Journaling ≠ “Dear Diary…”

{3 different ways to keep a journal}

I have kept a private journal since I was eight years old. Sometime I wrote because I wanted to and sometimes I wrote because someone else told me I should — whether my mom or some guru online.

Over the years I have experimented with various methods. Here are three I recommend trying:

One line a day

Some people tell themselves, “I only have to write one line,” and then write more if they want to. They let “one line a day” be a minimum, a starting point.

I treat it as an exercise in brevity. I set aside a single page in my bullet journal, number it with the days of the month, and limit myself to writing one line to sum up or highlight one thing about my day.

Looking back over these month-at-a-glance pages is interesting. The simple summaries trigger more detailed memories.

Sometimes I take note of mundane things that turn out to be more memorable than expected. In May 2017, for example, I noted feeling strangely tired and a little sick to my stomach days before learning I was pregnant!

Morning pages

Julia Cameron coined the term morning pages, but the concept is quite basic: fill three hand-written pages with whatever…