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.
There is a drawer in most houses with a notebook in it. Eleven pages filled in, the rest blank. Sometimes there are three of them, one from each of three different Januaries, and the handwriting gets smaller and more apologetic as it goes.
If that is your drawer, the problem was almost certainly not you. It was the size of the thing you agreed to.
The ask was too big
A blank page is an invitation to write something worth reading. That is a great deal to ask of anybody at half past ten at night. So you write a good page on day one, a decent one on day two, a rushed one on day three, and on day four you look at the page and think: not tonight, I will do a proper one tomorrow.
The page is now a debt. Nobody keeps up the payments on a debt they took out for fun.
Every journal I have kept for longer than a season has had one thing in common. The page could be finished in the time it takes a kettle to boil.
Make the smallest version you would still be glad to have
Picture the worst evening of your year. You got home late, somebody was ill, you did not want to speak to anyone. Whatever you could have managed on that night is the correct size of your daily entry. Not the size you can manage on a good Sunday.
For most people that is one to three lines. It looks insultingly small. It is not. A year of three-line entries is a year you can read back. A year of intended long entries is a drawer.
A year of three-line entries is a year you can read back. A year of intended long entries is a drawer.
Hang it on something you already do
You already brush your teeth. You already put your phone on the charger. You already sit in the same chair with the same drink. Habits do not run on motivation, they run on a hook to hang from. Put the book on the thing your hand already reaches for.
Mine lives under the lamp on my side of the bed, because the lamp goes off last.
Write the boring version
The entries that survive are specific and unremarkable. "Rain all day. Ellen rang about her mother. Made soup and did not eat it." That sentence will still mean something in two years.
"Feeling a bit low but staying positive" will not, because it could be any day of your life. You are not writing for a reader. You are leaving notes for yourself in April.
Decide now what a missed day means
It means nothing. There is no streak. This is where most journals actually die: not on the day you miss, but on the day after, when the empty box makes you feel like you have already failed and stopping starts to look tidier than catching up.
Skip the box. Write today's. If the empty ones bother you, put a small dash in them. A dash is an entry. It says you were alive and nothing needed saying.
Stop buying a better notebook
A new notebook is a very pleasant way of not writing. The one in the drawer with eleven pages in it is fine. Turn to page twelve, write today's date and carry on. You are not starting again. You are continuing badly, which is the entire skill.
Read back on purpose
The reason to write two lines a day is not the writing. It is the reading. Somewhere around week six, go back to week one. You will find at least one thing you were completely certain about that turned out to be temporary, and that is the moment the habit stops being homework.
A book built for the smallest version
A Line a Day is the format I keep coming back to for exactly this problem. One dated page per day of the year, split into five short blocks, one for each year. You write your few lines, and next year on the same date you write underneath and read last year's first.
The page is too small to fail at, and after twelve months it becomes the rare kind of journal that actually gets read.