How journaling helped me Process my thoughts & Organize my life
Starting last year, I started carrying multiple journals around. Here’s how they helped me keep my thoughts & my life organized.
Journaling before bed
This was the one that got me really starting to use my notebooks regularly. I started January 2, 2017 and ended up writing 220 nights in 2017!
Most nights, it’d be half a page just describing what went on that day. But every once in a while, it’d turn into a page or two ruminating on whatever was going on.
The content itself has never been important — sometimes, it would help placate my anger, other times it would help flush out an idea that I had. I could vent my frustrations or it would help me elucidate more on a conversation I had.
In essence, it would help me fill in the thoughts and conversations that I had that day — the things that I couldn’t process in the moment.
The ethos became: ✔︎ just write.
Explicit cover choices
When starting this journaling, I deliberately picked the Game of Thrones Moleskine with the direwolf. It was a period of my life where I felt very secluded and lost. So I picked that image cause, for me, it represented strength and resilience mired in solitude.
For 2018, I picked up a Beatles Moleskine. I’ll be studying coding intensively for the first half of the year, so I picked the Beatles to reflect their early days where they “trained” in the clubs of Hamburg. To execute on the vision for my life, I need to steel my resolve and humble myself to this training.
Transitioning back to a physical task list
I used to keep my task list on digital platforms: Google Tasks, Wunderlist, Todoist, Asana, Google Keep, etc. I’ve tried so many over the years. At some point I came across the “Eisenhower Box”:
It made me notice that my problem was that my task list was too long. Not that I was too busy, but the unlimited nature of these digital platforms made it too easy for me to add tasks, no matter how minute or abstract they were.
The Eisenhower Box didn’t quite fit my use-case, so last year, I started experimenting in my general note-taking notebook. I needed: recurring weekly tasks, ongoing long-term tasks, normal tasks with the ability to “DELETE”, writing ideas.
This is what I came up:
- at the top, I have my weekly tasks, with the # of times I’d like to accomplish them
- next, I have long-term goals that show the current # I’m at
- then I have my weekly tasks
- on the right, ideas for writing
There are two more quirks that help keep my task list sane. First, because I write my weekly tasks each and every week, if there are any tasks still leftover, I have to deliberately decide to write them again.
Mentally, it was more difficult for me to delete something from my digital task list if I didn’t want to work on it anymore. Here, though, it was much easier for me to just not write it again as I rewrote my weekly tasks.
The second quirk I added was “circles”. I would mark these circles mid-week and it was my way of giving myself permission: “Okay, you don’t have to do these anymore!”
This year, I also started using a daily journal, where I extended this to my daily tasks, giving life to a micro-task list! Now, even more internal satisfaction from marking off more tasks!!
in memoriam…
In giving up my digital task lists, I gained the ability to easily let go of tasks that, at the end of the day, really weren’t that important. Hah, it was a really small change, but the difference between deliberately deleting a task versus choosing to not write it again made it so much easier to let go.
That and the visual elements of numbering recurring and ongoing weekly tasks helped me to stay cognizant of where I was with my goals as the week progressed.
It’s taken nearly a year to get here, but I’m really happy with where my workflow is right now. We’ll see where it goes from here, though :).
So, my suggestions:
- (Sort of) daily evening recap journaling: gives your brain more space to process through thoughts and emotions.
- Weekly/daily physical task lists + giving yourself permission to let go of unnecessary tasks!
