Why You Should Journal About Work
My 2021 bullet journal arrived this week. It’s not only amazing quality, it’s also on brand for me with the green color and the embossed leaves. I’ve kept a journal for years, but this practice has escalated as I’ve learned more about the benefits of journaling on mental and physical health. Something I hadn’t anticipated was how journaling would help me at work. In recent years I’ve become more intentional about writing about work in my diary style journal. It turns out to be incredibly valuable. In a podcast interview with TEDx speaker and leadership expert Alain Hunkins earlier this year, he beautifully explained why: “Without conscious competence you can’t repeat success, you just get lucky every once in awhile.” Said in in reverse, when you know what led to successful outcomes you can intentionally create the circumstances that will enable you to repeat success instead of relying on chance.
There are many ways to go about journaling for work. Here my aim is to share several methods for you to consider incorporating in 2021 to help you improve outcomes.
Bullet Journaling: This is a method, typically done in a dot or grid paper notebook, that can be completely flexible to your circumstances. In a bullet journal, or bujo, you document tasks preceded by a dot and use symbols to indicate what happened with that task (complete, started, moved to a different day, cancelled). A bujo is often also used to make notes, track habits and events, and document collections of things like books you want to read. The key step is that daily or weekly you take some time to review what happened and make intentional decisions about moving forward or cancelling incomplete tasks. You also make observations about what worked well, blockers, etc. It’s a mindfulness practice disguised as a productivity system [woah!]. Watch this video for a much better explanation than I can give here, but whatever you do don’t search #bujo on Instagram or you’ll think you have to be an artist to use this. It’s not about the art, it’s about the practice.
Workplace Interaction Journaling: When there is a critical interaction at work, take the time to journal about it. Include who was there, how it went, observations, and reflections on how to improve for next time. Don’t shy away from including your feelings. Do this as soon after the interaction as possible, within the same day. Improving self-awareness and empathy towards others are expected outcomes of this practice. This idea came from the executive mentor of a good work friend of mine and it’s what inspired me to incorporate more work-related content in my journaling.
Decision Journaling: Document consequential decisions by writing down what you expect to happen, why you expect this to happen, and how you feel both emotionally and physically. This process helps you avoid the trap of hindsight bias, an assumption that an event was more predictable than it is. As with the bullet journal, the magic happens when you go back to review the decisions after the outcomes are apparent. The decision journal doesn’t lie. It portrays what led to a decision and gives the long term benefit of improved future decisions. This method comes from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner that studies the psychology of judgement and decision making.
**BONUS** Gold Prospecting: Take a work problem that you are facing and dedicate 15-60 distraction-free minutes to brainstorm and journal potential solutions. Don’t judge ideas as they come to you, just write them down. The idea is that there is ‘mental gold’ in our minds, if we would only take the time to prospect for it. It’s not on the theme of reflection, it’s future looking, but I’m including it here because I’ll take any reason to encourage journaling. This method comes from the book Conquer Worry by S. Jay Coulter, who credits Earl Nightingale.
That’s a lot of ideas to get you started with journaling for work. If you’re still tentative and need a warm up, I suggest writing a page or two of reflections about 2020. Here are some prompts:
What was the most surprising part of 2020?
What is one thing that changed for the better?
Are there habits that you picked up this year that aren’t serving you well?
What do you want to do differently next year?
What is something new you learned about yourself?
Journaling is about awareness and intentional living. It’s only by reflecting on what happened that we can move forward with intention to a better life. Otherwise we are living on auto-pilot and who knows if that will lead us in the right direction. Happy journaling everyone!