What’s Working for Me: Journaling.
I’ve carried pocket notebooks for years, but never used them systematically. If a thought or an observation occurred to me, I’d jot it down, but that was the extent of it. Even though I carried those notebooks everywhere, they’d wear out long before I was able to fill them up with ideas.
Four months ago, thanks to several factors, I began experimenting with a much more systematic approach to journal-keeping. Nothing earth-shaking. Nothing transformative. Just a commitment to putting a page or so of handwritten notes on paper every day. The process has been one of trial and error, but I’ve settled into a system that works well for me. As I played around with approaches to note-taking, I also put a considerable amount of time into reading about how other folks have approached their own journaling processes. Given the number of other people reading and writing on this subject, I’ve decided to share the approach that I’ve developed (I’ll get into my reasons for journaling and its results in future posts).
I’m not saying it’s the best method. I’m not saying it’ll change your life. It’s just what’s working for me right now.
My journal functions simultaneously as a record-keeper, idea-book, to-do list, and planning document. As such, my system relies on five basic elements:
1. The two-pen method — Nothing fancy, just a daily rotation between two colors of ink — one day black ink, the next day blue ink, the next day black, the next day blue, and so on. I developed this technique while doing interview-heavy fieldwork in a situation where I had to accurately sort through hundreds of pages of handwritten field notes as quickly as possible. During a two-week long data-collection trip across Kenya conducting hour-long interviews 3 to 5 times a day, 5–6 days a week, I found that my beloved 5”x 8” legal pads quickly blurred into an undifferentiated mass of scribbled notes. This made it difficult to locate and reference past interview data on the fly or to easily sort out conversation sequences. By deliberately switching to a different ink color at the start of each day I could more easily navigate and make sense of my notes. These days I don’t generate nearly as much content in my journal, but it’s still nice to be able to easily see my daily output at a glance and to keep my place on the page when I’m going back over what I’ve written. I suppose I could use more than just two colors, but it’s easier to only have to keep track of two pens at a time.
2. Ideas are stars –Anything that I want to remember for later gets a new line and a star on the left margin. And I do mean anything. It could be a partially thought-out invention, an essay concept, a description of something I saw, a great quote, an odd conversation, a weird cluster of words, a silly thing my son said, or even just an incomplete notion that still needs to ferment a bit longer. I scribble a little five-point star next to each one so that it stands out when it’s time to curate the good stuff.
3. Tasks are bullets — These are the to-do items, i.e. anything that requires a follow-up action on my part. Maybe it’s a task for later today, maybe it’s a question to ask my neighbor the next time I see him, maybe it’s a topic to research when I’m having a beer at the end of the day, or maybe it’s just something around the house that I’ll need to fix later in the week. Once they’re done, I cross them off with a single line (so I can still read them). Crossing them off provides a bit of serotonin too — a feeling of accomplishment for following through on something I told myself to do.
4. The weekly review — At the end of each week I go back over the previous seven days or so to find whatever bullets I have not yet crossed off. All of the pending bullets get re-listed together on the most current page so that I can easily see what tasks still need to be done. This means that I never have to look back more than a week to find all of my incomplete or pending tasks. Once I write up the new list I cross out the older versions of the to-do items to avoid future duplication or confusion.
5. The monthly curation — At the end of each month I review all the starred items from that month and move them to a spreadsheet of ideas that I call “the stack.” I’ll write more about the stack later, but basically it’s a running excel table with entries for all of my in-development ideas: short stories, essays, recipes, song lyrics, business concepts, inventions, short films — they’re all there. New ideas come in faster than old ones get finished, but nothing drops off the list. The stack is what turns the creative content from the journal into distinct projects that can mature and develop, instead of just a random assemblage of ideas.
So, what doesn’t go in the notebook?
Work notes — More specifically, I don’t put anything directly related to any paid consulting/contract work that I do for any employers or clients. I absolutely won’t use my personal journal for that because I need to ensure that if I ever need to destroy work notes or hand them over to a colleague (e.g. if they contain proprietary or confidential information) I can do so easily without ever endangering the material from my personal journal. Instead, I always keep an auxiliary job-specific notebook on hand during the workday. And importantly, when I finish my workday, I close that notebook and walk away from it, symbolically indicating that I am free from those responsibilities until I reopen it the next morning. Generally, when I move to a new job, I permanently dispose of my work notebooks from the previous employer.
Phone numbers, grocery lists, appointments — That’s what phones are for these days. I may jot a phone number down if I can’t get into my phone right away, or I may make a bullet-note to remind myself of an individual item that I need to obtain, but in the interests of consistency, I store shopping lists and calendar items on cloud-based platforms that I share with my wife to facilitate household coordination.
And that’s the system...
It took about a month of trial and error to dial it in, but it really hasn’t changed in the several months since then. What works for me may not work for you, but what works for you might just work for me, so feel free to share your ideas as well!
