How Journaling Transformed My Daily Life
You agree with me or not, but we are all a bunch of adults running around to accomplish a never-ending list of tasks. The moment we hit the floor in the morning till the minute we hit the sack in the night, we are constantly making phone calls, chasing deadlines, fulfilling social personal & professional obligations but yet there are unattended items on the to-do-list which keep gnawing at the back of our minds.
I started working full-time more than a year back and no matter how hard I tried, I seemed to be lagging on so many fronts. Amidst the hundred different things I was trying to juggle at a time, I never could get around to finishing everything that was on my plate. My daily reading habit took a serious hit and no matter what I tried, I could never make time to devote to my fitness and it went spiraling downwards from thereon.
But three months back, I got introduced to a habit that completely turned around my life. I started keeping a journal and my life came together as if tied together by an invisible thread. I can’t even express how exhilarating it is to experience the effortlessness of it all. This is the reason I wanted to share the benefits of Journaling with you all.
- It vaporizes clutter: Most of us go about our days without a plan in mind which results in the undertaking of innumerable unnecessary tasks. We struggle with prioritization, therefore, fail to understand the urgency with which we must batch our activities. In the end, we are left with decision fatigue & unsatisfactory outcomes. Keeping a journal solves this problem. You can record your daily, weekly and monthly targets in advance and devote a timeline for the same. It is like playing a game of Tetris where your time is the square empty boxes and the activities are the Tetris blocks. It enables you to visualize the overall pictures and helps in eliminating the redundant set of activities leaving more time to focus on your target.
2. Have more time on hand: One of the most amazing things about keeping a journal is it frees up your schedule like magic. Because you would assign each day with a certain number of activities with the amount of time you require to do it, you would see that a lot of portions of your day automatically gets vacated. You may choose these chunks of time to do anything that you like. You can devote this time to a long-lost habit or pick a completely new one.
You would also notice a kind of peace settling down in your life as it sweeps away the constant struggle of jumping from one task to another without getting enough time to relish its accomplishment.
3. Small wins pave the way for bigger success: Rome wasn’t built in a day nor will your biggest goals be accomplished just fine day. A little something that you do every day adds up to the bigger scheme of things and effort put in accomplishing smaller wins adds up to the big success you are dreaming about. The daily, weekly, monthly goals that I talked about in the earlier point help you in keeping track of all your activities and accomplishment which would pave the way for the goal(s) you were born to achieve.
And believe me when I say that I feel a certain level of satisfaction when I strike through all the activities I put on the to-do-list, color my habit & mood tracker. I wait for that hit of dopamine at the end of every night.
4. Improves the quality of life: Before I started keeping a journal and monitoring my daily activities, I had no way of keeping a track of my everyday routine. Life was Netflix, food take-outs/order-ins, mindless scrolling of social media, endless hours on calls, unproductive passing of time, etc. In short, my life was a mess.
With a journal handy at all times and dedicated documentation of all my daily activities helped me taking into account my activities, food habits, money spent, and others. Creating a routine for myself and sticking to it religiously has had a positive impact on every aspect of my life. I feel rejuvenated owing to the improvement in my mental & physical health, I am more focused at work, I have more clarity of thoughts and above all, I am at peace with myself.
5. It helps in realizing the bigger picture: Most of us feel that what we are doing currently is nowhere associated with the goals we aim to achieve. It happens because we fail to tie the activities to the result, we designed in our mind. Journaling assisted zeroing-in on my one big and multiple small goals and then breaking them into multiple smaller tasks spread over days & months. These everyday goals are now acting as a guiding light for me to keep moving towards my big moment.
6. Achieve more goals: Like I said before, keeping a journal enabled me to free up portions of my day which I dedicated to exploring newer avenues. I picked up two new habits, but I am yet to know I far I have come in experimenting with them. The point is the mere option of seeing my life laid flat in front of my eyes (in my handwriting) allowed me to give myself a chance with something which I considered uncharted territory for myself. This has not only given me the courage to try newer things but also gave me the confidence of converting those things into something meaningful.
So, if you don’t know how to put the brakes on the speeding monotony of the concept called life, find yourself a pen & journal and give it a chance. You will see your life unfold a little differently than it is at the moment.
