The best 5 tips to start journaling
To start journaling and make a habit of writing every day can be stressful. Many of us like the idea of writing a journal, but we all have busy lives and time is an asset we always seems to be running out of. Finding the time and energy to devote to writing a journal may seem like an unreachable achievement, but you should think of it as an investment. You have to invest some of your precious time into something that will improve and enrich your life.
I’ve five tips to help you quickly start journaling.
1) Start small
Taking abruptly a significant commitment can be intimidating. Start small, commit yourself to journal for a month or two, and only then decide if you want to make it a life lasting habit. Start writing short entries, writing just a couple of minutes every day. After some days you’ll feel the need to write longer, second this need and let the time you spend writing grow naturally.
You have to nurture this new habit as it grows day by day, without forcing it. Your first 2-minutes entries could seem too dull and short to be meaningful, but they are not intimidating at all and will be excellent training material for your writing muscles.
2) Choose a platform that you like
Make writing a journal a frictionless activity as much as you can, by choosing a platform that you like.
There are hundreds of platforms that you can use to write your journal. You can choose a dedicated app like Day One, Journey or Diaro, they are full of features and have a gorgeous user interface.
You can also choose your favorite note taking application like Evernote, Apple Note, Google Keep or OneNote.
If you are more a pen & paper person, buy a beautiful notebook and use your favorite pen, it’ll help to make your writing time a pleasant experience.
Personally, when I started journaling, I used Journey (and have fallen in love with Markdown since then) for some months. I also tried Diaro, but I ended up using Evernote because it’s my delocalized memory and it makes sense to have also my journal there.
3) Use the writing style that suits you best
Your journal doesn’t need to be a well-written autobiography. Choose the writing style that suits you best instead.
It can be a stream of consciousness or a bullet list of short annotations. You can write one long entry at the end (or beginning) of the day or a series of shorter entries during the day.
Your journal can be a visual diary built with pictures, taken with your smartphone during the day, and some comments. You can even create a mind map, or draw an infographic, to visually summarize your day.
Use your talents to make it personal and unique; thanks also to current technology, the options are limitless.
4) Use a template
If the blank page scares you, use a template!
You can find a lot of them online, and you can create a mix-and-match template or create your own from scratch.
Write down which are the most important things to remember of a day, in your opinion.
For example:
What I’ve accomplished today
What I’m happy for
What made me laugh
What I’ve learned
Choose what is important to you, what you want to remember when you’ll read your journal some years in the future. It’s your journal, your life, choose whatever you treasure the most.
If your problem is to start writing, if a little inspiration is all you need, you can use just a prompt instead of a list of questions.
You can write a list of prompts and choose one each day. Again, you can find a lot of ideas online. The editors of ** Wordpress.com ** even wrote a document of prompts specifically designed for each day of the year.
5) Don’t make it overstressful
Writing a journal should be a pleasant experience, a gift from you to your future self. Take it easy, don’t stress yourself over it.
If you miss a day, it’s not a big deal, you can make up the next day… or not. You are entitled to have gaps in your journal.
If you don’t have much to write, it’s OK! You don’t have to write a minimum number of words. Follow your mood, one day you can be more or less chatty than the following, let this be mirrored in the way you write in your journal.
Remember: you don’t have obligations, it’s all up to you. How, how much and when you write your journal is only for you. You don’t have to prove anything, and nobody can judge you.