Tool # 3 – A Journal

When people read magazines in waiting rooms they tend not to give it their full attention because their mind is elsewhere. They flick through the pages quickly, looking at the pictures and occasionally reading one of the articles. When they put the magazine down they might say they have read it cover to cover however if you ask them about one of the articles, they might recall the headlines but probably none of detail. A few days later they will almost certainly have forgotten even that.

This is exactly how a normal working day goes for me. A blur of meetings and conversations that only get my partial attention as I concurrently think about all the things I need to do and make the connections I need to make to decide what needs to be done next. At the end of the day, I get a sense of completion but I know that my recollections are for the most part quite patchy and temporary. I know this because every so often I have an attempt at keeping a journal.

I realise this is slightly hypocritical to recommend a tool that I struggle to use consistently myself but I am sure of its benefits. The longest continuous period I have kept a journal was two months while I was working on a special project.  The goal of the project was to trial agile development to improve delivery success rates in the organisation and part of the deal was that we were located in a separate building away from the rest of the company. My boss wanted to stay across what was going on and somehow I ended up sending her a daily email  which summarised the days events. It was my decision to write these emails because, being an experiment, I wanted to keep track of everything so that we could learn what worked and what didn’t and there is no way to tell the difference while you are in the moment. So at the end of each day I would write down exactly what happened and why.

The act of writing this daily report proved two things to me. Firstly, that choosing the right words to accurately capture the key events of the day wasn’t easy. Putting my thoughts on paper meant I had to really know what I was trying to say, which sounds easy but turns out to be surprisingly tough in practice. Secondly, it showed that my memory was not as good as I thought and when I didn’t take good notes I often had nothing at all.

As the weeks past, I found myself doing really well in that job and from a career perspective, it was close to a peak experience to me. The project was considered a success overall and I got a lot of recognition for my contribution. I am sure it was due in no small part to the act of forcing brain to slow down after each day to explain what had happened and what I thought about it.

So this is the real benefit of keeping a regular journal, it makes you slow your thoughts down and structure them into verbs and nouns which makes you really concentrate on what you saw, what you heard and most importantly – what you think. That task is quite difficult even immediately after the event and gets increasingly harder as time goes by. Finding the right words to convert your hazy memories into accurate written statements is the key to clarifying your thinking and even makes you  reconsider what you heard and question whether it was you wanted to hear or the reality of the situation.

I have not kept up a journal for as long since that project despite ongoing repeated attempts. You essentially need to be a writer with an audience of one and there is something about that which makes it easy to give up despite the benefits.  Keeping a journal is once again about discipline and developing a habit. Its about establishing a routine and sticking with it even when you are tired and desperate not to relive unpleasant experiences.

When I do find myself in this situation, I often remind myself that I don’t need to write a novel. It doesn’t even really need to be a paragraph. Just writing a sentence for each thing that happened during the day is good enough to crystallise your thoughts. It is more about the thought process and focus you gain from the task than the amount of words you write. While I have not timed it, I am sure that the actual physical typing is probably a very small part of keeping the journal. The vast majority of effort is staring into space with your mind working overtime.

Reading your journal once you have kept it up for a while is a great experience. You get a unique perspective on yourself before you knew what was going happen next. However, similar to mind maps, the real benefit is not gained by reading your notes afterwards but through the deep comprehension you gain as a result of giving your brain a major nudge into action. You are creating a mental foundation of comprehension and self awareness that prepares you to deal more effectively with the events of the next day. It honestly does feel like that when you have completed a journal entry. You feel on top of the situation and in control.

Your brain is totally capable of dealing with this extra work. It’s just a matter of creating the time and having the discipline to not to breeze through it like a magazine and then forget it. But you do need to expend the effort in up front and provide the right level of concentration to make it all stick.

Apparently your subconscious takes in much more that you are consciously aware of and court witnesses often give more accurate information under hypnosis than they do under oath but that is no help to you in the course of a normal working day. Keeping a journal will help you maximise your understanding of yourself and your work and therefore how well you deal with it.