Align your Intentions and Actions with a Simple Journal: A How-to
Creating my first Short Term Journal of 2018.
It’s the beginning of the month which means it’s time to create a new Short Term Journal.
Wait… What’s a “Short Term Journal”?
A Short Term Journal is a monthly journal I use to record thoughts, track habits, and record progress towards goals. It works in tandem with my Long Term Journal to align my short term actions and long term goals.
My Short Term Journal (or STJ) is definitely a “productivity” tool, but it also brings benefits entirely unrelated to anything work- or goal-related. It is the keystone to all of my routines. It is really more of a life tool than anything else.
Choice of Medium
But, first, let’s talk what medium you should use. Honestly, a STJ can be kept on a roll of toilet paper if you’re so inclined. Personally, I prefer Moleskine’s large lined Cahier journals:
As I (usually) use one STJ a month, its 80 ruled pages are perfect for my purposes:
But there are all sorts of other options out there for you: digital, analog, and otherwise. Go with what works for you. Below I describe my process using my preferred medium, but it is easily applied to other mediums. This can also be applied to other time-frames if a month is too short or too long.
TASK 1: Choose a medium (without fret as this will work for nearly any.)
TASK 2: Buy/download chosen medium (or pull it out of a drawer — most people have an empty notebook somewhere.)
Front-to-back: Daily Journaling
For ease of flipping, I use my journal front-to-back for one purpose and back-to-front for others. The first 60 pages of my STJ are dedicated to daily journaling. My daily journaling practice has no hard-and-fast rules other than the stupidly simple: I skip lines between entries. I date- and time-stamp them. And I try to write for more than a page (although I often don’t.)
Most entries begin with a recitation of something that happened or something that’s coming up. Sometimes it’s something that is heavy on my mind, other times it’s “I just woke up. The coffee is good.” (And more often than I’d like to admit, those are the most intelligible sentences I write.)
Beyond this, I am flexible. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.
I do, however, have some themes based on the day of the week, but they primarily serve as a back-up if I can’t think of anything to write day-of.
Monday: I look ahead to the week: important events, must-dos, the little things like groceries.
Tuesday: I usually write about the week’s tasks and guideposts, and try to identify what anxieties I have related to them. By identifying them early in the week, I can deal with them before they end up ruining my week’s productivity.
Wednesday: I like to “dig deep” and write something a little more personal. Sometimes it has something to do with difficult emotions, other times it is something random I want to explore like why I like x, why I did y, how I feel about z. Other times I continue my writing from Tuesday — perhaps because my task anxiety is related to a larger issue.
Thursday: Assuming I made some mental progress on Wednesday, I continue down the path. If not, I choose a different path.
Friday: I like to review how the week is going, what my successes were, what my failures were. This is a good time to reflect upon the week before they fade away during the weekend.
Weekend: I like to write something random and spontaneous, and unrelated to anything I’ve written recently (or ever.) These have included random diatribes about the sounds of birds, a history of my posture, and my thesis regarding the origins of the ‘fist bump.’
Here’s the first words from my first entry from this month:
TASK 3:
Sure, you could wait to write in your journal until the entire thing is setup… but that’s probably procrastinatory. So… write in it now. Keep it super simple. A few lines are fine. (“This is my first entry” counts. It’s the act, not the substance, that matters.)
Back-to-front: Monthly Tracking
The latter ~20 pages of my journal are used to track progress. There are a few different ways I track progress, listed in order back-to-front:
Monthly guideposts (milestones necessary for achieving goals, as described in greater detail in my book.)
My January monthly guideposts go on the inside cover:
TASK 4: Create reasonable monthly guideposts for your current goals or projects (i.e., a necessary stop on the way to achieving X) and put them on the inside cover.
Next come weekly guideposts (informed by the monthly guideposts.)
My January weekly guideposts go opposite the monthly:
TASK 5: Create reasonable weekly guideposts for your current goals or projects (i.e., a necessary stop on the way to reaching your monthly guidepost.)
Then, continuing back-to-front, are dedicated pages for tracking pivotal daily practices that are not directly linked to goals (I track exercise, meditation, and what I call my “Zero Hour” where I process e-mails, tasks, etc.) I keep it simple, writing down my intentions in one column and realities in another, then any notes on the opposite page.
One of my dedicated pages:
TASK 6: Choose which types of dedicated pages you will keep. These are the habits and routines that you want to perform indefinitely.
TASK 7: Create your dedicated pages.
Next comes a page dedicated to my lifelong accumulation of intentional/productive days. (I keep track of the days in which I complete all of my intended actions. My ultimate goal is to reach 6,000 before I die. Morbid? Maybe. But it works.)
Here’s my current count:
OPTIONAL TASK: Start a tally up to a number of your choosing. (This is something I do that might very well work for nobody else. Feel free to skip.)
And then, critical to my tracking, comes my daily log. (Throughout the day, log your start and stop times for your various tasks and keep notes related to where you left off, what you observed, felt, etc.)
Here’s a picture of mine:
TASK 8 (or 9): Create a daily log for today, modeled on the one above.
And most importantly…
TASK 9 (or 10): Do something other than setting up your short term journal… and log it. After all, the goal is to do stuff, not make to do stuff.
If you would like to learn more about this journaling system, you can check out my book. (It is free Tuesday, January 9 through Friday, January 12.)
