Journaling for Clarity

Discover how writing in a journal can help you review your goals, track your progress, and achieve clarity in your life.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” — Socrates

Let's start this article by asking yourself one question.

When was the last time you had some alone time to talk with yourself and figure out what are you doing these days, measure life’s progress etc.

One interesting fact about life is that “ It’s possible for us to want for the wrong thing, achieve it and enjoy it at the current moment and regret it in the late future”

So how would you know if you are enjoying the correct thing in your life if you don’t have time to think about yourself?

Why Self Assessment?

I presume that you have set some short-term or long-term goals and have made plans for your future.

The day we create a plan we are full of energy to complete those but gradually we tend to forget what we planned initially. We get indulged in something that is nowhere related to the plans. We get soo distracted that we started enjoying it.

This is the typical cycle of how goals remain unachieved.

What if we get those realization checkpoints in frequent intervals so that even if we deviate we have option to get back on track as early as possible?

If you can relate to this, you are missing self-review. You are too busy in your life that you don’t have time to pause and look within yourself. So self-assessment in some intervals is essential.

It helps you to Pause and Re-Think your steps.

How?

You can do it by asking questions for yourself such as:

• What do I want
• Am I on the right track?
• Am I making progress on the current path?
• Am I happy on this path?
• Should I consider changing the path?

This list can be longer but you might have got the gist.

This may seem normal but this is actually serious and many of us have been missing this due to busy lifestyles, distractions such as social media, or other reasons.

These kinds of questions on some intervals will help you plan your every step and also you will be aware of your present status so you can create an early decision that may prevent you from regretting when you are in your retirement life.

Self Review System I follow

Started writing journals without any reason and eventually I found it to be effective.

I chose Journaling to do all of those. I allocate 5–10 mins daily and it gives me the opportunity to pause all other jargon and just think about myself.

I write a journal to manifest, track goals, do self-reviews, pour emotions, etc. Every day before bed, I write a journal, sometimes I wrap up with even 2–3 lines, and some days It becomes pages.

But every week or twice I must review myself with those questions.

I have a certain template that I follow which basically summarizes my day. Later I will show you how to write a journal in notion.

It basically has 2 sections one where I just dump my whole day randomly and the next section is where I answer the above-mentioned questions (not all, I think of them in general and write those which strike me most).

It’s not like without a journal one can’t assess himself. But keeping those thoughts in your mind only can fade away quickly and it can be difficult to retain and recall thoughts without a written record.

Without self-review

Let’s say I want to learn guitar. But after learning for a few days I forgot about it completely or skip for a few days for any reason and eventually, I may let it go and move on other things, leaving my guitar-playing aspirations behind.

With frequent self-review

Since learning guitar was my goal, while doing self-review it will be active in my mind. On a regular day when I used to practice, I can reflect my progress in my Journal which will provide me with insight into how far I have come and how much progress I have made in achieving my goal.

And if I stopped practicing then I will get time to stop and think about why I left practice, I would get the opportunity to know the distraction and solve it at the same time.
This is the best part of doing a self-review.

So that’s my approach to journaling and the Self-review system. Let me know your experiences as well.

We will meet in the next article.
Thanks for reading, and until next time, happy journaling!😊