Kendra Wright sits down with Zack to discuss the power of daily journaling and how it can help you organize and energize your life. She chronicles why she started journaling and how it helped her remember the awesome moments in her year while getting her through hard times as well. Listen in to learn how journaling can make you more productive!
Cheat Sheet
- Why Kendra journals and what got her started
- Why she believes that your life is less about what you do and more about what you remember
- How journaling can help you make it through the hard times
- The nitty-gritty details of Kendra’s epic journaling system
- Why Kendra has chosen the DayOne app as her digital journal
- The daily reflection questions that Kendra personally uses
- How she implements a tagging system to organize her journal
- Some of Kendra’s favorite magic moments from her year that she can recall because of her journaling habit
- The most important time to journal
- How to consistently review your journal at the end of the week
- How (and why) journaling can help you maintain focus and energy in your life
Links
- HeyKendra.com
- Day One (app)
- Our episode with Marc and Angel
- TPS02: Journaling
- TextExpander mobile
- Weekly Learnings (TinyLetter by Zack)
- How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
Book, tool, ritual
Book: Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It and The Last Lecture
Tool: News Feed Eradicator (Chrome plugin) or Kill FB Feed (Firefox Add-On)
Ritual: Daily journaling
Connect with Kendra Wright
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I heard you on the Productivity Show and got Day One.
How do you make the tags permanent so that I can choose from them instead of adding them every time?
Great question Gizem!
I can see each of those angles being valuable but in my life, I want to check in with myself on ways I’m not utilizing my time most effectively. Not because I want to “judge” myself for it, but so that I can be aware of it and make a decision on if I want to keep doing it.
This question has helped me become aware of:
– How I use mindless social media when I’m bored/uninspired instead of just taking a break or doing pomodoros (if I’m working).
– How I wasn’t being as present with people I care about (I was waiting to talk vs. full immersive listening)
– Not answering phone calls when I’m working (even if it’s going to be “quick”… because I work for myself it’s easy for me to just answer my cell when anyone calls. I realized how it was breaking my flow and distracting me and now I no longer do it (unless its a client) :)
– I also realized the same about text messaging and massively cut that back during my working hours – by telling friends “Alright, gotta go… time to start working for the day.”…. or just not replying until I take a break.
All these tiny habit shifts and awareness allow me to work LESS hours in the day then most people because I work DEEP hours. I get 8 hrs of work done in about 5-6 :)
Hope some of these insights are helpful!
What is the point of the question on the least valuable thing? I think I get the idea for most of the others, but this one is kind of confusing to me. Do we want to record some action that turned out to be a waste of time or worse so we do not repeat it again? Or do we want to think about the really small things that still matter?
Very helpful to have the ideas for tagging and easy access to a list of prompting questions – thank you!
Great podcast, thanks a lot!
I’ve started journaling only very recently and I’ve implemented Kendra’s idea of having daily questions show up when journaling, and tags.
I found this interview very helpful. I have been journaling intermittently for years about what I do each day and what’s on my mind, but these prompts provide structure for what I am documenting. I have found myself journaling every day since listening to the show and my journaling is far more meaningful. The tags system is an excellent idea and will enable me to extract ideas for my annual newsletter effortlessly rather than spending time noting these things down each month in a separate document. Thanks for a very thought provoking podcast.
Very insightful interview. After hearing the podcast I implemted a tagging system for my journal too. Thanks to Kendra for the inspiration.
Brilliant interview. I can’t find the daily questions and tags?
Here’s the questions/tags from the episode:
1. what did I accomplish?
2. what did I learn?
3. what am I grateful for?
4. what am I committed to doing better tomorrow?
5. what was my favorite thing about my day?
6. what was the least valuable thing I did today?
7. what am I most excited about in my life right now?
8. what is my greatest challenge right now?
Tags: travel, accomplishments, goals, magic moments, lessons, gratitude
Thank you for interviewing one of my favorite people.
;-)