Journaling regularly doesn’t have to be a time-consuming exercise. Though it’s nice occasionally to spend two hours writing in your journal, you probably don’t have that kind of time in your day-to-day schedule. (If you do, please let us know how you do it).
Instead of wishing you had more hours in the day, work with your busy calendar and try progressive journaling: taking one-minute breaks throughout the day and writing a line or two at a time. You won’t feel pressed for time, and the end result is a fun patchwork of thoughts and ideas that have crossed your mind over the course of different times, places and moods.
How to do Effortless Journaling
Here are a few tips to help you get started:
1. Carry a pen and a small journal with you at all times in your bag or pocket. When you have a minute of downtime (when you would normally reach for your smartphone), take your journal out and free-write until you have to get back to business. These moments pop up all the time – in line at the coffee shop, in the conference room before a meeting, at school just before the kids get out – so learn to recognize them and take advantage of them.
2. Play around with different ways of writing in short bursts. Jot down what you are feeling in the moment, describe a scene you are observing or let your mind wander and record the first thoughts that appear. Experiment with stopping mid-sentence so you have somewhere to pick up on your next break. Ask yourself a question that you want to answer later.
3. Set a goal for how many times you want to write each day. Start small, with less than five writing periods, then see if you can scale up to 10 or more. Make it into a game where you give yourself points for each entry.
4. Do a week of progressive journaling before you read anything that you’ve written. At the end of the first seven days, go back to the first entry and read everything at once. Highlight or underline passages that you find most interesting, and use those observations to kick off new entries.
5. Write a short story in a day. Make each entry a vignette or chapter, and see how much plot and character development you can do in just a few lines.
Have you ever tried journaling like this? Share your tips in the comments!
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