The key I have found to being consistent, is to be disciplined in doing routine things. One area that I have become disciplined in is journaling.
Each day I wake up feeling as though I have a productivity debt that I need to pay off throughout the day and I have found that my journaling practice has helped me in managing this unreasonable expectation I have of myself.
Having a routine of daily, weekly and monthly planning in place allows me to ensure that each day I know my priority tasks and gives me a quantitative measure of how many of my goals I have achieved.
I follow a pretty simple template within my journal that allows me to plan out my day each morning and to review the day before I go to bed.
What I enjoy about this format, which is a slightly modified version of the Resilience Shield Journal template, is that it allows me to reflect each day and see what I have achieved and state what I’m grateful for.
Morning entry:
How I’m feeling I write down one or two words to explain how I am feeling in that moment. This helps make sure I am present in what I am doing.
How well I’ve recovered and time spent asleep I have been using a WHOOP band for the last 3 months and it gives me a great insight into how my activities throughout the day impact my sleep and recovery. This information gives me a gauge of how my energy levels might be and whether my tasks or objectives are achievable.
Rating my wellbeing I rate how my mind, body, social and professional layers are feeling. These concepts come straight from the Resilience Shield framework for resilience that I’ve based a lot of my self development around. Check out Master your mindset and overcome adversity | The Resilience Shield for more info.
My daily challenges/mantras I have a list of 6 statements I write to myself each day, reminding myself of what is important to me and what I want to focus on. An example of one of them is “Observe and consider the story I am telling myself”.
A list of tasks or objectives I want to achieve today This can include exercise and meditation targets, and important work I need to complete. This gives me my main focuses for the day and I make sure these align to my weekly or monthly objectives.
Free writing I then free write for a paragraph or so, thinking about the day ahead, expanding on how I might be feeling and reaffirming my priorities for the day.
Synopsis of the day A brief overview of key things from the day, how I felt about what happened and anything that is racing through my head. I find this is a great time to debrief the day with myself and is an opportunity to get racing thoughts out of my head before I go to sleep.
List of achievements This list includes what I’m grateful for from the day and I try and list over 5 things each day. I usually go through my task list, from the morning, and tick off everything I did do as well, adding to my feeling of accomplishment.
Improvement areas Writing one or two things down where I didn’t perform how I wanted to, or write any feedback I received and work out what I am going to do to improve on it the next day.
Next day planning I then list all the important things I can think of that I want to do the following day. This helps reduce the amount of thoughts I have going through my head before I go to sleep.
Initially when you look at this list, it may seem like a lot of work. But all of this information fits across two pages of an A5 notebook.
I think we all get so carried away with our days and often forget a lot of the good things that have happened, because we can get hyper focussed on the one bad thing that may have happened. Initially it was quite difficult to state what I was grateful for or had achieved throughout the day, but daily practice has meant that I can now rattle off a list of things I am grateful much easier.
I use a similar journaling framework to do a review of the week, check my progress against my goals and go back and see everything I achieved through the week.
Journaling is such a simple way to order our thoughts and you can very quickly see the benefits. I would recommend journaling to everyone, just start small and simple and let it grow organically.
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