The Life-Changing Habit of Journaling (What I Learned)

some of the greatest minds in human history have spent much of their time writing things down in journals Ben Franklin Leonardo da Vinci Isaac Newton so what is it about journaling that these people knew that made them want to spend many of their precious hours writing down their thoughts and ideas and while my IQ may be a mere fraction of some of those great minds I came the realization that maybe they were on to something go figure so in this video I want to share with you what I learned the past four years of journaling how it has not only improved the quality of my life but also my levels of productivity and efficiency which I hold to be quite valuable so let me show you my journals they're not necessarily aesthetically pleasing they're not these beautiful things that sometimes other people see but it's something that has worked extremely well for myself so my current journaling strategy uses two different journals and then well this pound of paper but you'll see where that comes into play later so everybody has something different a lot of people will just use one journal for everything some others might have three or four different journals but the strategy that I use now at the moment is one this simply uses two different journals and then this pad of paper and this works really well for me but for you maybe you have different goals and you want to do something differently and you certainly can adapt to that now the first one that I want to show you here is just this small little journal it's something that I use for brainstorming and different ideas that I might randomly have I think the best way to compare this is sort of to the notes section on most people's phones and just sort of writing down random things thoughts that you might have it's a pretty simple layout that I have for it I can't really show you many of the pages because they're pretty important but you can see that you know it's it's relatively small and I just keep it for things that I want to make sure that I don't forget them so I carry them around probably eighty to ninety percent of my day or my life really I carry this around and I'm able to write down these quick ideas that I might have I simply just write the date at the top before I write down some ideas and that's really the only way of organizing that I have for it this isn't something that it's going to be seen by people I just use it for myself and for my ideas and it's not necessarily in the most organized either but I don't think it has to be it's just for writing down quick ideas or thoughts or if I wake up in the morning and you know something happens and I'm not feeling well you can write that down and sort of categorize it in in that section there so this is what I use for that small little journal it fits in my pocket pretty pretty easily and that's what I like about it and I go through one of these I would say probably every five to six months although I don't necessarily force myself to get new ones I certainly wait until I fill it up you can see that this one's pretty beat up because I do carry it with me quite often so that's the first one that I use and it is pretty helpful pretty useful in a lot of cases and then we have what I would say is probably my primary journal this is the one that I use for my long-term planning I use this for annual monthly and weekly goals tasks ideas that I might have this is one that is probably more important you can see I write my name and the year at the bottom of each one of these just so that I can organize them a little bit better I started this one probably back in may be in November or early December of 2019 so I use the date based off of when I started it just to keep it things organized a little bit and it's it's almost filled at this point now I don't force myself to write something in this every single day if there's times where you know I might go a couple of days without writing anything that's totally okay I think it's not really necessary to force yourself to write something if you don't have anything to write or if you're just so busy with something else that you want to take some time off from it but I will say that I do read through this and look over it pretty much every day I use this for a couple of different things one of them is for those annual goals that alright out and so I'll usually do that in the first few pages of this just some sort of life goals things that I want to do in my life things that are important to me keeping all of that in the first few pages and then I will begin to do my monthly in my weekly tasks and things that I really want to focus on for the month and I think what's important for these is that it's important to keep them measurable so for example if you have a goal for the month of you want to get better at speaking Spanish that's not a very measurable goal and because it's not very measurable it's gonna be difficult to track your progress with something like become a better speaker at Spanish so instead of that maybe for the month you want to learn 200 new words in Spanish or at the end of the month you want to be able to hold a five-minute conversation with somebody in Spanish and so having some measurable goals can certainly be useful for that so typically what I'll do is at the end of every month and then at the beginning of a new month I will sort of create a review for the previous month things that I've done well areas that I would like to improve upon and maybe some failures that I've had as well this typically does go longer than one page and then I will create the outlook for the next month and this could be anything this could be related to your thoughts and ideas or it could be something such as your finances maybe you have been swamped in student loan debt and you want to pay off your debt using something like this if a monthly review and then a monthly outlook for the next coming month can really be an effective strategy for paying off debt maybe you have a lot of student loans you want to pay them off you can include that in your monthly review essentially cataloging the most important things in your life relationships even or other things in life that are pretty important to you as well for that monthly review and then the monthly outlook and don't mind my handwriting it's it's it's not very good so then my next step is to create this weekly plan or the things that I want to do for that specific week and so for this here this is the week from May 24th to May 31st and I'll just write down three to five of my primary tasks or things that are really important to me so for this week I'll probably write down things like well I want to create this video showing people how I journal and this is one that's important to me but also it's going to be Memorial Day and so it's important for me to go up to my grandparents house to have a picnic for Memorial Day and that's something that is very important for the week as well and then a couple of other things that I'm maybe feeling or tasks that need to be done for the week like creating my website is something that is important as well so I'll write down three to five primary important things for me for the week and it's important to keep it somewhat simple I think it's important to keep it relatively within one or two pages if it goes too long it just sort of becomes problematic and it gets too filled up and it gets difficult to kind of track now there are also times where I'll write down many men more pages besides just the annual monthly and weekly tasks and goals I need to do I'll write down many pages more if I have some big ideas or thoughts that I'm having at a specific time and certainly okay for me to do that just starting with the date and then being able to fill that out from there so this is my primary journal as I said I'd probably go through one of these maybe every five to six months this one is almost full it's about probably three-quarters full and then we finally have this simple pad of paper which I also think is very important see I don't like to put in my daily small tasks into something like a journal because I just feel as though it gets sort of cluttered and there's things that are not necessarily as important but they're still sort of a to-do list or things that do need to get done so for today specifically there were a couple of things that I needed to do sometimes it's something as simple as literally take out the trash and other times it's something more important like file my taxes or apply for a loan or do something that's very important like call my accountant and those are all things that will go down on this pad of paper and it does just help writing these down for that daily to-do list so this is really just for daily I do keep some of these I try to keep them but at the same time I don't write down anything that's necessarily crucial or important for the long term so it's more so short-term things that need to get done or or tasks and I I just think it's something that is important in this process so there's really three primary reasons why I do this and the first one is because it allows me to measure my progress through various life goals and accomplishments that I'm looking to do and so you know it feels almost as if we blink and suddenly a year goes by remember December 31st 2019 it feels like yesterday and it was almost half a year ago we're gonna be in 2021 soon and so by keeping a journal and measuring my progress when I set goals it allows me to I feel so accomplished those goals much quicker and much more likely to accomplish those goals rather than if you just simply set a goal in your mind that hey maybe I want to get a PhD or maybe I want to go to space one day it's gonna be difficult to do that if you're not measuring progress towards that because suddenly you wake up and you are nowhere near that goal you haven't been taking those small incremental steps towards accomplishing that thing that you might have set your mind towards so I really like to use this analogy but I sort of view life as like a game like a sports game let's say football and by keeping a journal it allows you to keep a score to understand how many points you need to get to that next accomplishment do you need to win the game how many points do you have to score do you have to play defense how much time do you have left on the clock it allows you to measure more of that whereas before keeping a journal I almost felt like I was playing a game but I had no idea where I was I didn't know who was on my team I didn't know what the score was and so it just made it a lot more difficult to kind of figure out where I was in life now the second reason why I do this is because it allows me to keep myself on track I think a lot of us do find ourselves sort of going off the path from time to time it certainly happens to me and sometimes this can be something as simple as maybe I realized that I haven't been spending enough time with my family I have been working on some other projects or something and I just have been not focused on thinking about the things in my life that are important to me so it's always helpful to get back on track by reading over things that you've written down that are important to you and the past people that you want to keep connections with friends that you don't want to separate from and so just keeping all of that and here really is beneficial from my experience and so finally you know that I put quite a bit of effort into productivity and efficiency and creating systems in my life but this allows me to create this organization for my mind so it's almost like the Dewey Decimal System for your brain see before I was doing this before I was writing things down it was almost as if my brain my ideas thoughts experiences feelings everything was sort of this pile of books and when I wanted to pull something out I wanted to think back to 2014 if you want to do that you have to really start to think deep about it you can start to remember it but if you have a system for it if you can collect those thoughts into journals and then it allows you to essentially create that Dewey Decimal System for your brain so when you walk into the library you know ok I need to go to this aisle I need to go to this year and I can find the book based off of these certain things that can organize this into one collective system so those are the three primary is why I think this can be really beneficial for everyone it doesn't hurt to try it out it costs you $5 or $10 for a journal and just see what happens and I think for most people it can be extremely useful in your life whether you're trying to accomplish certain goals or you're just trying to fix certain things or just kind of keep your life on track so thanks for watching the video I appreciate all the support I hope you found some value in it if you did make sure you subscribe follow me on Instagram and I'll save your body in next week's video [Music]

Channel: Nate O'Brien

Views: 113,517

Keywords: how to journal, how to journal for self growth, journaling ideas, how to journal daily, ideas for journaling, journaling tips, bullet journal, how to journal for men, daily habits, how to journal for beginners, how to journal for productivity, bullet journal setup, bullet journal 2020, how to journal everyday, how to journal law of attraction, journaling ideas for self improvement, bullet journaling ideas for beginners, nate o'brien

Id: mIuOepwzXTo

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020