Smart Journaling Is a Tool You Can’t Ignore

You have your notebook, now what? If you tried to journal but couldn’t get into it or didn’t see the benefits, you might not have found the type of journaling that suits you. Read on.

Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash

A disclaimer first: I’ll be talking about journaling assuming we are both doing it in a notebook. You might prefer doing it on an electronic device and that’s fine. I just don’t know how that works. There is no right or wrong way of doing it. I write in notebooks because I love the physical act of writing. I also love stationery. Handling notebooks makes me happy and I find it easier to refer back to something I wrote in them. It works better for me. Choose what works for you.

The Mind Sweep

Although the expression comes from David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, I started doing them after reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, who, herself, got the idea from Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, published in the 1930s. When an idea has been around for a long time, you know it’s a good one.

I write things down on the page so it’s out of my mind and I try to seep every corner of it so that those thoughts are either analyzed, recorded or organized.

For a long time, I wrote to just express what was on my mind and especially what was weighing me down. I really needed to get…