Ace Department

When you think about the great diarists, you may think Judy Blume* more than Ben Franklin, General Patton, or Oprah.  But from now on you’ll think magnate more than teen.  Because you’re going to emulate this brilliant, simple trick.

The oldest productivity gurus in the book had it right: they kept diaries of their daily work and rest to provide context, satisfaction, and a sense of purpose for their next days.  Recording their lives in writing gave them patience, helped them learn, and gave them the distance we often need from ourselves to grow.  Whether you do it in notes to yourself or letters to someone else (like John Adams to Thomas Jefferson), getting your thoughts down on paper is eerily correlated with not only high intelligence but high achievement.

But like anything worthwhile, it’s not free.

I used to be in the habit of jotting down notes in a nightly gratitude journal (if “journal” = random sheets of paper), noting all the things that had happened in a given day, but without letting myself frame them as negatives.

Of course it’s easy to be grateful for a good cup of coffee or two extra hits of the snooze button in the morning.  But if it had been a hard day at work, I’d force myself to remember something I learned from the struggle.  If a friend and I had fought, I’d try to find gratitude for the opportunity to repair the relationship and move on stronger than we’d been before.  On and seemingly sickeningly on.

I know that seeing everything through rose-colored glasses isn’t always easy, nor ideal.  But I can tell you I felt healthier and happier during that time than any other period of my life.  Which makes it hard to explain how I let myself stop.

So here’s my challenge to you (and to myself):

Start (or restart) your diary today.

Call it a journal, call it notes, call it stuff you write, or don’t call it at all, but get writing.  Even if you only have five minutes to spare.  Let’s do it every day for the next two weeks, and meet back here to regroup.

Here are some goals to keep in mind:

1. Allow yourself to focus on what really matters to you — what you enjoy most, what you’re great at, where you excel.
2. Learn — Where can you be more engaged?  What can you drop?  What should you add?
3. Track what’s going on in your personal and professional lives to help yourself plan what’s next.  What are the recurring themes that satisfy and trouble you?
4. Make it easy on yourself — write how you want, when you want, for as long as you want.  It’s not essential to reread your diaries (since so much of the benefit comes from the thought behind writing at all), but if you do want to use this as an opportunity to track goals over time, make sure you write in a way that will be easy to read again.  (Consider writing with a highlighter in hand.)
5. Keep perspective — change doesn’t happen overnight, but it does happen over time.

*Even Judy Blume was onto something.