Latest Update: Added a post from Working On Me on how to restart when you’ve stopped journaling.
Thinking of starting a journal? It’s a popular activity now, particularly among women, to help make sense of life by keeping a written record of thoughts, hopes and dreams. Here are a few tips and links:
Benefits of Journalling
- The main benefit of keeping a journal is the same as GTD’s - it’s getting stuff out of your head and onto paper.
- When keeping a journal you are your own audience, so your writing can be as wild and free as you wish. You don’t even have to write. You can draw, or collage… you call the shots.
- It’s a record of your life and your thoughts.
- You decide who gets to see it.
- You can swear as much as you like.
How to Start
- Get a nice notebook, Moleskines are a favourite here, but there are loads of great notebooks out there to choose from. Depends on what size you want, whether it needs to be pocketable, or whether you’d like to be able to do other stuff in it too, like paint.
- Start on an occasion, like a birthday, or a wedding, or a birth - I started my first journal on New Year’s Day, 2005. Starting on a new year is a good chance to review the year gone by and write about your hopes and dreams for the future.
How to Restart
- If you’ve let your journal go unused for a while, Working On Me has a great tip for getting started again - not just ignoring the gap, but not trying to jump in and cover it all either.
Other Tips
- Use whatever feels most comfortable at the time - pen, pencil, felt tip, eyeliner…
- Have you written something you’d be mortified with embarrassment about if anyone else saw it? Paint over it! Get out the markers and scribble over it. Turn it into a piece of art.
Handy Links
- Two Quick Journalling Techniques and a Hack - a couple of interesting new tricks to try and advice on how to fit it into a DIY Planner.
- Creative Journalling - helping you to turn your journal into your personal creative playground.
- The embodiment project 2007 - designed to inspire participants to contribute to their journal every day of 2007.
- innowen, journalling expert at DIY Planner, has a page on her own site on crafting a Tarot Journal
- Emberlexi has uploaded pages from her journal onto Flickr - some lovely examples of the possibilities of creative journalling.
- innowen’s Book of Countings a really nice way of actually counting your blessings and reminding yourself of the times when you’re a blessing to others. Thanks, innowen!
- Doug is quite literally writing the book on paper-based productivity, and he’s posted a draft of the first chapter on D*I*Y Planner - an introduction to journalling.
- innowen’s posts on Sketch Journalling, and Journalling Prompts.
- A good page about illustrated journalling
- An article explaining how journalling can help your health
- A collection of articles on journalling
- Personal Journaling Magazine
- DIY Planner’s Journalling Section
- Ninth Wave Designs on using a Moleskine Diary
- Illustrated Journeys thread on MetaFilter - starting with Kathrin2305’s amazing journals, but with lots more links in the comments.
In my journal…
I’ve recently started journaling again - using an A4 landscape Snowdon Cartridge “Fat Pad”. So far the book contains dip pen sketches, watercolour patterns, writing and a bit of collage. It’s a big colourful mess of a book, but it’s so much fun! Photos may come when I have a page I feel like sharing…
What’s in your journal?
Got pictures of your journal you’d like to share? Post links to your photos here in the comments.
Happy journaling!
Contrarian
I’ve used both paper and digital journals and I found that I liked using digital journals better. I’m not sure I always like the online format, like Livejournal or Blogger for journaling, as I find when I use those types of publishing tools, I stop journaling and I start pontificating. To that end, I use a plain old notepad file and plain text.
That was the old days.
Now, I think a little more graphically than I used to, and I find that keeping a paper journal might be more useful to me, as I’ll use it for both drawings and text.
Why do I journal? To vent usually. Because anything else I do usually ends up as an illustration or a blog post.
[chrisbrogan.com]![[chrisbrogan.com]](http://feeds.feedburner.com/chrisbrogandotcom.gif)
Yeah, I vent too
I’ve always preferred the immediacy of scribbling my thoughts directly down onto paper - captures the mood at the time a lot better than hammering away at a keyboard can.
Sam Harris (Coming April ‘06 - Re-branding!) Creative Wanderer and Wonderer You’ll have to excuse me, it’s the hormones.
Sometimes you just need to unplug, man
I found that out a few months ago. It seemed like my online presence was consuming so much of my time, and I missed the privacy of having a written journal. So I got one from Half Price Books, and I’ve been using it for nearly everything I need to write down now.
I’ve enjoyed going back and reading journals I have from long ago.
I've been keeping a written journal forever
Well…since I was 10. I just have to write. I love the web, but journals are so touchy-feely and help me focus better than all this typing on a screen. I know exactly what you mean about the privacy of a written journal Dan! I have had real trouble with a blog because the thought of other people reading my personal thoughts is very strange to me. Maybe I will get more used to it and be able to adjust my writing from diary to web. But I always feel like I am stilted when I write in a web journal because I am so used to letting it all hang out in my written diaries and I know I can’t do that online. Well I could, but god you’d be scared. LOL!
I lost almost all of my journals in a flood at my house a few years ago, but when I used to read them it was interesting to see how things have changed from 10 to now! Whoa - a lotta years. :)
I keep a digital blog but
I keep a digital blog but not online, that would be too scary. My mind is pretty messy and I can’t write fast enough to get all my thoughts down before I forget them, so I prefer to type. You can also re-arrange things you’ve typed, and correct them. However reading about paper journals sounds so interesting I really want to have a go, it sounds like a lot of fun. I might try just doing a words-free journal to compliment the digital one, with just pictures and so on. It’ll take me months to find the right book to do it all in first though…
I recommend it...
…even if it’s just for an excuse to play with paints, crayons and PVA glue. :)
(PS - hi there, long time no see etc etc)
Sam Randall
Ain’t Life Grand?
Yes I have a bit of a thing
Yes I have a bit of a thing for craft shops and stationery and stuff, so it would be a good excuse to buy lots of bits and pieces… I could even have a box to keep it all. I’m quite excited about the whole thing now. Hi to you too, it is nice to see you again, been bending your other half’s ear about random things. Perhaps see you on msn or something?
Random things?
You mean you managed to get some conversation out of him that wasn’t about pens? Congratulations! :)
Sam Randall
Ain’t Life Grand?
Journaling
I started keeping a paper journal in 1991 when in the midst of a traumatic set of experiences. My journal was my only outlet. I rarely miss a day now. I have to say there is something about paper and pen that does it for me too. Everything slows down around me as I stop and write. I have since started a blog too but that is of course much more public. My journal is just for me.
I think journals are a great
I think journals are a great idea… im 16 years old and have been keeping a journal for quite some time now.. i think that it helps with your grammar, helps to remember things that you otherwise wouldn’t have - among other things. My preffered journal is the collins black one with the red spine and red corners… it’s very comfortable, and the pages are nice and smooth. mariana
Nice post! ...
Great post, I’ve been journaling for 5+ years using Moleskines and love it.
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