[maksimum]

Whenever I hear people talk about picking up journaling I come away a little annoyed.

They publicly describe a habit that they claim is useful. To me that implies that they're suggesting others invest time into the habit.

But I've never been compelled by the arguments. I haven't seen someone try to make (even qualitatively) refutable claims. If you don't make refutable claims, how can I experiment in order to see whether the habit makes sense for me?

[kerkeslager]

I won't call these claims because I don't know whether it's true or false for you, but I will offer you some hypotheses you can test. My hypotheses are:

1. If you journal daily for a year about your short (today-this week), medium (this month-this year), and long (next 10 years-life) term goals, you will a) notice ways in which you could be working toward your goals, b) notice behaviors which are counterproductive to your goals, and c) notice how you feel about the goals you've consciously or unconsciously set for yourself, which will result in adding, removing, or re-prioritizing some goals.

2. If you journal daily for a month about what you're grateful for and something beautiful you experience each day, you'll notice what a rich life you have and experience a slight subjective improvement in your overall mood.

3. If you journal daily for a year about the problems you're facing in your life, and spend some time every month reading all the journal entries from the previous month, you'll identify recurring problems you didn't notice before so you can start to address them.

Try any of those claims out and see what happens! I've personally tried all three (though never as consistently as "every day") and seen each of the results for myself. But again I'm not claiming you will see the same results, only hypothesizing.

I think part of why you're not hearing many refutable claims is that most people who journal are aware that there are a lot of reasons to journal and ways to journal, so it wouldn't be wise to make universal claims. I think you can come up with what you want to get out of journaling and come up with a journal plan that might achieve that goal, and just try it, but what you want is going to be personal to you.

[journalctl]

I don’t think you need to be quite so methodical.. Just try it. If you don’t like it, adjust a bit or stop. Or don’t try it at all. The blog post isn’t meant to be insulting or some kind of assault on people who don’t journal.

[csallen]

What does the ctl stand for in your name?

[radlad]

journalctl is an executable from the Linux systemd suite. It is used for accessing logs stored by journald. It stands for control.

[journalctl]

Indeed! I wanted to comment on a post about journaling so it seemed like a clever username. :)

[JustSomeNobody]

You may be reading beyond the words that people are actually writing.

It’s just journaling. Try it. Don’t try it.

[tripzilch]

Okay, this is one very simple thing, and the only one I can personally speak of having at least a qualitative and even sort-of quantitative positive effect.

Someone once gave me a little hand-made note book that said "Each day I write down 3 things I am grateful for'. So I started doing that.

I didn't want to write down obvious things like being grateful for having limbs, eyesight or such, mainly because you can write down the same every day. So at first I found it kind of hard to come up with three genuine novel things to be grateful about. But after a while (3 weeks or so?) I found that I had to stop myself from writing down more than eight things :-) (that is eight new things each day)

I mean, it's not a full journal, and the effect is relatively small (or is it?). But it's also something very easy to pick up, and you can actually evaluate its effectiveness somewhat by paying attention to the effect I described above. Which is what you asked about :) All in all, I suppose refutable claim is that if you do this simple exercise you will find it becomes easier to have positive thoughts and be more grateful about life.

[ellius]

Anecdotally, I really like the Bullet Journal system of combining todo lists with reflection. It's useful to compare the things you'd like to be doing to the things you're actually doing, and to actively contemplate the difference and changes you can make.

[jborichevskiy]

I’ve come across it before but never considered it that way- I too find the delta in what I’m doing vs want to be doing very important to keep in mind for achieving goals and maintaining focus, so it sounds like this might be a way to do it more effectively. Have you ever tried doing it digitally?

[ellius]

I mix and match a bunch of systems, some of which are digital, to create something that works for me. I think personal productivity and reflection systems have to be unique to the user. The part I personally find useful to digitize is the small annoying tasks I have to keep track of, e.g. "talk to Bob about the x, get y and z from the grocery." These tend to move around a lot and I will push them from day to day, and they don't really reflect any underlying structure or goals. At best they tell me the various sources of all the shit I have to do and could serve as indicators of things to cut out.

I prefer handwritten systems for more long-term goals, daily reflection, and projects. You get a lot more stability and emotional connection to your tasks and thoughts when you write them down in my experience. That's what I want when I'm really planning and thinking about my life. Digital doesn't seem to have the same effect. It's too easy to delete and edit yourself.

If you're really interested, this is what my system looks like. It's a mishmash of the following:

• Pile of Index Cards - I use it as the "single source of truth" for tasks and projects. I don't use the stuff about thoughts and discoveries, but I like having discrete cards I can move around and prioritize for todos.

• GTD (Getting Things Done) - I mainly use the idea that each task should have a clearly defined "next action" or a specific trigger if you're waiting on something. Ensures I'm not subconsciously avoiding a task because it has some undefined prerequisite.

• Bullet Journal - once per week, I populate pages of the days for the week ahead with tasks I expect to do from my index cards. I use that page to notice when I'm pushing tasks back and also to reflect and write down notable events from the day.

• iPhone Notes - I duplicate the task list for the day, and I move one into a "WIP" (work-in-progress) slot. This is the first thing I plan to do. It ensures I'm not trying to multi-task and do too many things at once. Over the course of the day I will peek at that list and move items around or push them back into an "Inbox," which then circles back to the Index Cards at the end of the week. New tasks go in there too. At the end of the week I re-prioritize and throw away any index cards I realize are not necessary or I no longer care about.

It sounds like a lot, but it's actually a reasonably fluid system and I'm fairly happy with it. I refine the bumpy parts when I find they aren't working.

[jborichevskiy]

Thank you for writing this out, this is helpful! And agreed about an effective system being pretty unique to the individual.

[viburnum]

Not every statement needs to contain refutable claims. Where do you think hypotheses come from?

[aesh2Xa1]

I'm misunderstanding this comment. A hypothesis is, by definition, a refutable claim. It must be testable, falsifiable.

... what do you mean?

[GavinMcG]

Why couldn't you refute the supposed benefit by doing the activity but not benefiting?

[tarr11]

I suppose a refutable claim that could be made by this post is “People who regularly journal gain more self awareness than those who do not”

[yodsanklai]

Is there an experiment that can compare the level of self awareness between two individuals? If not, then it is not refutable.

[tarr11]

It does appear that people have attempted to create such an experiment.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5114878/

[em-bee]

that won't help. people can be self-aware through a number of ways. and unless you can measure the self-awareness of any one person and find people with a similar level of self-awareness then how will you measure the effect the journal has?

you need to compare your own self-awareness before and after the experiment. only that matters. you can do a study where you let a number of people start a journal and then measure if they report increased self-awareness. but depending on how self-aware they were before, the change may vary from a lot to no change at all without proving or refuting anything.

[sporkologist]

If you need hard core science proof that journaling is worth it, maybe go on to a different activity like mime or surfing that you'd like better. For me, it lets me be more objective about what I'm doing and helps organize things and sketch out new ideas. I've been journaling since the 70's so I'm a bit of an outlier.

[omaranto]

Here's a refutable claim for you: if you try journaling you will enjoy it and find it, in your own personal subjective opinion, a worthwhile use of your time.

[em-bee]

i use the journal as a memory bank. i write stuff down, and when i search for some specific information that i might have noted, i go back to look for it. i write down what i feel is important that day, things i want to remember, and i use it as a way to reflect on the day and observe whether anything noteworthy happened.