The App Development Learning Journal: Day 10

Value of journaling to reinvent paths (& How to journal on Medium)

7 min readJul 11, 2020

The journaling journey so far

On 1 July, 2020, exactly 10 days ago, I made a commitment to journal about my journey to become a Tech founder of my own business, and do so on Medium.

The reasons were two. 1) Journaling is known to be very useful for acquiring a new habit. 2) Doing so on Medium is a great way to keep a sense of accountability, and share the journey and lessons.

In the 10 days since, this has worked as intended. I got 25% of the way through my chosen app development course, and learned to wire 9 different apps. The process has been a lot of work.

At the same time, creating and making things has been fun and rewarding.

It does put a smile on my face to see the picture below =)

Through it, I discovered and learned,

the invaluable benefits of journaling as a way to change behaviour and reinvent new paths for ourselves,
the difference between journaling and journaling on Medium, and therefore the lessons on how to journal on Medium,
the adjustments / pivoting needed for the next cycle of iteration in this experiemental project.

Below are the details.

1. Why and How to Journal

Journal as a way to form a habit / acquire a skill

Dale Carnegie shared a description of the invaluable benefits of daily journaling in his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. In a quote he noted as said by someone he greatly admired, it is said,

“This system of self-analysis, self-education, continued year after year, did more for me than any other one thing I have ever attempted”.

Skill development is not an overnight event. It requires consistent accumulation through a habit. A great quote on this is,

“Ordinary things consistently done produce extraordinary results.” — Keith Cunningham

Last year, I was introduced to a journaling system, called The Freedom Journal. It was a daily journal to train a skill or achieve a goal over 100 days. Even with only ~50% of the days completed, I still achieved my goal. It was incredible. This made me look at journaling differently.
Over the last 10 days,

journaling on Medium has been helpful to keep a sense of accountability, keep a consistent progress, and keep growing a belief in a new path which comes with making progress.

In addition, journaling as a form of written communication helps us think and learn better generally over time.

“Thinking is the foundation of writing. An idea can have value in itself, but its usefulness diminishes to the extent that you can’t articulate it to someone else.” — William Zinsser, journalist and non-fiction writer, on Writing to Learn
“Getting good at communication — particularly written communication — is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.” — Sam Altman, entrepreneur and technologist, on How To Be Successful

Two lessons on how to journal better

1> Journal with a set structure.

In many popular journals, eg. The Freedom Journal, The Clear Habit Journal, The Habit Journal, or The Good Time Journal / Good Work Journal from Designing Your Life / Designing Work Life, they all have consistent structures to automatically and consistently focus the mind towards a clear result / purpose. Eg. restating a long term project goal, listing intentions for the day, making targetted observations about specific kinds of actions and energies.
In the Medium article, How To Start A Daily Journaling Habit (And What To Write About), by Darius Foroux, I liked he pointed out the importance to journal our decisions.
So having structure is about creating consistency. And consistent accumulation is the key to making enduring change.
I find over the last 10 days though, I was more “writing” than “journaling”. I wrote to publish and did not consistently “journal” which required a structure. I asked myself to simply journal on two simple questions, “What have I learned about app development today?”, and “What have I learned about Medium today?” This proves insufficiently structured and has no clear audience. In comparison to popular templates out there, it is a great idea to,

Create structures for our journaling. Because it helps us capture better things and capture them faster.

I look forward to designing this into my learning journal going forward.

2> Create short learning cycles, i.e. review often

I am grateful I asked myself to commit to journaling on Medium simply for 10 days. It was a new experiment, I didn’t know if I could sustain it notwithstanding the logical benefits. Now, at the end of 10 days, it gives me a chance to review and reset. A shorter learning cycle makes learning faster.

This is the proverbial, “fail fast learn fast” paradigm, indeed useful. Stop to review often, so as to learn often.

The Freedom Journal works on 10 day cycles over 100 days. I realise I prefer planning on multiples of 7 instead of 10, it aligns more naturally with the calendar. So my next learning cycles will be 7 days at a time.

2. How to Journal on Medium (The difference between journaling and journaling on Medium)

Briefly first on the similarity. Both are forms of writing. So journaling and Medium are not incompatible.

The obvious difference is the reader / audience.

What does this mean?

When we journal, the primary audience is ourselves. It’s more an activity of systematic capturing. It simply needs to make sense for ourselves.
When we journal pubicly, the audience becomes the public. Seems obvious, in hindsight.
For this communication to work, it requires a separate job of researching, thinking, contextualising, and polishing. Our time is valuable, it deserves meaningful and useful communication, and that takes purposely effort to create.

The problem of journaling on Medium

It becomes unwieldy and ineffective to create useful communication when the audience is too broad, multi-layered, or unclear. Is the journal for self or the public?

For examples, there were useful things I wanted to journal for myself which would require separate explanation or be irrelevant to a general audience. Eg. how I eventually found some sound playing functions on Google, or how programming on the couch instead of the desk caused a drag and drop error that took me a long time to debug.
The consideration required to write for a general audience detracted from the value of my journaling. It distracted me from the focus to learn app development skills, and probably caused confusion for the general audience as to the purpose of my communication to them.

So, is Medium still a good place for sharing a journal?

In reflection, the answer for me lies in better alignment between the purpose of the author via the journal and that of the intended reader.

The purpose and focus of my journaling here is to create a habit, develop a skill, and helpfully share the experience. It is less about advice or persuasion. A purpose to advise or persuade a general audience will require separate time and effort.
It is therefore more useful for this blog to communicate specifically to the learninging community of app development skills.

With these observations, the following changes and decisions will probably be more suited.

3. New Pivot & The Next 7 Days

The journal’s intention and audience, will narrow, and become more specific, in order to better align the two.
For the next 7 day cycle, the daily journal will continue on Medium, with a weekly update in other forums. And this format will be reviewed again at the end of 7 days.

The intention of this journal is,

to write about the journey of learning app development skills and ideas in technology, with a blog title renamed as “The App Development Learning Journal”;
primarily to share the experience and connect with those on the same learing journey, i.e. amongst the learning community of Angela Yu’s coding courses (for reasons about these courses in Day3's journal);
secondarily, and in the long time, hopefully through its accumulation and less frequent but more for-purpose articles, to connect with a general audience, and inspire a sense of possibility for those who harbour an interest in technology and design skills, so they take up the challenge to develop these skills, and join an innovative STEM workforce which we need.

This will reflect a more human-centred way of communication that works for both the reader and writer.

As far as an entrepreneurial journey is concerned, this has been a truly valuable experience, specifically around getting the ideas of positioning / pivoting, and messaging. Onwards it now evolves into the next iteration.

I thank you for your company over the last 10 days, and hope the things I managed to share are meaningful to you in your lifelong learning journey.

Last, But Not Least

If I have managed to stoke your interest, or you managed to pass this enthusiasm for technology to someone in your life, amazing and thank you, I look forward to seeing new members in the App Brewery learning community.
If you have good journaling practice to share, please leave a note.
Or, if you have a similar blog, you are most welcome to leave me a private note and let me know about it.
Or, if you are curious about the specific learning journey to reinvent yourself with app development skills, I will see you on Medium!

Past 10 Days

For the journey so far, below are the journals with lessons I hope you’ll find useful.