Pen{g}sieve Vol 1 (II): A powerful habit to savor life and sharpen your mind
In 2013, I started journaling in an app called DayOne. It takes only 10 to 20 minutes a day, but over time, I have built a collection of over 3000 journal entries. My journaling is a habit system that captures juicy bits of my experiencing-self in writing and just-in-time for my future self.
My journal is a Pensieve (shoutout to the Harry Potter fans) that I come back to often, sometimes to savor memorable moments in the past, oftentimes to strengthen my beliefs that transformations do happen over time albeit in tiny steps. In fact, this newsletter is only possible because I have this Pensieve to draw from, thus the name “Pen{g}sieve” (which my daughter especially approved of).
A brief history of my journaling habit
My journaling started as a replacement for sharing on WeChat Moments. At the time, I noticed that, despite the reward of likes, sharing on social media was arduous. I found myself struggling to find a balance between wanting to capture as many moments as possible and keeping from oversharing. I started feeling like my social media moments were just an illusion of my real life. Until one day I found the perfect solution, a private journal, which allowed me to capture my life in an authentic way without announcing it to the world. That was my journaling system 1.0.
When I read past journal entries, I’m often surprised by how little I remember. These precious moments would have been lost if not for my Pensieve. Below are three entries from my Happiness Journal (in their original form including typos :). They are tiny moments, but well worth savoring.
The best journaling time for me is early in the morning. When I sit into my favorite reclining chair with a hot cup of tea, pull back the window shades to look over the sunny garden, and open my iPad to write in a quiet house, I feel so calm and my thoughts just pour out. Basically, I stumbled into a daily mindfulness practice without realizing it at the time.
While my old journaling system (1.0) was a huge de-stressor for my busy work life, over the past year, the system has evolved significantly, which I call “journaling on steroids” (my system 2.0). I believe journaling 2.0 is an important factor in my recent transformation. The benefits are profound:
a collection of life’s worthy moments (Journaling 1.0),
a daily mindfulness practice (Journaling 2.0)
a mental tool to debug your life incl. habit design, emotion analysis, and decision retrospective (Journaling 2.0)
the engine for my content creation (Journal 2.0)
Journaling beyond capturing memorable moments
When I started journaling, I only had one journal category. As journaling became more of a daily habit, I adapted my system. I created multiple Journals (a DayOne premium feature), each with a specific function:
Happiness journal: this is a collection of tiny moments of joy and gratitude; most of them are so fleeting that they are often lost without deliberate capturing;
Being Mindful: this is my favorite journal. It records my thoughts, my perception, and my reflection, basically pearls of my wisdom. I can record several of these entries in a day;
Life Hack: this is a habit system that forces me to implement and record a tiny systematic improvement in my life. My goal is to have one Life Hack entry per day so the compounding effect of these tiny improvements can produce a big change over time;
A beautiful question: I use this journal to think about long term problems through questioning. In each journal entry, I answer a thought-provoking question. If “Life Hack” is fine-tuning, “A beautiful question” often triggers fundamental mind shifts. It is a powerful tool (see the post on my inquiry system);
Decision logs: a collection of decision retrospectives, which is used as a mental tool to improve decision making;
Zen@Work: this records major events happening at work, my work-related mindfulness thoughts, and deliberate practices;
My life: this is a hodgepodge of everything else (mostly non-work related such as travel logs, family events, gardening, etc). This is my journaling system 1.0, my “tree-hole”, spontaneous, and not goal-driven at all.
The rest of the blog illustrates three of the journal categories from my system 2.0 that I think is a somewhat unusual way of using journaling to sharpen our minds.
Life Hack Journal
Life Hack is an example of using the journaling habit to create another habit: consistently integrate one tiny systematic improvement to my life every day. For instance, establishing a routine of reading books for 20 minutes a day is counted as one systematic improvement. The next day I have to find another systematic improvement while making sure reading books is part of my daily routine.
You can imagine how powerful a habit of systematic improvements can be. If each life hack is a 1% improvement, compounding over a year, it becomes Power-of(1.01, 365) = 37.78 times improvement.
As you can see above, when I started this habit back in January, the life hacks were about more mundane things such as wearing a pair of fleece pants while walking Leo (that’s a systematic improvement because it made winter dog walk enjoyable). But as time went by, life hacks became deeper, such as organizing Zoom reunions to help people stay connected.
Being Mindful Journal
I use this journal to build up my mindfulness practice. This is my favorite journal category because it allows me to “debug” my mind and dig deeper into it.
Above is an example of how I reflected on how a lack of clarity impacted my work. The trigger of that reflection was a comment shared by someone from a group coaching session. Note that defining a template (shown to the left) is important because it gives a structure for this type of analysis. For example, the “How do I deal with it” section forces me to think about a remedy to the problem instead of merely understanding a problem. Often the outcome of a Being Minding entry becomes a Life Hack entry.
Decision Journal
I use this journal to improve my decision-making skills. Basically, it defines a system to capture the decision-making process in writing following a check-list and to evaluate the decision afterward so that each decision is a learning cycle.
Above is an example of a recent decision on whether to take an online course called Building the Second Brain. My first reaction was not to take it because it was too expensive, but by capturing the decision on paper, I was able to reason through the decision-making process. I realized that I am learning an essential skill and gaining access to a very different community of writers, bloggers, solopreneurs that could benefit me for the rest of my life, so it is worth any one-time price tag. The course turned out to be a transforming experience for me: somehow it changed my mindset from being a content consumer to being a content producer. Without taking the course, this newsletter probably would not have been started.
The approach of using daily journaling to dive deep into a specific area for deliberate improvements applies to many areas. I have created many other short-term journals, such as a learning journal when I wanted to look at how I improve my learning skills; an interview journal to document job discussions, soft-skill question reflections, and ups/downs during the job search; and a journal on starting a side-hustle business to record the experience of trying something totally new.
How do changes happen?
Looking back, Journaling 2.0 is an important part of what transformed me in the past year. Not only does journaling improve mindfulness (i.e., the ability to notice) which is critical to any self-transformation, it also defines a method that allows us to analyze and improve abstract things such as cognitive process, emotional triggers, and meaning & purpose.
Some people may be overwhelmed by Journaling 2.0 and wonder if life is still fun with so much deliberate design. The truth is that finding the right system to get better at something you care about is liberating! Is there anyone who does not feel some degree of stagnation in certain aspects of our lives, such as living in the same messy house, getting stuck in the same old job, and experiencing the same mental fog, internal fear, and lack of energy for years, or simply feeling that we are not getting any better?
So how do changes happen? If you have the right system in place, then most big changes can be broken down into tiny steps, and all you need to do is to stick to it. My journaling system is one example of such. You don’t have to use mine, but do, design your own!