitioner of stoicism and it has heavily influenced my writing practice. When certain emotions crowd my thinking throughout the day, I always come back to them with my weapon of choice: my pen.

After writing out what I’m feeling, I will change my tone to a more objective, third-person perspective. I dig into my emotion-based thinking pattern and exploit it for what it truly is, an over-inflated value judgment. It’s not the events themselves but the value I give to them that determines my emotional response. Events, in this case, are mostly negative thought patterns that snowball to include negative emotions. I distill those emotional thought patterns into their constituent parts as though I were giving advice to a stranger. For me, it’s equivalent to sitting with a therapist for 30 minutes every night before bed and it’s done wonders for my default mode of thinking.

3 — Virtual Journal

This one is my brain dump; my virtual friend to whom I vent out and then collect and assemble the pieces in a more emotionally healthy way.

I created a folder on my desktop called journal and I fill it with appropriately titled and dated text edit files. These entries are a bit more varied but have one theme in common, details. When I was a single guy, I would write detailed entries after dates I went on. This helped me to learn from mistakes I was making, sure. More importantly, however, it helped me learn more about myself. I learned what I liked and disliked, what I wanted in a partner and what my deal breakers were. After figuring those little pieces out I was able to work on those aspects of myself. You can’t expect the person you want to be with to reciprocate if you’re not offering it up yourself.

The dating scene started this practice but, that was just the beginning. Now, I use it to record odd experiences and to expand on entries in my thoughts folder in my notes app.

Typing is much faster than writing and when I want to go into great detail to either save that experience for later or to do some investigative work it saves an awful lot of time. I can also organize everything using typeface and other formatting. I’ve already used the search feature a few times to go back to something that happened to me and if I want to get even more analytical, I can search by an emotion, phrase or other keywords to see how much I’ve mentioned them. Of the 3 types of writing I do, this has brought about the biggest overall epiphanies in my personal development.


It’s so easy, for me, to get caught in a cycle of self pity and self loathing. It’s how I’m wired and I’m well aware. It’s in my family and I’ve watched it my entire life and after receiving the results of my DNA sequencing the patterns I’ve noticed in myself make complete sense. Many of my entries will start off negative but I quickly change the tune and write as though I am giving advice to a stranger. By intentionally removing the value judgements that cause the emotions and subsequent rumination, I distill them down into objective problems and that has made getting out of those cycles of thinking so much easier. It’s not always instant, but if something bothers me for multiple days, I will write about it until it changes. It has not failed me yet over the last 6 or 7 years and it’s something I will continue to do indefinitely.

It may seem like an awful lot to start doing at once, but I promise it isn’t. Everyone gets frustrated at simple things and I’ll bet the house that you make little observations and have micro-epiphanies like I do. Negative thoughts and emotions don’t have to control the way you live but you can’t get a handle on them until you figure out where they’re coming from. Making a habit of these short sessions of introspection will allow those habits to change organically with time.

The techniques above are integrated into your daily life and don’t require setting aside much time. It’s easy to build a new habit when it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to build a new habit.

James Suszynski

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humble philosophy of everyday living

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