DRMacIver's Notebook

Journaling as a foundational practice

Published: 2024-01-16

This is another draft bankruptcy, excerpted from another abandoned book project. Most of the rest of the project is very sketchy but this is one of the more fleshed out chapters.

Journaling is writing about your life, ideally every day, in a way that helps you observe key things about it, understand them, and start to improve them. It returns you to the question of what’s going on in your life and how you can understand it and improve it over and over again. It helps you figure out what matters to you.

If there is one thing that I wish I had kept up as a practice throughout the last five years, it’s daily journaling. Every time I’ve done it it’s been important and transformative and then for one reason or another I’ve just… stopped.Editor’s note: Don’t ask how well I’m doing on this right now please…

Continuity of journaling practice is hard, and the design of the practice matters both for feeling like you’re getting something out of it and for making it robust against failure.

Here is what I currently consider an ideal journaling practice:

Journaling is done by hand, with a fountain pen, in an A5 notebook. For reference, I use this one, and I think it’s reasonably well designed for the purpose, but it’s nothing special. Write on some flat surface, with your arm well supported (note: I am still figuring out ideal writing posture, and may need to update this advice). Pages in the journal should be dated. I usually only add a date for the first page of every day (dating every page is also fine, I just rarely bother). I have a dedicated writing desk from which phones and computers are banned, but this may be hard to find space for.

You should have a foundational journaling prompt that you use every day. The idea of the foundational prompt is that it takes you straight into just writing without having to make decisions about what to write about, and it creates a diverse range of different starting points to get you to examine things from many different angles.

Mine is this: I draw a tarot card from a standard Rider-Waite-Smith deck, I consult Joan Bunning’s “Big Book of Tarot” entry for that card. I read the description of the card out loud. I then write two pages inspired by it. “Inspired” can be anything that feels right. Often I pick out some characteristic from the list of characteristics that describes some problem I’m currently having. Sometimes the card lands with a big “ouch, too accurate” and I know exactly what to write. Sometimes the card completely fails to land and I instead describe the absence of the card’s qualities from my life. If the card is a court card I often talk about what it would be like to be the person represented.

If you are comfortable with Tarot (this does not require attributing any mystical significance to it. I don’t), I recommend adopting this as your specific practice. If you want to try it out without committing to buying a deck and the book, you can use https://randomtarotcard.com/ for your card draw and look up the card in http://www.learntarot.com/cards.htm (which is by the same author as the book I use, but the book often has expanded descriptions).

If you’re not comfortable with tarot, I’ll list some alternative prompts further down.

(Note: In actual fact I currently do not my foundational journaling in my journal, I’m doing it on A4 sheets, because I started it as a project of working through the deck one card at a time without replacement and introduced the journal midway through and want to complete the deck before I switch over to the journal. This section may be updated if I discover that the switchover doesn’t work, but I have used a tarot deck this way in the past and expect it to work fine)Editor’s note: This project has now been completed. See Completing completable projects

The goal is that the foundational journaling should be done by noon. If you notice that it is after noon, you should treat it as a matter of some urgency to go complete it.

Immediately after you have done your foundational journaling, you will ideally write another page of journaling about anything you feel like writing about. If literally nothing comes to mind, don’t worry about it. This page is not a requirement of the practice, it’s just a point at which you are invited to journal.

In general, you should try to journal in whole pages. Keep writing until the page is full, and then stop. As you notice you’re coming to the end of a page, try to sum up or fine some appropriate way to drop the mic at the end.

Something else I find useful is to light a candle while journaling. The way the candle works is that it serves as a sort of anchor: If the candle is lit, I’m supposed to be journaling. If I notice it is lit, I should make a decision to go back to journaling or snuff it out. As long as I’ve completed my foundational journaling, it’s fine to choose to stop journaling, the candle just serves as a reminder to make the decision.

Throughout the day if at any point you feel like you need to think something through or want to express something, go write a page in your journal about it. The ideal is to cultivate the journal as something you want to use and keep going back to. There is no such thing as too much journaling as long as most pages you write in your journal feel productive to have written.

Debugging Notes

This is a good opportunity to practise debugging.Editor’s note: This is partly a reference to a previous chapter on debugging in this book attempt, but I never actually wrote that chapter. I may attempt to turn its stub into a notebook post at some point soon. Chances are, if you try to copy the above verbatim, you’ll run into some problems. I don’t know what they are (if you do run into some problems, please tell me! I’d like to debug them with you)

I promise that the daily journaling habit is going to be worth it, so it’s worth spending some time figuring out why it isn’t working for you and changing that.

Here are some variants you can try for the physical form:

You can, if you must, journal on the computer. I think it’s a bad idea, but the best system is the one you can actually follow, so if you hate handwriting and can’t bring yourself to do it, don’t.
You can reduce the volume of journaling, either by writing fewer pages, switching to a smaller journal, allowing yourself to stop at the half page mark, etc.
You could journal on disposable paper - write it on an A4 sheet and then shred it if you don’t want to keep it around.
Experiment with different pens and journals. Do you hate fountain pens? Do you prefer squared over lined? etc.

For the content you could try different foundational practices. e.g.

Pick some book of special significance to you (a bible for example, but it could also be a favourite novel) and use that as a source of prompts. Turn to a random page, read the page out loud, and focus in on some passage that feels salient in some way.
Rather than having a special book, you could have a book that you rotate. Pick some book of your shelves, use that for a while. When you feel like moving on after journaling, switch it out for something else.
A variation on the above is that rather than random pages you could work through the book sequentially - read a few pages before journaling until you find something

The core of the foundational practice is that it needs a random prompt to get you started, and those random prompts have to have a reasonable amount of range, and a lot of flexibility for interpreting them.

Another common way the journaling practice is likely to fail is that you just stop doing it. Usually you forget to do it one day, and it makes it easier to forget to do it the next, etc. The practice I described above has a number of features designed to offset that:

It has a specific centre that is easy to return to (do your foundational journaling before noon).
It makes that centre easy to achieve (it uses a random prompt)
It has the candle as an anchor to help stabilise the practice.
Similarly it has a physical book for that.

But these are all predicated on the fact that it’s relatively easy for me to find time in the morning to do it, and I have a good physical space for it. Your problems might be different.

The core thing to do though is to decide:

When are you going to do your journaling?
What are you going to do when you miss that slot?
Where are you going to do your journaling?
What are you going to do if you’re not able to do it there? (e.g. because traveling)

For me the answers are:

Ideally while I drink my morning coffee, but any time before noon is fine.
As soon as I can after noon I go do my journaling.
At my writing desk.
I’ll bring my journal with me and try to do some journaling on the right schedule, but it often won’t be my foundational practice because I don’t have the tarot deck I’m using with me.

Afterword

This excerpt was a good reminder that I should try to journal more reliably again. I haven’t stopped doing it, but I probably average about once a week.

Partly this is because this daily writing project is taking up the time slot that would otherwise be used for journalling.