Journaling & Reviews: Stay on track

“If you're serious about improving your play, be brutally honest with yourself.” - Greg Norman

The previous post was about getting on track by setting goals for yourself. That is the first step towards a self-determined life heading towards your desires. Some problems you might face are “how do I know what I want?” and “how can I reach long term goals without losing sight of them over time?”. To answer those questions you need to regularly think about your life and review past timeframes. This is what you might know as “journaling” or “review”.

Journaling is scientifically proven one of the most impactful ways to happiness we know of. And I think it’s the the most important part about productivity.

So what exactly do I mean by doing “reviews”? My understanding of this is most suitable by the phrase “reflective practise”. It is a regular timeslot where you critically reflect on a past period of your life. First of all, I am going to talk about the benefits of journaling (& reviews) according to my own experience and science. Then I will show you how to do reviews, how I do it and finally how you can start with your own review.

Benefits of journaling

The benefits are quite versatile. I will point out the most impactful ones in my opinion:

• Get to know your true inner state and feelings
  When you pay attention to your thoughts, questions like “why am I thinking this way?” naturally emerge. Starting from there you can start researching what you want to change or improve.
• Helps you reflect on your life and make better decisions
  If you know what you want in life and regularly review those goals you will always have the bigger picture in mind during all the descisions you make. Your descision making switches from a more or less chaotic way to a more focused pattern.
• Boosts your mood, reduces anxiety
  Writing about your feelings and thoughts is both revealing and relieving. It reduces stress by working through anxious feelings. Get to know yourself better, accept who you are and open yourself up for improvement will make yourself feel more confident.
• It can prepare you for future stressful situations
  Seeing the bigger picture helps you foreshadow things you want to avoid. If you are steering towards obstacles, it´s easier to navigate around them when you have a birdseye view.
• Helps with falling asleep
  When you write before bedtime, it can help you fall asleep because you wrote everything off your mind into your journal. This reduces overthinking when you lie in bed.

What should you write about in your review?

Of course it is up to you what to write about. It depends on the state of your life and your personality. The topics that should always be reflected about in my opinion are:

• 🧠 Your inner state of mind
  It is important to pay attention to your thoughts. I believe you can derive a lot of insights from your mind you would not get to know otherwise. It gives you a glance into your subconcious mind. You can do this by writing your raw thoughts down and rethink about them.
• ❓ Mindset development
  Train your brain into recognizing the things that are important to you. I reflect on the positives things in my life to make myself realize that I am blessed with a good life and the negative things are just minor problems.
• 🏃🏾‍♀️ Personal development
  This term refers to your experiences and self fulfillment. It’s the product of the previous two topics above where you get to know what you want in the first place. This topic is then about making sure that you are going after whatever you figured out before. I personally also check if there is anything that helped me grow. A seminar I attended, nice experiences like a roadtrip or skydiving are just a few possible examples there.
• ✔️ Task management
  The last topic which is important to me is task management. Sadly “task” is seen as a stressful thing or a burden most of the time. (If you have any suggestions how to rephrase “task management” write me on Instagram. I couldn’t come up with a better word).

The truth is that a “task” - as I understand it - is the final step to make the things you want a reality.

To connect those topics let me repeat and rephrase the things I just said:

• 🧠 getting to know your inner state of mind to see what’s going on inside yourself.
• ❓ see what is important to you and develop the mindset to pay attention to to what you pay attention to.
• 🏃🏾‍♀️ figure out what personal real life experience you want to have and what you need to do to get them.
• ✔️ lastly acutally make sure you do them!
• 🔄 repeat

Timeframes

I have learned that it is best for me if I review different topics in different periods of time. I started with a weekly pattern for journaling but soon recognized that not all topics I write about there makes sense in this given timeframe. That is when I started to use different reviews for different purposes. Here is how your review schedule could look like.

• 😃 weekly review:
  Main purpose of this topic is mindset & personal development as well as task management.
• 🧠 monthly review:
  This is quite similar to the weekly review but with a focus on the bigger picture.
• 🍀 yearly review:
  There I think about my life in general. I reflect about the past year, the current situation and things I would like to change in the future. I have an “input list” for my yearly review, where I write down some big questions, ideas and thoughts about my life down during the whole year and read them at the review.
• 🗓️ daily review:
  In my opinion this is what comes closest to the thing you have in mind when thinking about “journaling”. Write your thoughts down to get to know your inner state of mind and see what you can find. I do that in times of inner turmoil for several weeks until I found a solution for my problem.

Ultimately choose an interval for your review that makes sense for yourself.

If this structure makes sense to you and you want to start right away I have a “Review & Journal template” in Notion* for you that follows the structure as I just described it. You will have different templates for different intervals where I wrote down questions that will help you reflect onto your life and helps you getting started with journaling. I also filled some reviews with examples - check them out!

You can start using it right away by downloading the template for free down below.

I will be publishing posts for this series every two weeks so if you want to stay posted on my releases subscribe to my E-Mail Newsletter and follow me on social media.

Do you have any experiences with journaling? If you have any thoughts, ideas or stories don’t hesitate to share them with me!

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"You won’t find out what you want in life if you hardly think about it."

Constantly review the path you’re taking to check if you are still on track and if that is still the track you want to walk on.

You just learned my understanding of reviews and why it’s a very good tool to reflect on your life. Also I showed you what to reflect on and which intervals makes sense. Of course that is only a guideline.

So how to start?

My main tip is that you just get started right away. You can use my Notion template or just a blank sheet of paper. The most important thing is to simply get started. Don’t set a standard on how good your review needs to be because no one else but you is most likely going to read it anyway.

Also block a specific time frame in your calendar. For me it works best before I start working for 30mins every monday. That way you build a habit which helps you built up consistency over time.

If you are the type of person that needs a step by step plan here is what I recommend you to do so you can start your first review in 5 minutes with zero cost. Get Notion → Download my template → start with a weekly review (manual and tips included)

I think that you should start with the weekly review only so you can get used to journaling without having the pressure to start with a very short interval.

Final thoughts

Reviews are the most powerful tool to forge your own destiny in my opinion. That’s why I recommend everyone to that on a regular basis. At the same time you should not let yourself become stressed by a “regular task” of thinking about your life.

Also you don’t have to make a ritual out of it where you feel the need to find you inner middle first to get in the right mood for journaling. It’s writing your thoughts down and thinking about your life. Nothing more and nothing less. You are not bound to a sacred altar to do a review, just do it anywhere it fits you. Having a coffee break? Grab your laptop, phone or book and write your thoughts down!

Now you know what productivity is, how to set goals and how to reflect on you life. But how do you make those goals a reality? In the following posts I will talk about exactly that.

Next time: Habits & Systems: supercharge efficiency. I will show you how to consistently and effectively work on stuff you want to do.

If you want to find out more about journaling - check out these other sources I find helpful:

• MSU - For worriers, expressive writing cools brain on stressful tasks
• APA - Writing to heal
• Edutopia - The Brain-Based Benefits of Writing for Math and Science Learning
• PubMed - The effects of bedtime writing on difficulty falling asleep: A polysomnographic study comparing to-do lists and completed activity lists
• Benefits and Drawbacks of Journaling - verywellmind
• I Journaled Everyday for 90 Days. Here’s What I Learned - Ali Abdaal

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” - William Wordsworth

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