What journaling every day for 2 years has taught me
Lessons learned from over 800 days of daily journaling.
I’ve been journaling every day for over two years, and it’s become one of the most important and transformative practices in my life. Here’s what it’s taught me.
I. The Power of a Daily Writing Habit
Our lives and identities are shaped by our habits. The things we do every day are a reflection of who we are. The reverse is even truer—who we are is a reflection of the things we do every day. I’m a writer, not just because I say so, but because I’ve made a habit of writing.
Journaling is a low-stakes way of establishing a daily writing habit. You’ll always have something to write about, even if it’s just how unremarkable your day was, and there’s no pressure that it has to be of publishable quality.
Journaling doesn’t have to be a daily practice, although I’ve found that cadence and consistency to be the most beneficial for me.
I’ve journaled on and off for over thirteen years. When I started journaling at the age of six, I only wrote entries during certain periods I wanted to remember—trips or major events, like acting in a Broadway show. In 2017, when I was eleven, I started a new journal of daily life, the first time I’d journaled ‘regular life’ instead of a specific trip or experience. I was rather inconsistent, and only wrote 32 entries in the entire year. But it was a start.
In 2020, shortly after quarantine lockdowns in New York City began, I started a daily journal again. It felt like an appropriate time to resume. I was living through something monumental, a surreal moment in modern world history.
Over the next couple of years, I kept journaling, albeit with some large gaps. A little over two years ago, at the end of 2022, was when I started a daily journaling streak that I haven’t broken since.
And sure, missing a day here and there wouldn’t be the end of the world. But for me, it’s become a ritual. The day doesn’t feel complete, and I don’t feel like I’ve fully processed all that’s transpired, until I’ve written something about it.
II. The Practice of Documenting Your Life
Life is composed of countless memories plus the present moment. Our lives are 99.999% memory; the present, experienced moment is but the smallest remaining fraction.
One of the things that makes a life feel expansive and well-lived is a vast library of memories, awareness of the millions of big and little moments that led up to the here and now. To document your life is to capture those moments on paper or in pixels or in waveforms, creating records and relics you can look back at in the future.
Being able to read what I was thinking and doing and creating a year ago, or two years ago, or three, or four, or five, is incredible. On my dashboard page in Notion, I have a tab where I can see entries from this day in previous years. It’s fun to look back and get such a clear glimpse into the past through my writing. Every entry is a time capsule. I’m able to remember so much more of my life, even the smallest details that I would’ve forgotten had I not written them down.
It’s interesting to see how my journaling style has evolved over the years. My earliest journals were focused exclusively on recording the events of the day. (Honestly, they’re not very interesting to read.) Over the years, I started including more internal thoughts and reflections. In some physical journals, I drew illustrations to complement what I was writing about.
The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve written about what’s happening on an internal level from day to day—my aspirations, fears, and mindset. Connecting those ideas to the actual events I’m experiencing provides a more complete picture of life in the present moment.
I think this helps develop my skills in writing fiction, too. The aim of my writing is to craft a true reflection of the fabric of life. That means including every dimension, from physical to intellectual to emotional. Great books transport us to other worlds and times, sketching them with such detail and veracity that we feel like we’re actually there, even if they’re completely fictional. That’s my overall aim in journaling. I want to be able to look back at what I’ve written in the future and feel like I’ve stepped through a time machine.
One thing I’ve added to my journaling practice in the past few months has been taking a photo every day to include in my entry. Not only am I documenting my life in writing, but I’m including a visual memento. I don’t know that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it does enhance what I’ve written about the day.
Humans are storytelling creatures. We see stories everywhere. We create them for fun, or to share how we’re feeling, or to impart wisdom to others. Our own lives are filtered through the lens of story. In documenting your experiences, you literally get to write the story of your life.
Okay, a brief aside: I don’t know how common this is among writers, but I often interpret events in my life from an overtly literary angle. Last year, I spent a month in Europe, and exactly halfway through, I got sick. On top of that, I was feeling burned out and disappointed in myself for failing to keep up making daily videos, which I’d been trying to do for 365 days straight. And you know what I thought to myself? I’ve reached the midpoint of the Save the Cat Beat Sheet. According to that story structure, I’ve been on a downward path, and after this False Defeat midpoint, things will improve on an upward path to the climax of the story.
And that’s actually how it ended up working out. Life imitates art, or art imitates life.
III. The Skill of Metacognition
Metacognition is the study of one’s own thoughts. It’s thinking about thinking. While that may sound like an ouroboros of over-analysis, it can be incredibly useful, especially to artists.
Writing a book or making art of any kind can feel like an abstract process. The more you record and reflect on that process, the less overwhelming and unknowable it begins to feel.
I find journaling to be an excellent way of documenting my creative process and contemplating how a project is going. If I’m stuck in the novel I’m working on, I can write about that in my journal and explore the reasons behind the creative block. I can follow my stream of consciousness to discover new paths I might want to take the story down. In my experience, there’s a big difference between simply thinking something through and writing it out on the page. Putting your thoughts and dreams and uncertainties into words compels you to clearly articulate concepts.
In externalizing your thoughts through journaling, you’ll be able to see how your thinking changes over time, and what ideas and issues matter most to you. For fiction writers, a journal provides perspective that better enables you to identify thematic topics that are relevant to your own life. Journaling can be an outlet to write about these big ideas, like death and justice and free will, without the filter of fiction. You can get out all your thoughts on a topic and then take only your best ideas and insights into your story.
Writing about your creative work alongside everything else going on in your life can illuminate patterns and correlations. Events and circumstances unrelated to writing can have a big impact on your art, even if the link isn’t obvious. If you’re reflecting on all aspects of your life together, it’s far easier to connect the dots. For instance, you might find your creative energy is influenced by the seasons, or that you get your best ideas when you have long stretches of time alone in nature.
Beyond your creative work, keeping a journal develops your skill of self-reflection. It makes you take stock of your life, your habits, your behavior, your decisions, your ways of thinking. Every day, you have a chance to take a look at yourself and ask how you can improve. Because almost inevitably, through journaling, you’ll come to discover things about life and about yourself—some of which you like, and some of which you very much don’t.
Using a journal as a tool for self-reflection and self-improvement is nothing new. In fact, the practice dates back to ancient times. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius kept a journal to reflect on his life, philosophy, and how he could improve himself. The philosopher Seneca wrote that every night, “I examine my entire day and go back over what I’ve done and said, hiding nothing from myself, passing nothing by.”
Writing about your life consistently for years is a powerful method of self-reflection. You can stumble upon realizations without even intending to. Journaling is a form of data collection—as you experience new things, you take note of the feelings and ideas they spark. More than simply thinking to yourself, writing everything out on the page forces you to confront hard truths head-on, crystalize your vision for the future, recognize what you want and don’t want. Over time, as you collect more data points, you can refine your goals and systems to better align with your values, your strengths, and the reality of the world.
It’s all well and good to want to be a bestselling author, but if you never do the work to reflect on why you want that and what it would take to achieve it, you’ll be stumbling through the dark toward a dream you don’t fully understand. Journaling builds this crucial skill of metacognition, of self-analysis, that’s needed to successfully navigate life.
IV. The Value of Beautiful Writing
I take great pleasure in writing well, crafting articulate arguments and beautiful sentences, even when it’s in a journal entry that no one else will ever read. I’m not alone in this; it’s something many writers, I’m sure, can relate to.
I think there’s something special about creating beautiful things for the sake of creating beautiful things. Approaching life with artistry even when no one’s looking. It’s something uniquely human, and thus something all the more important in today’s day and age. Efficiency and utility are prized above all else. Technology is built to be as streamlined and pragmatic as possible. Everything must be cut down to a replicable form. Words must be concise and inoffensive. It’s all about economy and speed.
And look, I’m all for streamlining processes and reducing informational clutter. But for me, journaling, just like fiction writing, isn’t about utility. Writing isn’t just a communication tool. It’s an art form.
When you read private letters written by great authors, you’ll find that they put what could be seen as a completely unnecessary amount of work into writing them. They imbued their correspondences with the same care and mastery of language as their novels and poems and essays. It wasn’t efficient. But they made their words matter, even the ones that were never meant for publication. And so, decades and even centuries later, we can read their letters and find insight and beauty within.
Nowadays, that kind of unnecessarily beautiful writing is far less common. Part of that has to do with how the world has changed. We have to respond to far more messages than people in the past. Authors’ inboxes and DMs are teeming with questions and comments from readers, friends, family, businesses, and collaborators, to the point that it would be impossible to craft a lengthy response to every one of them. And of course, minimalism and efficiency have their place. Not everything you write needs to be dripping with poetic imagery.
But this idea of creating beautiful writing for an audience of one, or even just for yourself, fascinates me. Journaling is how I put that idea into practice.
Some of my favorite pieces I’ve written are contained within my journals, and in all likelihood, no one else will ever read them. That’s just fine with me. Everything you write develops your skills, and the insights you unlock in journaling can eventually make their way into the stories you share with the world.
Although I do love to imbue some of my journaling with a sense of craft and artistry, that’s not how I approach it every day. If I had the expectation that every entry would shine with poetic beauty or deep insight, I would’ve given up a long time ago. My aim is simply to document my life however I see fit and write something about every day.
Above all, a journal should be honest. Sometimes, the most honest way of journaling is spilling a loose, unedited flow of consciousness on the page. Sometimes, the most honest way of journaling is taking the time to find just the right words to skillfully paint a picture like you would in a novel or poem. Both approaches are valid. Both are necessary.
Since there’s no pressure for it to be polished or publishable, journaling can be an ideal outlet for experimentation. You can try writing in different styles and formats. My journal entries range from analytical breakdowns of how I spent every minute of my day to philosophical essays. Some are just a sentence or two. Others are thousands of words long and broken into parts.
This year, I want to get even more experimental with my journaling. Maybe I’ll try writing a poem about the day’s events, or get back to drawing illustrations to visualize what I’m writing about. The possibilities are limitless, and that’s part of what makes journaling so fun.
Over the past two years that I’ve been journaling daily, and the past thirteen years I’ve been journaling overall, I’ve learned a lot. About myself, about creativity, about the challenges and big questions of life. At this point, it’s something I can’t imagine not doing. It provides clarity in a way that little else can. In our modern era, when we’re bombarded with information and opinions from every direction all the time, clarity is more important than ever.
Through journaling, I’ve been able to get clarity on important decisions in my life. I’ve grappled with ideas that matter deeply to me. I’ve learned more about myself and my creative process. The things I’ve discovered and worked out through journaling have altered my trajectory for the better in significant ways.
Writing every day, documenting your life, reflecting on your thoughts, and creating a space for artistic experimentation can have a profound effect on the way you think, act, and write. Journaling might just change your life. It’s changed mine.
You can watch the video version of this post here. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
My latest work
I’m finishing the first draft of Catalyst of Control right now. If you’re interested in reading it early (and for free!), you can apply here.
Recommendations
Listen: This song from Sunset Blvd. I got to see the phenomenal new Broadway production this month.
Read: The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson, a fascinating look into the science of what we’re made of.
Watch: Nickel Boys, directed by RaMell Ross, a film shot in first-person perspective. I had the pleasure of speaking with its innovative cinematographer Jomo Fray at a screening last month.
