5 Ways to Journal (And Why You Should)

journaling is a great practice and one of the reasons that I love it so much is that it makes no distinction between The Young and the old or the rich and the poor really journaling is for absolutely anybody but when I've talked about journaling before with people whether it's through YouTube or in my personal life some people just say that they were never able to get the Habit to stick and some people have even told me that they find it a bit intimidating to get started so I'm going to talk about some of the benefits

of journaling and there really are a lot of them and five different ways you could get started with journaling or if you're someone who's kind of fallen out of the Habit these would be five ways to sort of restart that journaling habit so there's this book called daily rituals by amazing Curry it's a really great book I encourage you to read it in that book Curry profiles maybe about 150 artists or writers composers philosophers just people we would think of as generally pretty creative people but it only rates about a page and a half about

each one of them and his entire focus is on their daily routines and one thing I noticed when I was reading that book is that Curry actually doesn't mention whether or not they kept to journal he'll talk about whether they wrote on a daily basis but he doesn't necessarily say that they're writing in a journal so I decided to do a little bit of my own digging so I went through the list of names and would just search for whether or not they kept a diary or a journal and I found that almost every person

that Curry profiled did actually keep a journal now there were a few notable exceptions to that one of them that really stood out to me was Jane Austen which I figured was like a real pity and this was true for not just the writers and you might think writers are more keen on this but also for composers so he talks about Beethoven and Mozart both Beethoven and Mozart they kept a journal so it just seems like there's this thread running throughout history that very creative intellectual reflective people they kept a journal and when I was

trying to think about why so many of these people keep journals I I kind of stumbled on what I think are three main reasons why they would do that so one most of these people were also people of routine so they would have a daily routine that they tried their best to stick to and journaling really can be a nice Center of a daily routine that's definitely how I've ended up using it the second reason I came up with was that journaling allows us to process our thoughts in a judgment-free environment so much of what

these people would do ended up being for public consumption so having a journal can almost be like a little Safe Haven this allows us to explore ideas more freely maybe even say things that we would never say in public but we need to sort of work through those ideas to see if they are good or bad and then third I think that there's something really nice about just having a sort of predefined space in your life where you think about yourself just having that time where you're allowed to think about yourself I think can be

rather psychologically powerful and while those are explanations that I came up with to explain possibly why so many people in history have kept journals the truth is all of those benefits are available to us we can take part in what's frankly like an ancient practice by buying a notepad and getting a pin now if you're actually looking to get started journaling you might just have this question which is like where do I begin where do I start and so that's why I came up with this list of five methods that you might want to try

in order to just get started journaling so the first method of journaling I'd like to recommend to you is something that I just call free writing now free writing really in my mind is kind of like the most pure form of journaling because like what is journaling right journaling is basically just taking your thoughts and then putting them down on a page and when I'm free writing that's all I'm doing I'm not thinking about structure I'm not thinking about a goal that I want to accomplish I'm just sitting down and I'm writing now this is

actually the style of journaling that I do most often and I think that I'm able to do this because I enjoy the act of writing quite a bit and I usually don't have to struggle to find things to say in fact I would say that my biggest challenge as a writer is filtering out all of the junk and finding like that tiny little bit of good stuff in what I write free writing is a way of me sort of like getting all my thoughts out onto a page and then later on I can go back

I can look for the good stuff I can expand on that maybe in more formal writing but I also know that lots of people who are getting starting journaling they can feel a little intimidated by the blank page and it's a little bit harder for them to just sit down and start writing and that's why I'll talk about those other methods in just a moment I would say that free writing probably maximizes creativity it's probably just the thing that lets you be as creative as possible in your journaling as quickly as possible but it does

mean that you give up on any kind of like organization because your thoughts aren't structured in any particular way and it can be really hard to go and find the good stuff again so it's like a very labor intensive form of journaling especially if you want to go back and re-read your thoughts I tend to find that that labor is usually fruitful for me I like to make things a little harder for myself in my writing practice but it's just something to keep in mind if you're looking for the right thing for you now there's

a practice that's really related to free writing that's called morning Pages this is not something that I came up with in fact you can find a description and guide in Julia Cameron's the artist way Cameron suggests that every single morning the first thing you do is write three pages in longhand stream of Consciousness writing the idea for Cameron is to get away from what she calls the sensor which is that judgmental voice that some of us have in our head which is so critical at the beginning of the creative process that it actually stops us

from being able to create at all now given all of this it's probably not surprising that this method of journaling was described in a book that's essentially a self-help guide for writers and artists who are struggling with burnout or some kind of writers or creators block because of that I'm not sure morning pages is like really essential for everybody and I don't know how widely I would recommend it but if you are an artist or a writer who's really struggling with burnout or creators block then maybe consider trying this out and I'll say that every

time I have talked about journaling on this channel people have come into the comments and mentioned how useful morning Pages have been for them if you're looking for something that's less of a Daily Commitment but more of a long-term thing you might want to check out the five-year Journal now some companies like hobonichi actually sell five-year journals but you could just take a normal journal and turn one into a five-year Journal if you're creative enough the idea behind a five-year Journal is that you have five entries for every date on the calendar so five for

January first five for January second and the idea is that the first year of your Journal you're filling out the first of those entries for each date and in the second year you're filling out the second and you're just gonna do that for five years now because you're filling out essentially five journals on one page you are pretty contained right you only have a little bit of space and this means you can only write a couple of sentences that's why I say it's useful for people getting started because maybe you don't have a whole page

to write or a whole three pages to write but you can probably write three to five sentences every day as long as you sort of make a habit out of it I've tried a five-year Journal before and I wasn't able to keep it up while I do make a habit of keeping a journal I do not do it every single day I probably Journal maybe five to six days a week but I take at least one day off and I hated having those blank spots in the five-year Journal I also tend to write rather long

journal entries and so that little space was just like a little too confining for me in general I think you'll see a theme on the kind of stuff that I recommend or at least that I say that I like myself which is that I don't like anything which makes me feel like I'm failing at journaling but some people like structure and like rules and if that's you then maybe try out one of these methods it's kind of impossible to make a video about journaling without talking about bullet journaling now bullet journaling is something I've tried

before and it's something I've always failed at I'm actually going to probably try it again this year as like an analog way of structuring my days but that's kind of key for me I'm thinking of it more as an analog productivity tool a way of organizing my life a little bit better and not thinking about it so much as a journal I know that you can incorporate journaling into the bullet Journal method you can do a morning reflection or an evening reflection it's all kind of in this system there's a whole book about bullet journaling

and a million YouTube videos so you could find out if you'd like for some reason that just didn't feel like real journaling to me I just wasn't able to make it work for me now Look if it works for you great no judgment keep doing what you're doing but for me I think that at best bullet journaling can be a kind of Life organization method that is a supplement to my journaling so in the end it just didn't seem like bullet journaling was for me at least as a journal now another way to journal that's

really easy if you're just getting started is to just keep a commonplace book I actually made a video about this really early on in my YouTube career and I would actually change a few things that I said in that video so so in a commonplace book is really more like a repository or collection of interesting quotes that you found or lines from songs or stray observations or little Snippets from conversations basically anything you find interesting throughout your day you just write in your commonplace book now in my previous video I suggested that if you have

a commonplace book you should keep a second journal for your deep thinking and you would kind of extract things from your commonplace book and then put them into your your sort of real journal and I think that a lot of people just complain that they don't want to carry two journals around and I get it so maybe for instance if you have a commonplace book you could use the left Page and that's where you collect things for a day and the right page is where you write down your observations or maybe do your reflecting your

synthesizing and you're actually kind of you're journaling and then you could just keep repeating that every day or you could just mix these freely absolutely no structure I would suggest you really play around with it and experiment keeping a commonplace book is such an old tradition and so I really think it would be so cool to see kind of a Resurgence of commonplace books in ordinary life I have one more method to recommend and this is a method which if someone said to me I've never journaled before how can I get started this would be

what I would suggest and it would be reading Reflections so this is especially good if you like to read already the idea is like take whatever you're reading just anything fiction non-fiction philosophy history whatever and then start your Journal by reflecting about what you read recently so I like to read at night before I go to bed and so then in the morning I would reflect on something that I read it's nice to have that that space or that distance but you could do it at the same time if you wanted what I found is

that I start with the text and I start by thinking about what I'm reading but eventually I Veer into the personal so it's not as if I'm not journaling about my personal life it's just like the text becomes kind of a springboard for me and I actually think this is a really wonderful thing if we think about the whole intellectual life and how it should relate to practical life because I don't want to be someone who's sort of totally separates my philosophical work or my intellectual work from How I Live my day-to-day life I want

them to be one integrated whole and so by starting with the text that I'm reading which are usually you know classic works of literature or philosophy or something like this but you know it could be science fiction it could be something much lighter what I'm doing is I am integrating all of it together what I read in philosophy should change how I live somehow I don't want there to be a hard and fast separation so probably the number one question I get anytime I talk about note taking or journaling or anything like that is should

I use a digital tool or an analog tool I think the answer is you have to decide that for yourself I've even made a video about one such digital tool notion which I think can be very useful for some parts of your life but I also in general have a preference for analog tools when it comes to something like journaling so I'll tell you why I prefer analog tools maybe you'll find it persuasive but really I think this is a very personal decision it's about weighing cost and benefit fits and I'm not going to tell

you what exactly you need to do I would just encourage you to be thoughtful about any use of technology in your life you should just always be thinking does this technology actually make me better off so I typically prefer to use analog tools for my writing because I find that slowing down the pace and writing by hand actually helps me out I find that I just think better a bit more clearly this way sometimes when I use screens or keyboards I feel like I can almost get my ideas out too quickly I want to slow

them down just a little bit I also just really like the experience of writing I like nice pens and good paper and sturdy notebooks and I like when you put them together and you just write and finally I like getting away from screens sometimes my full-time job is in Tech and then I'm a YouTuber and I spend a lot of time on my phone like talking to people or communicating I find that just getting away from screens is a really powerful thing to do especially in the mornings and the evenings this is a space in

my life where I'm just saying Tech cannot intrude here because of that I ultimately have decided to mostly journal in an analog style I also know that there are costs associated with that though so for instance I have no digital backups of my journals so if there were a fire or if I just misplaced things they would be lost forever and I also can't easily search through those journals but I've thought about those costs and then I've thought about the benefits of using analog methods and I've decided that for me the benefits outweigh the cost

you might come to a different conclusion but the important part is did you actually think about the costs and the benefits did you actually weigh the pros and cons a general critique I have of how we as a culture think is that we often find a digital tool or a shiny new Gadget and we think you know what I need that in my life and we uncritically adopt it just don't do that journaling is actually a very kind of intellectual and intimate experience and so only bring in a digital tool if you really think it

will make you better off I'm not here to tell you you're doing it wrong I'm just here to encourage you to think about it a little bit all right I would love to hear your thoughts about journaling do you like digital tools do you like analog tools is there a method you use for journaling that I left out of a list like this um do you hate journaling and think it's stupid maybe you could tell me all about that down in the comments too well that's all I have for you today so until next time

take care