Journal more and journal systematically

Dear Young Tim,

Thanks so much for your patience as I get these notes to you, albeit with delay. The last many months have been trying, to say the least.

Problems

During this time of adversity, I’m reminded that much of adulthood is about trying to rekindle and maintain the enjoyable from your childhood, while still fulfilling your present responsibilities. Journaling—writing one’s subjective thoughts and feelings— is one such enjoyable practice from my youth that still pays dividends.

The most general summary is that life is full of hard times. This includes hardships in one’s personal, professional, familial, social, and romantic life. Considering worldwide as opposed to individualistic concerns, our hardships also include the global Covid-19 pandemic and economic recession that are still raging as well. None of this even begins to address the fact that tons of people around the world and in the United States live harsher lives than myself. Under such conditions, one may experience many distressed thoughts. Indeed, without a management system, one may find oneself drowning in a deluge of thoughts and emotions.

(Partial) Solutions

In such contexts, journaling has long been one way for me to capture my steady stream of ideas and inner monologues. For instance, in high school, I used my running logs to record not just what workouts I ran but also whatever I thought about while running. In graduate school, I turned to using a research journal that housed my thoughts and feelings on potential research topics. After school, I’ve returned to journaling, now about the full range of concerns in my life, from research to home repairs and everything in between.

Young Tim, this third wave of journaling is different from the first two. It’s more all-encompassing. All topics are fair game for journaling. It’s more systematic. I use self-determined triggers for some journaling activities. I use templates and prompts for some journaling activities. I organize my journals, by more than just chronological order. While these practices certainly entail additional effort, the benefits have been worth far more than the costs.

For instance, the immediate benefits I’ve enjoyed include

  • greater self-respect as I acknowledge, fully engage with,
    and record my thoughts and feelings for all topics as opposed to only a select few.
  • deeper thinking, more regularly, as I complete pre-planned templates
    (e.g. for decision records).
    These templates inspire further thought as they guide me
    to answer questions I otherwise may forget / neglect to ask.
  • better guidance of my thoughts via broadening questions,
    especially when emotionally flustered.
    E.g., I took a conversations course that posited that
    the one who most guides a conversation is the one asking the questions,
    not the one doing the answering and making statements.
    With question prompts coming from cognitive behavioral therapy,
    I’ve been frequently able to direct my thinking to more logical, less catastrophized, and less distorted ends, rather than being merely subject to them.
  • increased comfort from always being able to talk with oneself on the page,
    especially when one cannot talk with others in the moment.

Implementation

Procedures

So how have I garnered these benefits? At a high level, I adopted the following system.

First, I take short, on-the-fly notes about my thoughts, in real-time. These are the thoughts that arise in a ‘disrupting’ manner— thoughts that are not focused the specific task you are doing. Such on-the-fly notes are typically (though not always) unstructured.

Secondly, I use structured notes of sundry kinds. These notes are typically of short to medium length. That is, a few sentences to a few paragraphs. These might be the notes that correspond to ‘disputing a belief with evidence’ in cognitive behavioral therapy, or the decision templates utilized in architecture decision records.

Lastly, I use unstructured notes to capture medium to long reflections and thoughts. These notes are typically answers to single question prompts, or they are complex, spontaneous thoughts, born of long-running hyperfocus on a particular topic. Examples here may be one-time questions that ask me to recount particular meaningful events from my past / childhood.

Between these three types of notes, I have been/felt able to capture all of the thoughts I desire.

Tooling

Okay, let’s get beyond the high level description. How do I actually do this?

Fundamentally, I journal digitally using git repositories to store the three types of journaling notes. I store the on-the-fly notes in json files (i.e., ‘issues’) using git-bug. I store the structured and unstructured notes in markdown in the repositories using git as well. Software such as nb and kb are additionally useful for storing and managing the markdown notes in the repository. They provide searching, linking, and tagging functionality.

Beyond the software tools I use to facilitate journaling, I also draw from external information resources as well. For instance, I often fill in structured journaling notes by answering cognitive behavioral therapy questions for identifying emotional and behavioral consequences of one’s beliefs. Similarly, I use templates from resources such as y-statements and architecture decision records to journal my thoughts about decisions that I have to make. Lastly, I make liberal use of writing, journaling, and reflecting prompts that I find online. These prompts often guide my unstructured journaling notes.

Conclusion

Young Tim, if you engage in such journaling practices consistently, over a long period of time, then in addition to the immediate benefits described above, you should also gain longer-term benefits. Your anxiety should decrease as you live a life where you capture rather than lose most thoughts, and your anxiety no longer needs to keep track of important facts, assessments, and deadlines. You should also have joys and pleasant surprises from looking back at your past thoughts, being delighted as interesting ideas reappear over time and form new connections as you live through new experiences. Lastly, you should materially benefit from trend spotting and insight / hypothesis generation. With your thoughts preserved for future review, you should increasingly be able to spot trends in your thinking and experience: patterns which you can leverage or change to achieve the state of life that you desire.

So without further ado, please, go forth and journal–a lot!