🌰 a collection of journaling methods

Everyone talks about how beneficial journaling is, but few talk about how they journal. This is understandable, journaling is a deeply personal activity, but it has long led me to wonder how others journal. This is a space for me to collect approaches and ideas from others. I’ll cover three individuals who have journalled for many years and their approach, with a couple extra resources listed for fun. Hopefully this will allow me (and you) to experiment with these approaches.

Do you journal? Let me know how.

Penn Jilette of Penn & Teller

Penn Jilette is the famous magician from the duo Penn and Teller. His interview with Tim Ferriss back in January of 2020 is a fantastic listen for a variety of reasons. But relevantly, he shared his journaling approach in great detail. Here’s a snippet:

… I bought myself my first computer. And when I first sat down at the computer, the very first things I wrote were published as short stories. I mean, I went from not writing to writing constantly. And then, it’s very funny to think of this, but at 30 years old I thought, “Man, I haven’t kept a journal. There was all this street performing when I was homeless and living on the streets and all of that that I haven’t recorded; nothing’s going to happen from here on, but I guess, just for the hell of it, I’ll start here.” you know?

And that was 34 years ago. And I guess it’s not literally true that I haven’t missed a day — there may have been a day that I was unconscious — but it is certainly fewer than five days I’ve missed in 34 days and I do not have any sort of particular system. I write the date, the time, where I am, and then I usually write, “I got up.” I then record the previous 24 hours, I take notes on every conversation I’ve had, I write a book report on every book I’ve read, I write a movie report on every movie I’ve watched, I write an art report on every museum or artistic thing I’ve experienced and, as I said, notes on every conversation. I don’t know how much it is, probably 500 to a thousand words a day. I should know how much it is.

And then, and I believe this is the part that may be the most useful, obviously not when I started, but since then, every morning I read 20 years ago, 10 years ago, and one year ago. Now those numbers for how long ago have, of course, changed. It used to be five, but I find that may be the most useful part of my journaling because I time travel. So every morning — it’s mostly morning — I talk to myself 20 years ago, I talk to myself 10 years ago, and I talk to myself last year. And I read that entry and I will tell you, back when I was dating, if you were a sexual partner of mine and you happen to have the exact same argument one year ago that you had that day, I can tell you right now it was over. Because if I look back and see the same problem 2010 or one year ago, attention must be paid.

I recommend reading the full journaling section of the transcript (or listen: minute 25ish to 37ish), as I am only allowed to quote up to 500 words here. If you’re reading, start at “How do you journal? How do you use journaling?” and end at “I want to come back to the weak visual memories.” It’s one of the most detailed descriptions of such a private practice that I’ve ever heard.

I used to clearly remember conversations I’d had with friends, the contents of those conversations, etc. But in recent years, I’ve felt my memory wane. The idea of recording all the little things I want to remember quite appealing. That said, writing about every art show, every book or article, is daunting. 500 words seems very few to record everything that happens in 24 hours. Yet Penn states that he only spends 20-30 minutes on the practice each morning, so who’s to say?

Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron is known for her 1992 book The Artist’s Way, a self-paced course to break artist’s block. In it, she introduces two tools she considers paramount to the creative process. The first, which we’ll discuss here, is “Morning Pages”, her journaling method.

As Cameron explains:

In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. I ask you to do this by an apparently pointless process I call the morning pages. You will do the pages daily through all the weeks of the course and, I hope, much longer. I have been doing them for a decade now. I have students who have worked with them nearly that long and who would no more abandon them than breathing.

…

What are morning pages? Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah …” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain,since that is one of their main functions.

…

The morning pages are not supposed to sound smart—although sometimes they might. Most times they won’t, and nobody will ever know except you. Nobody is allowed to read your morning pages except you. And you shouldn’t even read them yourself for the first eight weeks or so. Just write three pages, and stick them into an envelope. Or write three pages in a spiral notebook and don’t leaf back through. Just write three pages … and write three more pages the next day.

(Note: longhand writing here means “handwritten in full sentences, not shorthand”. Granted, I’m not sure who uses shorthand these days.)

Though Cameron states that morning pages are not meant to sound smart, she notes that over the years, morning pages have become meditative and even spiritual for her. She’s able to pose questions and, through this habit of writing exactly what comes to mind without filtering, get answers from “our own creativity and our creator.” She considers morning pages to be her direct connection to God.

So many people swear by morning pages by now, that it’s invariably worth trying. I’ve definitely used the practice of “brain dumping” in my journal before, and it’s a valuable way to converse with yourself. Sometimes you don’t know (or aren’t willing to admit) what’s bothering you until it’s out onto the page. I also believe there’s something to Cameron’s assertion that handwriting the pages matter. I’ve experienced in my own note-taking that it’s impossible to write faster than you think, but you can type faster than you think. I can type without remembering anything I’ve written down, but handwriting forces me to process and remember more. On the one hand, this suggests that for true stream-of-consciousness writing, there is great value in typing to bypass all filters. However, in order to process your feelings or remember what you’ve written, handwriting is key.

Ryder Carroll

Ryder Carroll is famous for his simple part-journal-part-planner: the Bullet Journal. He goes through the process quickly in this video:

The TLDR being:

Have an index so you an keep track of where certain sections are.
Have a future log at least 6 months out to store to-dos and events for the future.
At the beginning of each month, start a monthly log with a calendar on the left-page for the month’s events and due dates, and a monthly to-do list on the right-page.
Each day create a daily log where you write to-dos, notes, and events as they come up. The short-form bullet point style is called “rapid logging”
At the end of each month:
1. Create the next month’s monthly log and add it to the index.
2. Assess all the daily logs from the current month, mark tasks as done as needed, cross out tasks that no longer matter, and migrate tasks that do still matter either to the future log or to the next month’s log.
3. Check the future log to see if there are any events or tasks you need to move to this month’s log.
Any specialized notes you take can happen on any page, just add the pages to the index so you can find it later.

I’ve bullet journaled on and off since college. It’s extremely powerful if you stick to the basics of the system. Pre-printed planners are strict and inflexible: skipping a month or taking notes while reading a book is impossible. The bullet journal method is designed for the fluidity of life. I used to stick with the basics and longform journal in my daily spreads in addition to rapid logging.

However, my struggles with bullet journaling were three-fold:

I’d forget to do the monthly assessment and migration
the calendar drawing can feel repetitive and bare-bones compared to my smartphone’s calendar system
it’s easy to get sucked into the aesthetic world of habit trackers, weekly spreads, and midliners. It’s easy to forget that there’s a reason strict, pre-printed planners don’t work well for you, and that’s the same reason making a “books I’ve read this year” spread will fail.

Other assorted approaches:

struthless on Youtube outlines 9 guided journaling exercises to cover situations like managing anxieties, doing a lifestyle audit, or gaining clarity in “Journaling Techniques that Changed My Life”
Chad Kohaylk gets granular on how he implements Morning Pages and a daily note into his everyday life here
Rachel from The Sorry Girls outlines a potential half-guided half-freestyle approach in “preparing for a new year (feat. a home makeover)”

My Approach

As I noted, I’ve been bullet journaling for a while. But somewhere in the process (and mostly due to covid), I fell off the bandwagon and haven’t found my way back to regularity. One of the open questions I have right now is whether I should lean into digital journaling a la Penn Jilette or continue using notebooks as I have in the past. Thanks to the [[🧪 Obsidian Experiment]], more of my notes are digital. And using digital calendars works far better for me than the bullet journal calendars. That said, physical journaling is undeniably therapeutic.

More thoughts to come. For now, I just wanted to collect some potential methodologies in one place.

Info:

Inspired by:
- preparing for a new year (feat. a home makeover)
Related to:
- Journaling Techniques that Changed My Life
- The Artist’s Way
- [[🌰 it’s not about writing, it’s about thinking]]
- [[🗨️ Penn Jillette’s approach to journaling]]
Updates:
- 2022-07-29: Added Chad Kohalyk’s detailed blog post to “Other Methods”.

commonplace book

A place to collect relevant quotes and ideas:

Gratitude journaling “done right”
ana@tacobelllabs.net: Recently I’ve been using persuasive essay topics as journal prompts. They’re meant for high schoolers, but it’s kind of fun to get down my thoughts about “controversial” or hot topics*. Sometimes I get really into it and start citing sources for my claims as well. Would recommend if you’re in the mood to write but don’t have a topic in mind.
- Note that I mean topics like “should public schools have to wear uniforms” and not, like, “should abortion be legal”. Keep it lighthearted.
how to look back at old entries

Every post on this blog is a work in progress. Phrasing may be less than ideal, ideas may not yet be fully thought through. Thank you for watching me grow.