Every Day I Answer These 4 Questions
Journaling prompts to organize your daily thoughts and experiences
Five years ago, I started keeping a daily journal. I was looking to build a new habit, so I started small. That initial practice was writing one sentence every day.
Over the years, I have tried many different apps and approaches to daily journaling. I would regularly make a change to see if another method would bring me more value in my life.
The journaling structure that I found myself returning to and staying with long-term are four questions that help me think through each of the different parts of my day. These questions have helped me keep track of what is going on in my life, keep a positive outlook on my daily experiences, and reflect on the direction my life is going.
My journaling app
The journaling app that has worked the best for me, even though it isn’t specifically for journaling, is Obsidian.
Obsidian has become my personal Wikipedia. I capture notes from the books I am reading, details about projects I am working on, and my journal and life reviews.
I use the Daily Note feature in Obsidian for my journal. Every day when I open up the note for that day, Obsidian uses a template to populate the journal with the questions I want to answer.
What is on my mind this morning?
The first thing I do every morning is to capture what is on my mind. Noticing where my attention is going can help to grasp new ideas or clear my head of any ruminating thoughts.
This practice is similar to the idea of Morning Pages from Julia Cameron. If you haven’t heard of Morning Pages before, it is a practice where you fill up three pages off the top of your head each morning. However, that practice also says you should write them long-hand and you should not go back to review them — two areas where my approach is different since I use an app and read my journals weekly.
Many times in the morning, I will have some insight from the day before. The idea of sleeping on something before making a decision can also work for the things we experience in our daily lives. Throughout the day, there will be situations and problems I will encounter that will take some thinking and problem solving to be able to move forward. By taking the time to journal first thing in the morning, I will often discover my mind continued to work on the problem in the background, and I have fresh insights on how to move forward.
Lastly, capturing my thoughts in the morning helps me to prepare for the day. It allows me to plan and ensure I know what I want to accomplish once the busy day starts.
What did I do and learn throughout the day?
This question is one I will ask myself throughout my day. It becomes my daily log of the specific events or conversations that take place. It could include things like the notes from an appointment, saving the link to a YouTube video I thought was interesting, or even capturing thoughts from a meeting at work.
Being a daily log can make this section feel like it lacks something, so I also ask myself what I am learning throughout the day. Whenever I encounter something new, I want to capture it to help me remember it later. Since I am reviewing my journals regularly, I know I will see this again, enabling me to remember something new I learned.
What brought me joy today?
These last two questions I answer at the end of the day.
The question about what brought me joy is similar to the idea of a gratitude journal. There is so much that goes on in our daily lives. It is easy to get caught up in being busy and not slow down to enjoy the moments that enhance our daily lives.
As part of my end-of-day journaling, I always want to reflect on a moment that stood out to me as a joyful one. Some days it is something obvious and doesn’t happen every day — like getting positive feedback directly from someone I am coaching at work. On other days it is a simple event — like sitting and talking with my wife while eating lunch.
Any of these moments can bring joy to our daily lives, and taking the time to jot down one of those moments helps to keep your attention looking for them every day. By building a habit of noticing joy so you can put it in your journal, you find more of it every day.
What are my accomplishments and evening thoughts?
The last question I ask every day is to see if I made progress toward any of my goals for the day or if there is anything else I want to make sure I capture. Maybe it wasn’t a single event, so it didn’t go into the Activities of the Day section, but it could still end up in my Daily Review section.
This final section of my daily review gives me a place to capture thoughts that I might still have in my mind from any moment in the day. It is the bookend to the Morning Thoughts — allowing me to start and end my day by capturing the thoughts in my mind.
Conclusion
Over the years of journaling, I have tried many approaches, apps, and writing prompts. However, these four simple questions have become the ones I keep coming back to again and again:
- They allow me to start and end my day with a place to make notes about anything churning in my mind, which can help me to figure out challenging problems or think through something that is bothering me.
- They give me a place to log the events of my life so I can remember them and what I learned from them.
- It helps prime me to look for joy in my day-to-day life, which has been extremely valuable for making sure I find it somewhere every day of my life.
- It helps me to make sure I am moving toward my goals by being able to see the steady progress made day by day.
Journaling this way also has one other benefit — it helps time to slow down. Days can often go by in a blur of activity, and we don’t know where the time has gone. Slowing down to capture your thoughts and experiences daily gives you small moments of quiet reflection. Not only does that help you to notice more of the day as you are living it, but by capturing it, you can also remember those details whenever you review that journal again.
First published in Better Humans on Medium.com
https://medium.com/better-humans/every-day-i-answer-these-4-questions-c50f14519c8e