Today is a special day for me. A minor anniversary. Today marks three years of journalling every single day. It’s an easy date to keep track of :).
It’s a nice habit. One part of that, not even related to what I write in my journal is simply that it is a ritual. It is the last thing I do before bed. It caps off my day. And while it’s not always completely effective, it can be a helpful thing to offload thoughts I’m perseverating on before I try to sleep.
It took a long time to make it a habit. I was very stop-and-start about journalling for years. The first half of my first journal spans the end of 2014 to mid 2022. The second half of that notebook covers five months. There’s a lesson here. Consistency makes a big difference. A little bit every day adds up faster than it seems.
Part of how I made the habit stick was by really dropping all standards and ideas of what a journal entry “should” be. I don’t do a bullet journal or any other system. I just write a little about what happened each day. I have had days where I only wrote a single sentence: “I was very busy” or “worked a lot.” That counts. That’s good enough.
I do wonder sometimes how much it is really a journal versus just a logbook. I only tend to write about the events that happened in the day, and at a high level. There’s not usually much of my thoughts and feelings. In recent months, when I write down an opinion I have about anything, it’s usually here. I don’t think of this blog as a journal, but it is certainly journalish. It is not a deliberate journal, but there is overlap.
I don’t write it for anyone but me. I don’t write this blog for anyone but me either, but this is to an even greater degree. I don’t even write it for the me who is writing it. I write it for a future self. I try to use this thought as encouragement not to worry too much about making the entries interesting or novel. I do not know, after all, what I will find interesting years from now. That’s easier said than done. It’s very difficult to convice yourself that something is worth writing if it does not seem interesting right at that moment.
I journal by hand, with pen and paper. My go to journals are Leuchtturm 1917 hardcover A5 notebooks. I’ve got a nice stack of them at this point—it’s been satisfying watching that build up. It also has a stronger feeling of being a record of history that way. I can much more easily imagine these physical objects outlasting me than some file on my computer1.
Do you keep a journal? Is your blog part of it? Do you write on paper or are you all in on digital? I"d love to hear all about how you journal.
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I should say that the physical journals aren’t all that much less fragile than a hard drive. I like writing with fancy and colorful inks, which are often not at all waterproof. You could wipe out most of what I’ve written in them with a single glass of water. ↩︎