30 Minutes of Journaling that Changed My Life
Journaling doesn’t have to be complicated; simply giving shape to your thoughts and feelings can have profound effects.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
— Socrates
Frequent reflection and a strong self-awareness are common amongst many of the world’s top performers. And few methods of introspection are simpler or more powerful than taking pen and paper and writing down your thoughts and feelings.
From morning pages to reflection prompts, the techniques for journaling are numerous and can help us gain much needed calm, clarity, and growth.
Rather than add another theoretical exercise to your arsenal of journaling techniques, I want to give you a concrete example of how a single journaling session brought me clarity in a time of doubt and completely changed the trajectory of my life. If I’d have to give this technique a name, I’d call it Life Resetting.
Many people probably know this feeling that things used to be better, easier, more exciting, or [fill in your favorite positive adjective]. In most cases, this is just a temporary emotion at times when we feel a bit down or a sense of nostalgia in the face of growing older (or the common reaction to everything that happened in 2020).
But in some cases, it might be a genuine result of our circumstances or environments having changed. A change that — if we properly identify and understand — might be reversible.
I personally experienced this in 2017.
During a week of time off in nature, traveling through rural Japan, it slowly started dawning on me that I used to feel different: more creative, more productive, and at the same time calmer and less busy.
This nagging feeling grew stronger. I contemplated whether it might just be a normal consequence of growing up and entering the “real adult world,” but I wasn’t satisfied with that answer. I came to the realization that something in my life used to be better and I wanted to find out why that was the case and how I could get back to the original state.
So I took out my notebook.
The 30 minutes and two pages that ensued dramatically changed the trajectory of my life.
At the top of the page, I stated my question — the change in feeling I had identified and whose origins and root causes I was trying to identify.
In my case, this read “Why the f*ck do I feel so unproductive/inefficient/boring?”
Putting it there on the page in a single, simple question made it easier to hone in on the problem.
Next, I made two lists.
One of them contained all the key feelings and activities that I had in my life and was spending my time on in the past, during the state I wanted to get back to. The other one did the same for my then present state, the undesirable state I wanted to change.
Before:
Ph.D.
Startup co-founder
Tutor
15+ hours running/week
Much more time to read random fiction and non-fiction
Much more time to go out
Random projects
1+ hours cooking/day
More time spent meditating
More time spent studying Japanese
After:
[My job at the time]
Crossfit
Bit of beat-making
Going out on weekends and occasional weekday
After work feel very little motivation to do anything productive, simply waste time on easy distractions
The goal of this before/after comparison was just to observe states and changes. Next, it was time to drill into the root causes.
Clearly seeing the different circumstances written down in an easy side by side comparison allowed me to return to my original question, and really ask myself what underlying problems were responsible for my changed perception.
For me, this is what it looked like:
“Problems” contributing to this:
Constant distractions (e.g. Slack)
Inability to freely choose schedule
Inability to freely choose workplace
Feeling that I “have to look busy”
Can’t simply not work when I don’t feel productive, which also means I don’t work at some times I do feel productive because I’ve “already done my work for the day”
Being constantly reachable (see distractions)
Having to fit work into an arbitrary externally imposed chunk of time
Previously rarely spent more than 4 hours a day on “work,” but those 4 hours were highly productive
On the surface it might look like the before/after comparison and my identified issues are not directly related. But I don’t think I could have easily identified these problems without first providing the additional contextual information to my original question.
And that was it. On two pages, with less than 30 minutes of work, I had initiated a huge change.
The hard work still had to be done, but I had planted a seed.
Having written down the problems, I could dive deeper into them, and try to address them. A first step was to identify which ones can actually be influenced, and which ones are outside of my control.
My approach to better understand what was going on and what I might be able to do about it was to write about the problem, which led me to publish my first — and probably still best — article on Medium.
Little did I know at the time that my little struggle with this seemingly simple problem would become the center of my life.
About a year after my fateful journaling session, having finally realized that my job at the time would not support the life I was looking for, I quit and became a full-time digital creative.
Also, after continuing to write on the topic for a while — mostly just to help myself process my own thoughts — I realized more and more how commonplace my particular issue is, and I became passionate about using my unique perspective to help other people address the problem in their own lives.
My own hidden struggle, laid bare by the simple journaling exercise, started my quest to help people build their rest ethic and live lives of noble leisure. It led me to co-author a book about the value of Time Off which became an instant Amazon bestseller in multiple categories. And it’s continuing to push me on the path of changing our current culture that all too often seems to confuse busyness with productivity.
Not only did those two pages of journaling help me get closer to the life I desired for myself, but it also made me completely reinvent my career and has given me a tremendous sense of meaning and purpose.
It took over two years to completely unfold (and I assume I’m still only at the beginning of this journey), but I can trace it all back to those 30 minutes I spent with my notebook in late 2017.
I can’t promise that the changes will be quite as profound for you, but I can guarantee that if you sit down to try the exercise for yourself, you will learn some valuable insights about yourself.
And you never know, you might completely reset and re-invent your life.