Benefits of Journaling

• When you keep a journal, you can look back on important life events to read about how you felt at the time. You may also be able to learn from these past experiences.
• Writing about traumatic events results in physical and psychological health benefits. Journaling focuses on understanding traumatic events and makes people see these events with an extra level of clarity.

Start your daily journal off on the right foot by scheduling your writing for a set time every day.

• If you find your mind is most active in the morning, wake up 15 to 20 minutes earlier and jot down your thoughts then.
• If you prefer to record everything after the day is over, then make it an evening activity before you go to bed.

• Journaling can be used to sort through turbulent emotions and to discover hidden lessons from your experience.
• Art journaling: using mixed media can help you express yourself in refreshing and unusual ways.
• Journals can help you reflect. Journaling is a method of allowing the light of understanding and compassion to shine on your past.

• Start writing about where you are in your life at this moment. Describe your living situation, your work, and your relationships.
• Don’t edit your thoughts or feelings and don’t correct your grammar. Don’t censor your thoughts.
• If there’s something you are struggling with or an event that’s disturbing you, write about it in the third person.

• Recording your thoughts in a medium outside your own head helps your mind to become quieter: It stops returning to the same worn-out mental loops over and over. 
• When you recount and reflect upon your thoughts and experiences you are, in effect, telling your own story. Journaling helps us clarify, edit, and find new meaning in these narratives.

It serves as a tool for identifying what you should prioritize on a daily basis, and what you should let go of. And it also gives you a record of the progress you’ve made toward your goals to keep you motivated.

1. Get a Journal and Writing Utensils
2. Start an Index Page: The backbone of your BuJo system, like a table of contents in a book
3. Create Logs - places where you can brain-dump tasks, projects, goals
4. Pick Signifiers: Many people use bullets for lists of tasks, circles for events, and dashes for notes. 
5. Document Items with Collections: Collections are running lists and anything you want to remember for later(like blog topics, books you want to read etc.)

• A future log helps you keep track of items that aren’t yet on your immediate radar.
• Monthly logs include things like calendars and categorized goal lists for the next 30 days.
• Daily logs may includes entries of to-dos, meetings, and reminders.

"Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them."

• Increases focus;
• Deeper level of learning, order, action, and release;
• Holding thoughts still so they can be changed and integrated;
• Releasing pent-up thoughts and emotions;
• Empowerment;
• Bridging inner thinking with outer events;
• Detaching and letting go of the past;
• Allowing you to re-experience the past with today’s adult mind.

While many people recommend journaling in a physical notebook to give your brain a break from screens, if you’re having a hard time keeping up that practice, you can try using an app that you can whip out when you have an extra moment in the day.

Feel free to have your journal as disjointed as you want.

Leo Babatua of ZenHabits says he only writes his journal in bullet points; just three to six per day. By making it this easy, he says it’s much more attainable for him to keep it up.

Using journaling solely as an outlet for discharging emotions may suck the insight right out of the experience.

The benefits of expressive writing only emerge when we write about both the factual and the emotional aspects of the events we’re describing—neither on its own is effective in producing insight.

To ensure maximum benefits, it’s probably best that you don’t write every day in your journal. 

People should not write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of cycle of self-pity. But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important

• Haruki Murakami was born in 1949 in Kyoto, and instead of moving into a corporate career, he opened a jazz club in Tokyo.
• A few years later, at a baseball stadium, it occurred to him that he could write a novel. That led to Hear the Wind Sing (1979), which won him a new writers' prize.
• He was more like a  black sheep in the Japanese literary world, partly because his books were too American-like.
• Regardless of his critics, his commercial success continued to grow, hitting a high point in 1987 with Norwegian Wood, which sold 3,5m copies within a year of publication.

Haruki Murakami began to perfect the daily writing routine for which he is now as famous as for any single novel. He rises at 4 am to write for five or six hours, producing ten pages a day before a run of about six miles, and maybe a swim.

He believes that he has to be strong physically in order to write strong things.

These are the most pressing tasks we'll likely get to this week.  When we do fire-fighting, it's all relating to stuff in this quadrant.

These are the things that matter in the long-term but will offer no concrete benefits right now or even this year. They are things we know we need to get to but probably will push off.