Reflecting on Fourteen Years of Journaling
My annual reminder to reflect on the last year of journaling popped up today — which reminded me of something I wrote in 2022 which I’m gonna repeat here:
In the last year I’ve written 270k+ words. None of which you’ve read :-)
I’ve journaled daily pretty regularly since 2010. Mostly as an end-of-day habit — a few dozen, maybe a few hundred words. A little end-of-day retrospective. Which was super useful.
But a year ago I wrote “Trying journaling in here more regularly during the day … Let’s see how that works.”
Basically — what happens if I turned my journaling up to 11?
For me — pretty darn good things.
I ended up building a habit where I wrote a few sentences when I did a task, or switched contexts, or when some random stuff entered my head. Which meant my little end-of-day reflection had something explicit & concrete to reflect on.
It let me notice when I was wandering off an getting distracted. It let me notice where I was spending more or less time than I thought. It let me notice all the things I was doing — rather than the ones I remembered at the end of the day.
It let me remember the good bits when I’d had a bad day. It let me notice the bad bits when I’d had a good day. It gave me a place for that quick idea and random association so that I didn’t end up forgetting it.
One year, and more than 270k words later, I got my “REFLECT: One year of journaling at 11 — keep it up / turn it down?” reminder.
It’s been useful. So I’m carrying on.
And I have.
It’s nothing complicated. It’s just a markdown file that sits in an open tab of whatever text editor I’m currently living in. Plus a few text snippets that give me a template for the day and some prompts to answer. The details are not that important.
I’m up to 796k words now. That’s about around 1.5x the word count of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. 265k words a year on average. Hundreds of thousands of words that nobody but me sees.
I’m unsure which direction the causal arrow is pointing… but I find it fascinating that my journal word count drops by a good 20% or so when I have an unproductive week. Do I write less because I’m doing less? Or — am I doing less because I’m not reflecting on what I’m doing?
Is that effort worthwhile? In the decade of semi-regular journaling before I deliberately tried to write more I wrote 46k words in total. Now I write 5x that annually. Most of it is dull and repetitious. Nobody is gonna make a best seller out of my journal without the aid of an extremely vivid imagination.
But I’ve still found it super useful for all the reasons I outlined in 2022. It lets me see things I otherwise miss. I’ve lost count of the little things it’s let me spot — tiny improvements that help me turn up the good and turn down the bad.
Me: “I’m a terrible person for not getting shit done the first week in November.””
Journal: “Hey! The clocks went back, you were recovering from 2x vaccinations, the weather was foul, and gave you 48hrs of migraines! It’s amazing you achieved anything! FFS! Idiot. Get a grip!”
TL;DR: Having a journal is a great way for Past Adrian and Present Adrian to point at each other and go “FFS. Idiot. Get a grip.”
If you’ve never tried keeping a journal — why not give it a try for a couple of weeks. You might find you like it.
ttfn.
Originally published at https://adrianhoward.com.
