The Beauty of Journaling

Life is hard. With a seemingly endless list of things to do and a never ending need to aggressively prioritize it is more important than ever to find ways to effectively plan and manage your time. This is especially true for those of us looking to amplify our impact on the world around us whether that means building the next Fortune 100 company or supporting our community through volunteer work. There are certainly a plethora of tools and apps out there promising greater efficiency and time maximization but I have found that nothing quite beats the old fashioned journal. There is just something about putting a pen to paper that makes everything just click. By the end of this article I will have shared why I recommend everyone keeps a journal (or two)!

Enhances Your Clarity of Thought

With so many different things happening all at once it can seem impossibly hard to keep track of our thoughts. While I certainly still have issues teasing out what I am truly thinking there is nothing quite as cathartic as transferring all of the noise in my brain onto a page. This can be further refined by then taking a break (i.e. grabbing some more coffee) and then going back to read what you have written down.

I often feel at least a little embarrassed about how scattered my thoughts appear once they are written down but that is all a part of the process.

From there, reading through what you have written can help you make sense of all the thoughts racing through your head. I have found this to be particularly helpful when faced with two seemingly great actions I can take. After writing everything down, reflecting, and then writing out a summarized thought it becomes significantly easier to make the “right” choice.

Drives Your Efficiency

People don't often associate “old school” writing with efficiency. In fact, quite the opposite. With a variety of tools such as speech to text it could reasonably be argued that writing by hand is incredibly inefficient. However, there have been a bunch of studies (such as this one) that highlight the benefits of physically writing something down. Not only is it arguably quicker to write a sentence than it is to type it out, it helps this thought stick in your brain better. The simple act of writing in a physical way has significantly benefited me and my ability to remember ideas better.

Another important benefit of this is the fact that we never need to worry about the battery running out in the middle of an important conversation. I will often use a journal to take notes while in an important meeting or when having a conversation with a peer that I wish to remember. When using electronic methods to record notes there is always the risk that the battery may die or the save may fail. The biggest question around all of this is how many notebooks should you keep to maximize efficiency?

While this is certainly dependent on who you are asking we will be posting a discussion post in the future to see how many notebooks people like to keep and what they use them for (as a spoiler, I personally I am in the one master notebook camp).

Supports Your Personal Organization

By keeping a physical notebook it is easy to keep track of where your notes are and what specifics you are talking about in each notebook. In terms of tracking, there are a variety of methods out there to keep track of tasks and duties that are discussed greatly around the internet. I have always found a bunch of great resources in the journaling subreddits of Reddit and would highly recommend everyone check those groups out. We will not discuss the methods for tracking your tasks here but we do plan to discuss this in more detail at a later date.

With respect to what you are recording in each notebook, this is a key attribute that has been very beneficial to me personally on my journaling journey. As I have shared before, I am very much in the one notebook at a time camp so I always have a chronological record of what is going on in my life at any given time. This has proven to be incredibly valuable as I am able to “jump” to any point in my past and see what I was doing (as well as how I was doing) both personally and professionally. That being said, there is a case to be made for having multiple journals to cover different aspects of your life but this is very much a personal preference.

Finally, journaling is simply a fun thing to do. The act of writing is a pure creative expression and can be both therapeutic as well as incredibly insightful. We will often face significant pressures from the outside world so being able to have a safe, secure, and personal place to write has never been more important. In an increasingly digital world, the benefits of writing in a journal are increasingly precious.