- Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Articles
- Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Article
- Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Entries
- Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Impact Factor
Recently, American film director Robert Rodriguez appeared on The Tim Ferriss Show and explained why and how he journals.
And with technology these days, it's so much easier to maintain a digital journal for your life's record, both good and bad. For digital journaling, we don't think there's an app that's better for the job than Day One. I've been using Day One for years, ever since its inception in 2011, and it's just gotten better and better. Download: Day One. Voice recording? Using an app like Day One or Journey? Sending an email to yourself? Using a simple text editor? Pick whatever format has the least friction to get those answers out of your head. Tip #3 — Journal rain or shine This is the one where most people fail. Journal when you’re sick, when your head hurts, when you’re on vacation.
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Grand total 5 0 – create invoices and estimates will. This piqued my interest.
Like many people, I’ve always wanted to journal daily, but like most people, I’ve struggled with consistency.
This wasn’t because I lacked the self-discipline to write; it’s because I didn’t know what to write about. I wasn’t a fan of writing stream-of-conscious thought; I wanted consistency in my writing…
I wanted a template.
So, I did what most people do: I turned to Google. I varied my search terms, but my results left me less than satisfied.
Swift sprite alpine 4 2020. When I wasn’t met with “listicles” like, “7 Ways to Keep a Journal”, or encouraged to, “Just try it”, I was left with little to go on in terms of journaling templates.
I was left with one option: to draft my own journaling template.
Here’s what I came up with.
Free Download: Get immediate access to my free Evernote journaling templates so you never miss a day again.
I currently journal once in the morning and once in the evening, and since using a journaling template, I’ve been consistent. I use Evernote to record my entries and use two tags: “Planner” for my morning journal and “Journal” for my evening Journal.
This is what my morning journal looks like:
Note: “TK” stands for “to come”. [1]
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Every morning, I copy and paste the above template into a new note, date it and answer the following three questions:
1. “I am grateful for…” According to Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, writing down three new things that you’re grateful for, for 21 days in a row, can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to work more optimistically and more successfully. [2]
2. “What would make today great?” I “borrowed” this from The Five-Minute Journal. Here, I write my five most important tasks for the day. This helps me distinguish the vital few tasks from the trivial many, and reminds me that only a few things really matter and I can’t do everything. [3]
3. “What’s ONE Thing I must accomplish today?” This is my focusing question. This, as Gary Keller argues in his book, The ONE Thing, is the best approach to getting what you want. If you want to achieve extraordinary results, you need to narrow your focus and allow what matters most to drive your day.
In the evening, my journal is more thorough:
This is an opportunity to review my day and improve what is already working. I have an alarm on my phone to trigger my journaling habit, and every evening, at 21:00, before shutting down my laptop for the day, I answer seven questions:
1. “What did I achieve today?” This question helps me identify whether I actually achieved what I set out to accomplish in the morning, or if I got sidetracked. One lesson I’ve learned from answering this question is it’s easy to overestimate what you think you can achieve in a day, but I remind myself it’s not what you achieve in a day, it’s what you achieve eventually. This is what really matters.
2. “What lessons did I learn?” This is my favourite question to answer. This is where you journal your “Aha!” moments. Answers can range from personal, “I learned how to say no to dessert”, to skill-based, “I learned how to remove plosives in an audio recording using Audacity”. The more thorough you are, here, the more you can return to it again and again and learn from it.
3. “What am I thankful for right now?” This is similar to Question #1 in my morning journal but with a rather unorthodox twist: I thank my problems and ask myself what’s great about them. This is an exercise I learned from Anthony Robbins in his book, Awaken the Giant Within and it’s called “The Problem Solving Question”.
Last week, for example, I accidently deleted an audio recording I had made. “What is great about this problem?” I asked myself. “Nothing!” I replied. But when I meditated on it, when I really thought about it, I realised my problem was great because I could make an improvement on the original. As Laura Ingalls Wilder writes, “There is good in everything, if only we look for it.”
4. “How am I feeling right now?” This is an opportunity for me to be vulnerable, to let my guard down, to be open without censoring myself. I’m generally pretty happy, but if I’m feeling a negative emotion, I’ll identify the cause by using a why drill. I’ll ask myself why I’m feeling the emotion, in question, five times. This helps me be at the cause, rather than the effect of my concern.
5. “What did I read today?” This pertains to any blog posts I clipped and/or books I’m reading. This helps me track my weekly goal of reading a book a week. [4]
6.“What are 3 amazing things that happened today?” I think it’s important to bookend your day by focusing on your “small wins.” “I said no to a dessert.” “I resisted the urge to give into temptation.” “I didn’t sleep in.” “I achieved my most important task.” … These tiny advantages build forward momentum and remind us that bigger achievements are within reach.
7. “How could I have made today better?” Many of us, when dissatisfied with our day, prefer to write it off, to move past it as quickly and quietly as possible. But by asking yourself how you could have made the day better, you’re forcing your brain to look for improvements. Your day may have been stressful, but don’t write it off until you’ve learned something from it. Look for ONE Thing you can do, either prevent it from happening again or to help you deal with it more effectively.
Conclusion
Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Articles
This has been a departure from my usual writing style, but I wanted to write something personal, and give you an insight into how I journal and what I’m learning from it.
I consider it to be one of the best approaches to understanding your own psychology and documenting the changes you’re making in your life.
You might argue it’s not for you, but I invite you to try, using my template as a model, before disregarding it completely.
Free Download: Get immediate access to my free Evernote journaling templates so you never miss a day again.
Footnotes
[1] This is a writing lesson I learned from Neil Strauss in his Creative Live interview with Tim Ferriss. You can watch it on YouTube here.[2] Shawn Achor talks about the research-backed benefits of journaling in his entertaining TEDx talk, The Happy Secret to Better Work. You can read my key takeaways here.[3] This is a lesson I learnt from Greg McKeown in his wonderful book, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. You can read my Kindle notes and highlights here.[4] I explain my whole approach to reading in this article: How to Read a Book a Week (It’s a Lot Easier Than You Think).
Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Article
Unbound 1 1 6 – a faster simpler photo manager. Day One for iOS and Mac (affiliate links) is one of my favorite apps, even though I may not use it every single day. With 2.0’s introduction of support for multiple journals, though, I’ve found a number of new uses for it beyond personal journaling and reflection.
Note: If you need help with the core questions of why and how to journal for yourself, Day One has a pretty good series on its blog.
Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Entries
As for what to do with the new multiple journal support, I’ll share a couple of my own cases and a few ideas below that you can use as inspiration. While other apps may cover some or all of these tasks for you, mixing these with Day One’s other features—attaching locations to entries, automation with IF, multiple photos per entry, plotting entry dates on a scrolling calendar, and more—make it a compelling option for saving and looking back on all sorts of things:
- Social journal – Create a new journal specifically for saving certain kinds of activity on across all your social media accounts (mine is simply called “Social”). With Day One’s new, dedicated channel on IF, you can automatically save things like favorited tweets, Facebook photos you’re tagged in, liked videos on YouTube, Instagram photos, you like, and much more. You can also use Day One’s powerful app extension to cover that last mile of stuff you don’t want to automate. This is one of my favorite uses of Day One’s journals, especially after my previous tool for this, Favs, seems to be abandoned.
- Work journal – Some people don’t like to mix work and personal lives, so this is a good way to separate your journaling and reflection for work purposes.
- #Winning journal – If you’re like me, and sometimes you have a hard time remembering how far you’ve come in terms of personal or professional growth, a journal for cataloging milestones and other wins could go a long way. This could be instead of, or in addition to, a Work journal, but the idea is to set rules or goals for what to catalog here. Things like finishing a big project, receiving a compliment, getting a new client, and overcoming a personal fear or challenge are all good ideas.
- Photo a day – Maybe you want to build and explore your photography habit, or maybe you just need a place to keep your self portrait progression shots somewhere besides your Photos app. A dedicated Day One journal could be great for this, especially if you travel and want to record the location of your shots.
- Quote journal – I like saving quotes, and for a couple years now I’ve used the excellent Quotebook from Lickability. But recently I realized I sometimes post quotes to services like Tumblr, and I wanted an easy way to collect those too. I created a new Day One journal, hooked up a couple recipes in IF (such as “if I post a quote to Tumblr, add it to X journal in Day One”). I like that I can pull in these quotes from other places, in addition to manually adding them, and they’ll sync to all my devices, including my Mac.
Additions:
Day One 2 0 3 – Maintain A Daily Journal Impact Factor
- Booze journal – Another place where attaching places and locations, as well as tags, can be real handy for cataloging the beer, wine, and spirits you try and enjoy. Thanks Jay Ray.
That’s all I have for now. If you have some Day One journal that might be good fits here, let me know on Facebook and Twitter.