A few thoughts on journaling

Lately I’ve sat down and thought about my journaling and asked myself various questions while staring at a blank page in my notebook. I started journaling about 5 years ago and my style doing this changed over time. I’ve tried different approaches, gratitude journaling, different layouts of my notebooks and just experimenting with the process in general. And in the last 2 years I found “my way” to structure my notebooks and my journals, so I thought at least.

But during that one specific morning where I usually sit down and write my journal, I had to stop and asked myself some questions because something felt off. I tried to answer myself the question of what I want to write down if I have nothing to say. And looking at some of the previous pages, that feeling just grew stronger. I stare at the blank page, waiting for something deep and meaningful to come to me. I want to write something that sounds like it belongs in a journal. Some interesting and profound thoughts. And if those thoughts won’t come I find myself thinking that this is not very productive time.

In my opinion, feeling like this is partly a cultural problem. Somehow, journaling turned into some kind of performance. Influencers and various online voices started (a long time ago) framing journaling as a way for self-discovery or emotional healing.

So in short: journaling has become less about noticing your life and more about fixing it. But reading older historical journals, it was not always this way. People kept journals to write down what happened to them. Ordinary stuff like what they were working on, who they saw, what they ate for breakfast.

And funny enough, this approach of journaling where you focus more on the external details of your day can become more valuable than capturing the inverse where you focus so hard on your internal world and try to squeeze out something valuable. So I want to go back to the roots and write my journals more in a style of observation rather than performance.

A Novelist Who Wrote Down the Weather

The best example I know for this is Haruki Murakami. His book “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” came out of a journal he kept while training for the New York City Marathon in 2005 (it is a good read for this specific topic in my opinion). If you strip that book down to its mechanics, it’s a training log. How far he ran. What the temperature was. What the clouds looked like. Which music he listened to, how his legs felt at kilometer 15 and so on.

What I find remarkable is that the deep parts of that book are not actually written down anywhere in it. They accumulate. You read through pages of weather and distances and somewhere in between you understand something about discipline, about getting older, about the fear of losing the thing you love doing. He never sat down and wrote “today I would like to say something meaningful about discipline”. He wrote down that it was humid and that he had to stop twice.

That is the part that got lost in the process, once journaling started being treated like any other tool for self-improvement.

What This Looks Like on a Page

Here is an entry in the style I want to get away from:

Feeling a bit unmotivated lately. I think I need to focus more on what really matters and stop wasting energy on the things I cannot change. Maybe I should practice more gratitude.

Reading this back three weeks later tells me nothing. It could be from any day of the last five years. There are no people in it, no place, no weather, no specific bug I had to fix and nothing about what I achieved that day.

And here is the same day, written down as an observation:

Rain since the morning. Not the kind that falls, more the kind that just hangs in the air. Train to work was 9 minutes late as usual. Got coffee from the machine on the second floor because the good one in our department is broken again.

Worked most of the day on the CI pipeline for the new service. Three failed runs before I noticed I had the wrong runner tag on the job. I had to bother my colleague M. to help me fix that specific problem. He said “You just used the wrong runner tag”. Took him 5 seconds to find the problem. Kinda embarrassed and impressed at the same time.

Evening: Training felt nice, fell asleep on the couch later, no energy left in the tank.

Nothing profound happens here. It reads more like a logbook, but this is a day I can actually come back to. I know where I was, what I worked on, how my energy was that day. And the interesting thing is that the last line says more about my mood than the entire first entry above, and I didn’t have to squeeze it out of myself. It came naturally as a side-effect of just writing down what happened.

A Few Things I Try to Consider

These are not really rules, more like things I keep in mind when I sit in front of that blank page again:

• Try to note the weather. Sounds ridiculous, but it timestamps an entry far better than the date at the top of the page does.
• One sentence somebody else said. Just the sentence, not my interpretation of it.
• What I worked on, concretely. Not “work was stressful” but which service, which pipeline, which bug.
• Be thankful. No matter how bad my day felt in general, there is always something that I can be thankful for.
• No conclusion required. An entry is allowed to end without me having learned anything from it.

With that, my journaling became somewhat ongoing during the day, instead of finishing it completely in the morning.

Closing Thoughts

I don’t think observational journaling is objectively the better approach for everyone. If gratitude journaling or working through something on paper or a mix of different styles does the job for you, then keep doing it. I myself keep mixing different styles of writing journals. Right now I combine some gratitude journaling with the observational approach I’ve described above.

The less I try to sound deep while writing, the deeper my thoughts actually go.

Sources

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_I_Talk_About_When_I_Talk_About_Running