If you’re on my mailing list, you’ve been getting my 10 favorite journaling tips. Here they all are in one place, in case you missed any!
Tip #1: Daily practice
This just might be my favorite tip, which is why I’ve put it first:
Spend a little bit of time in your studio every day, even if it’s literally one minute.
My dad, who’s a serious jazz drummer, taught me a long time ago that something magical happens to your creative practice when you come to it every day.
But we don’t do that, because we think it means “Spend an hour a day writing.” That creates a giant wall of resistance. And the wall only gets higher every time we avoid studio time.
Inside our Growth Club community, we’re big fans of using small habits to keep our momentum. That means we come up with an itsy-bitsy version of a habit that we can do literally even on our worst days.
I call it the “minimum viable habit.” So for your studio journal, it might be writing literally a single sentence in the journal, or looking over some writing you’ve already done.
If you don’t already keep a journal, grab any blank book you might have lying around and join us! If you have one that you started and didn’t finish, use that. (You can cut the old pages out if you feel like it.)
You can certainly pick something up, but it doesn’t need to be fancy. Lynda Barry, the marvelous memoirist, uses cheap black and white composition notebooks. You can even fold a small stack of printer paper in half as a booklet.
The practice matters a lot more than how fancy your notebook is.
Tip #2: Every day is a fresh start
Sketchbook artists know that some days we make ugly drawings and some days we make great drawings. The more days we show up, the more good drawing days we get to have.
You might be tempted to start off with a complicated bullet journal format that uses four different colors of fountain pen, some expensive washi tape, a hand-drawn calendar, and a seventeen-page guide to all of the codes and systems you’re planning on using.
Around the fourth day, that’s going to exhaust you.
“Well, I messed it up and now it’s wrecked and I don’t feel good about it and it’s not fun and I feel crummy.”
So: Make a fresh start. Turn the page and write something new.
This doesn’t just get your blank books filled, it’s also a great practice for any creative work.
Yesterday’s work might be terrible. Today’s work might be stiff and clunky. But tomorrow you have a fresh day to show up.
If you mess a page up, turn the page and write something new.
If you rage-scribbled five pages of ranting at your housemate for never doing the dishes, turn the page and write something new.
If you just wrote the dumbest poem in the history of dumb poetry, turn the page and write something new.
And if you have a blank book that you started at some point and then abandoned, take it down off the shelf and start a new page.
Tip #3: Finish the book
This one’s easy.
Whether you write every day or every week or every six months, take the book you already started and keep writing in it until there are no more blank pages.
Even if you change directions. Or feel like you messed it up. (See Tip #2.) Or you have a new pretty blank book you picked up and you’re itching to write in that one.
Fill up the journal you have going now, then start a new one.
There is a curious satisfaction to completing anything. And that curious satisfaction does something interesting to your creative brain.
I don’t know the neuroscience behind it, but I do know that finishing things makes us feel confident. It also sparks tons of new ideas.
Artists finish sketchbooks. Writers finish journals. You’re an artist, and a writer, and you finish your journals and then you get the fun of starting new ones.
By the way, this is a hidden advantage of using cheap composition notebooks. They’re short, so they fill up fast.
Finish every book. Let them start stacking up up on your shelf. Label them with the dates. (I just use a metallic Sharpie on the spine.)
Your completed journals are rich resources to go through later. You’ll find that when you’re stuck for an idea for what to write about, or you want to make some progress in personal development or your business, you can go back through those old journals and you’ll find gold there.
But even if you never go through your old journals, they sit there on your shelf as a constant reminder:
You write, so you must be a writer. You keep creative journals, so you must be creative.
Tip #4: Build it to suit
My fourth tip is to design your Portable Writer’s Studio to suit your needs, not someone else’s.
There are journals out there that come pre-printed with ideas about how you should use them. I even saw one journal that’s designed to use when you’re high. (Now there’s a niche.)
If you have something pre-printed that works for you, feel free to use it. But for your creative space, you probably want more flexibility.
And if you have something that mostly works, but there’s a category you don’t want, rewrite it. Use some tape or a marker to block out the header you don’t need and replace it with what you do.
Inside Creative Fierce, we use a format I call the Portable Writer’s Studio, that uses color to define different page types.
And rather than deciding in advance that you’ll have a 20-page Idea Garden (for example), you work a few pages at a time, which lets you fill the book up. (As I mentioned above, washi tape is an easy way to do this.)
Try not to overcomplicate things with 15 or 20 different categories. You really only need to mark the pages that you want to revisit later.
So I happen to use green washi tape for my Idea Garden. I set aside 4-6 pages, and when it’s full, I start a new Idea Garden wherever I am in the book.
Do as much or as little color coding as you want. Maybe you’d like orange for quotations, blue for research, and sparkly silver for business planning.
Your studio, your categories, your rules.
Because every page is a fresh start in the journal, if you decide your system isn’t quite right, just turn the page and try a new system.
You’ll probably find you settle on something that suits you fairly quickly. But even if you don’t, you can adjust and adapt as often as you feel like it.
Build your studio to suit your needs and your preferences.
Tip #5: Keep it private
Keep your creative journal private.
Because, real talk: Most people’s ideas start out kind of funny-looking.
Great creative ideas are almost always developed over time.
Whether you’re talking about writing, painting, business, a film, or a four-part interpretive dance piece — the first versions of your idea are gonna need some work.
And that work is best done in private.
A harsh critique at the wrong point can kill a piece of work. And a pile of well-meaning praise at the wrong point can also kill a piece of work.
Journals are places you can get messy, and even ugly. You might work through some pretty scary ideas. (I wonder what Stephen King’s creative journal looks like.) You might have some thoughts that seem shameful or unworthy.
That’s all juicy material for exploration. But if you don’t keep that space private, you won’t have the room to be completely honest.
Now, sometimes you might want to share a page or two, and that’s completely cool. But make that an exception.
Keep your journal private by default, and share selectively, if at all.
Tip #6: Let it get messy
One of my non-negotiable rules for my own journals is that they are allowed to get messy.
Because I use the metaphor of a studio space, I like to think of my journals as having the verbal equivalent of paint splashed on the floor, canvasses stacked up everywhere, and lots of half-finished drawings tacked to the walls.
If you look for #bulletjournals on Instagram, you’ll see hundreds of images of colorful calendars, charts, and to-do lists. Some of the “BuJo” folks even use what they call “fonts” — which are just visual styles for their hand lettering.
It looks cool on Instagram. It’s probably great marketing for blank books and art supplies. But it’s very different from a working creative journal.
If you don’t have some ugly pages in your journal, you’re probably getting too precious with it. Let yourself record some dumb ideas in there. Do some doodling on your notes. Use a Sharpie to circle things.
In my workshops, I encourage diehard perfectionists to mess up their journals as soon as you crack open a new blank book. Spill a little black coffee or red wine in there, or let a toddler scribble on the first pages. (I picked this trick up from sketchbook artists, who can get as frozen by the blank page as any writer.)
Instagram-ready perfect pages are great as finished work. But your real journal is the one you feel comfortable making a mess in.
Tip #7: Keep as few notebooks as possible
Back when I worked with the wonderful editor-in-chief for Copyblogger, Stefanie Flaxman, I noticed that she had a whole bunch of journals going at once.
She had one for content notes, one for business notes from our editorial meetings, and others known only to her.
And that was the perfect system for Stefanie. But it’s not the perfect system for a lot of folks.
When I’m deciding how many notebooks to keep going at any one time, I like to channel my inner Albert Einstein,
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” *
That means I dump nearly everything into one book. Notes from meetings, business plans, content ideas, and the occasional rant at the injustice of the universe.
When do I move to a different book? When there’s a compelling reason. So at the moment, I use a cheaper notebook for to-do lists, because they’re purely disposable. And I use a good sketchbook for sketches and watercolor, because regular notebook paper isn’t great for those media.
If you have a great reason to split off a function, do it. If you don’t, save your mental energy — and fill up your blank books faster — by consolidating as much as you can into one book.
* OK, like most of the good Einstein quotes, that one is probably not real. What he really said, in a lecture in 1933, was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
Which, tbh, is a much better quote for having been simplified.
Tip #8: Take it with you (nearly) everywhere
This hasn’t been as critical during lockdown, but as we go back to doing things outside the house again,
Take your journal with you (nearly) everywhere.
Take it to work, take it on vacation, take it to conferences.
Hauling your journal everywhere makes it a part of your life, not something you do “when you have time.”
You’ve probably noticed that ideas strike you at the least convenient times. (For example, when you’re out on a walk, or when you’re taking a shower.)
The journal might not do too well in the shower, but you can probably bring it with you on that head-clearing walk.
One option is to stuff a tiny cheap notebook or some index cards into your pocket, along with a small pen or scrap of a pencil. That gives you a wonderfully portable way to capture ideas on the fly. And because the journal is allowed to get messy, you can just tape those into your permanent journal when you get home. No friction, nothing fancy.
Once you’ve filled your current journal up, consider portability when you’re picking up the next notebook. Make it something that can be thrown into a bag, backpack, or even a pocket, so it can ride along with you.
Tip #9: Avoid “I have to”
Instead of telling yourself, or someone else, that you have to work on your writing today, use the phrase,
I get to.”
Creativity isn’t in the same category as emptying the cat box or paying bills.
Creative work is something we get to do. It’s a privilege that we grant ourselves.
I know this sounds like a small, silly hack … and in a lot of ways, it is.
It’s also easy. And you may find, as I have, that it’s surprisingly powerful.
When will you get to mess around with your creative journal today?
Tip #10: Make excuses to play
Productivity types love to wag their fingers at you for making excuses.
I have a bunch of issues with this (partly because there’s so often a good reason behind what we call an “excuse,”) but this tip asks the question:
Are you making enough excuses?
Specifically, are you making enough excuses to open your journal, play around with some words, write down kooky ideas, and generally let yourself put words together in a way that makes you happy?
We all have so many responsibilities. We take care of business, we take care of the bills, we take care of the people we love, and then … we collapse into some Netflix and that bag of stale Halloween candy we found at the back of the cupboard. No judgment from me on that one.
But … have you considered making more excuses to do creative stuff that actually makes you feel good?
“I’ve worked hard this morning, I deserve 10 minutes to play with glitter pens in my journal.”
“That was a rough meeting. I deserve to copy out some Black Panther dialogue in my journal to feel better.”
“I’m so tired of being stuck at home. I deserve to put my phone on airplane mode and spend 20 minutes planning for the fun side hustle I want to build.”
Sneak moments of creativity in. Make excuses to mess around with creative work, especially “frivolous” creative work. Play more. Grind a little less.
What could you make an excuse to do today?
Those are our tips!
Hope you enjoyed the series. If you want more advice on productivity and creative confidence, keep watching your in-box.
I’ll shortly be sending out a PDF report on 7 Things Prolific Writers Do Differently. I’ve pulled together the most valuable advice I know to develop habits that will keep you creatively productive.
Until then, keep writing!
Sonia
