Writing about keeping a journal
Practical pieces about the habit itself: how to make the page small enough to survive a bad week, and what tends to change once you have a few months of it in your own handwriting.
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How to Read Back Your Own Notes: Look Down the Column, Not Along the Row
Keeping notes about your mood and energy is the easy half. Reading them back so a pattern shows up is the half most people skip. Here is a simple way to do it.
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How to Ask for Help When You Are the Person Everyone Relies On
If you look after someone, "let me know if you need anything" rarely leads to help. Writing the request down first, in four parts, makes it much easier to ask and to answer.
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Rate It Before You Explain It: The Honest Way to Write Down a Hard Day
Ask yourself how bad a day was and you will talk yourself down to a five. Write the number first, before the reasons, and you get something closer to the truth.
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Two Lines Before Bed: The Smallest Diary Habit That Actually Lasts
Long diary entries die in February. Two lines a night is small enough to survive a whole year, and specific enough to mean something when you read it back.
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The Five-Step Test: How to Tell a Goal From a Wish
Most goals fail before Tuesday morning because they were never goals to begin with. A simple test on paper tells you which is which, before you waste a week on it.
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Couples Rarely Drift Apart in One Argument. They Drift in the Weeks Nobody Wrote Down
A ten-minute weekly note about how close you felt, what went well and what did not. No advice, no scoring each other, just a record you can look back on together.
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Busy All Week and Cannot Say What You Did? Write Down Where the Hours Went
Being busy and getting things done feel identical from the inside. Two pages a week on paper will show you the difference, and who should have been doing half of it.
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One Word for the Day: The Smallest Journal That Still Tells You Something
Write one word each evening and one sentence about why. It takes a minute, and by December you have a dictionary of your own year.
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Why Seven Lines a Week Beats a Gratitude Page a Day
Most gratitude journals are abandoned in March. Not because gratitude stopped working, but because a page a day is too big. Here is the smaller version that lasts a year.
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The Questions You Will Wish You Had Asked Your Parents
Most of what we know about our parents is the handful of stories they tell well. Here is how to ask for the rest, without turning Sunday lunch into an interview.
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Writing Through the Year After Someone Dies
Grief does not keep to the stages in the leaflet. A page a week will not fix it, but it keeps a record of a year you will otherwise barely remember.
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What Do I Actually Want This For
The question that arrives in the car with the engine off. Why you cannot answer it in your head, and the smaller questions that get somewhere.
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Tracking Your Cycle on Paper, Without an App
A grid, a pencil and two scales. What a paper record does that a cycle app does not, plus how to fill in the first three months.
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Gratitude Without the Cheerfulness
Three things you are grateful for, every day, forever. Why that instruction quietly fails, and the smaller question that works instead.
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What Ten Minutes of Writing Does to Your Evening
I cannot tell you anything about your sleep. I can tell you what changes when the list is on paper at ten o'clock instead of in your head at midnight.
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How to Keep a Journal After You Have Quit Three Times
Most people do not fail at journalling. They agree to the wrong size of page. Here is how to pick one you can finish on a bad Tuesday.
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