• Journaling is an important tool for all successful people. How to start keeping a personal diary

    15.08.2019
    • …and better understand yourself

    In books about the life of high society, there are often episodes of communication between young ladies with a personal diary. Then it was fashionable and generally accepted, no one asked the question "why to conduct Personal diary»?

    Each girl considered it her duty to pour out sighs and mental anguish paper friend. And be sure to hide it away from mother, otherwise it will fall on nuts for kisses with a brave hussar under a bird cherry bush.

    In childhood, many kept personal diaries in ordinary checkered notebooks, but then they abandoned them. Isn't it in vain? Why do you need to keep a diary? I will give you a number of reasons for the practical benefits of this habit.

    Daily entries develop discipline

    It is much more difficult to repeat a simple action regularly than it is to complete a difficult task in one sitting. By accustoming yourself to keep daily records, you will see how much easier it has become to perform simple but routine work. She is the biggest part of her success.

    We do not always adequately perceive what we do

    First we set a goal. Then our lazy subconscious says: “Well, don’t be a bore, if we rest a little, then there will be nothing terrible!” And somehow it so imperceptibly turns out that we are not moving towards our goal at all, although we seem to be doing something.

    And if you open the diary and look? Suddenly it turns out that on Monday we were too lazy, on Tuesday our stomach hurt ... And so on. If you write down everything that you do, you will not be able to deceive yourself: the facts are here.

    We forget bad things very quickly.

    Sometimes we ourselves do not know why we feel uncomfortable communicating with certain person or don't like the job. The bad is erased as if by a flash of the memory neutralizer from Men in Black. And the time well spent is remembered long years. Because "yesterday" always seems better than "today". This is how our psyche works.

    Often we make the wrong decisions based on our bright memories. The diary is needed to preserve the individual details of what is happening, and not the whole image of events, distorted by the absence of forgotten facts.

    Based on memory, it is difficult to find a gap formed from a dozen repeating trifles. But we do have a diary!

    … and useful things we forget just as quickly

    Unfortunately, this is how our memory works - information that we do not use regularly evaporates from the brain like morning dew. To save space. We may forget important events of his life, because at that moment they did not seem fateful. The head is not rubber, everything will not fit.

    Keeping a diary will help you see the path you have traveled.

    Sometimes it seems that you are doing the work of Sisyphus, you are exhausted, you try, you do not sleep at night and you do not see the results. Even hands down!

    But gradual changes are imperceptible. Being inside the process, we are not always able to see the development. And for this you need to analyze what is happening. And, of course, to document it, fixing each, even a small success.

    ... give vent to emotions, put everything in order ...

    Sometimes, such anger will attack that it tears from the inside! Or sad, heaviness on the heart presses ...

    But after all, we later regret the words spoken in a fit of anger (if there is a conscience). Crying into a friend's vest is also not the case: whiners are not honored. And can you be sure that your feelings will not become the property of all mutual acquaintances?

    Paper will endure everything. And she doesn't have a tongue to gossip about. The diary will help not only to throw out the boiled, but also to understand the situation. Emotions don't work well. But when you write, the nerves calm down, the ability to think logically returns. Everything that happened becomes transparent and simple.

    …and better understand yourself

    By analyzing different situations in this way, you will be able to learn about your strengths and weaknesses. Why are certain behaviors of acquaintances annoying, why do you act this way and not otherwise? Trying to analyze “verbally”, you can miss something important. But nothing will be lost in the diary.

    In a few years you will find out that you have become a different person.

    If you re-read the diary after a long time, you can come to funny discoveries. It always seems to us that internally we remain the same, we only increase fat and count new wrinkles. But a lot has actually happened over the years.

    A diary will help you see yourself in retrospect. This view will give the necessary understanding: we are changing, developing, improving, gaining life experience. If you do not think about it, it seems that life stands still. That's why people keep a diary.

    There are many types of diaries. The most familiar to us is the personal one, about which a lot has been said - in it we write about everything that happens to us. There are also more highly specialized diaries - training, travel, books read, nutrition (diet), achievements in work.

    For example, a diary of books you read is needed to periodically refresh stories and impressions in your memory, otherwise they are simply washed away by time. Food diary - to know exactly how much we ate, including those moments when the brain was "out". Separate genres - a diary of travel or dreams - can form the basis of the book. Isn't it a tempting prospect?

    And for a snack, let me remind you that progress has already reached electronic diaries. Why keep a diary in a notebook if it can live in your tablet / smartphone under the seal of a strong password? Modern technologies will allow not only to always carry records with you, but also to group them by areas (family, work, sports), as well as to rate events. There are also separate applications for fixing results in sports or nutrition.

    When you look at your life without looking at specific details, much is not clear. Where does this dissatisfaction come from, why does everything not work out as dreamed? Conscious living, which is talked about so much, involves a thoughtful analysis of each of your actions. And in this, like no one better, a faithful and forgiving friend - a diary - will help.

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    Many people do not understand why keep a diary. Others do not understand what can be written in a diary. Still others believe that keeping a diary is the fun of teenagers. And only a few know how useful a diary can be. So, 10 reasons to start and regularly keep a diary.

    1. The diary allows you to achieve your goals

    Any goal must be written down. An unwritten goal can simply fly out of your head, and you immediately forget about what you wanted. The written goal gains strength, being postponed to your subconscious. When you write down a goal, the brain itself begins to look for ways to achieve it, just like an autopilot. Ask people who didn't achieve their goals if the goals were written down - in most cases the answer is no. On the contrary, most people who achieve the desired results always have goals written down before their eyes. Write down your goals in your diary: for five years, for a year, for a month, for a week, for the next day - success will be guaranteed.

    2. Journaling increases your level of awareness.

    By writing down our reflections, observations and comments every day, we get the opportunity to look at ourselves from the outside; think again about whether we are living the life we ​​want to live, whether we are doing the things we want.

    3. A diary helps you save your brilliant ideas.

    Agree that we all have brilliant ideas from time to time. But, either we are busy, or there is no pencil at hand, or we are already going to go to bed. How much brilliant ideas disappears like this? Don't let this happen to you too - look at geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, for example - he kept a diary.

    4. Journaling increases self-discipline

    When you write down the plan for the next day in a diary, the likelihood that you will complete everything is much greater than if you kept everything in your head. From the handwritten “jog at 7.00” is no longer “get out”.

    5. A diary helps you express your thoughts better.

    Keeping a diary, you become a writer, a journalist who describes the life of one very interesting and good man- You. In this way, you improve your writing and public speaking skills.

    6. Keeping a diary allows you to use past experiences.

    Scrolling through the diary, we can look at all the things that happened to us in the past. We can use this invaluable experience in the present and in the future.

    7. Keeping a journal builds self-confidence.

    Look at all the things that you have already achieved, starting from, say, birth! Firstly, you were already born and learned to read if you read this far))
    When I reread my diary, it amuses me how the goals that I set for myself a few years ago seem ridiculous and elementary to me today. It gives me a boost of energy and positive every day.

    You can also build confidence by doing a simple exercise: write down at least 5 things you do every day and enjoy the results.

    8. A diary makes your actions an order of magnitude more efficient.

    In a diary, you can record your experiences for the day. This will allow you to gain experience and wisdom that you can only dream of. Imagine there are 365 days in a year. Every day you are visited by several discoveries, insights, several thoughts. How many such useful thoughts will come to your mind in a year?

    For example, in your diary, you can record answers to the following questions:
    What did I do well today?
    What could I have done differently?

    9. A diary helps you get rid of negativity.

    All positive thoughts written down on paper gain strength. Negative ones, on the contrary, lose their power. If during the day you have accumulated negative experiences, you do not need to pour out this heavenly nectar on relatives and friends, share your thoughts with a diary.

    10. Become a coach for yourself

    Answer questions that are important to you in your diary. Concentrate on what is truly valuable to you in life. Learn to look at any situation from the outside. And look at yourself sometimes too. Get the results you truly deserve. The diary will help you become a coach for yourself!

    Do you write a diary?

    Life goes by fast. Today we are young and energetic, and waking up one day, we understand that the former "charge" is gone. The most important things are our experiences caused by certain events occurring in our lives.

    Don't let your life just go by like a stream of experiences that you won't remember. It is never too late to stop to realize their meaning. Keeping a diary will help you with this.

    Diary now so you don't forget later

    Because life moves so fast, it's important to record how it goes. There are so many little things that happen to us every day that shape who we are. Accounting for these experiences, the way they happen, can show us how we made important decisions later in life.

    Diary for processing feelings

    Another interesting journaling practice is processing your emotions to help you move on with your life. For example, if there is someone close who hurt you, or even it happened that someone died, and you did not have a chance to tell them what you wanted. Writing a “letter” to them in a diary instead of keeping the feelings inside can be a great thing to do to process your emotions.

    It is not necessary to store such works. Some people write them for the sake of transferring their feelings from their heads to paper, in order to burn or destroy them.

    Diary of your successes

    Another interesting thing to keep in a diary is all your progress. In case of failures, it is nice to go back in time with the notes and see that you are not a complete failure and that you have something to offer humanity. We can be very hard on ourselves, especially if we fail at something, feel we are not understood by others, or do not live up to our own expectations. Having a detailed record of our progress helps us get out of a negative rut and move forward in life.

    Diary to understand your mistakes

    Keeping a diary of failures is just as important as keeping a diary of successes. First, we can learn from our failures. It is madness to do the same thing and hope for a different result. Writing down your failures and learning from them is essential. This will keep us from going crazy and making the same mistakes over and over again.

    Second, it's important to understand that we can't all be amazing and amazing every second of every day. Understanding what you can and cannot do keeps you balanced and realistic. It also gives you permission to occasionally make mistakes without being extremely hard on yourself.

    How to keep a diary

    Now that you know the benefits of journaling, here are some tips on how to journal.

    Write at least once a week. Ideally, of course, if you take notes daily. You can even take a few small notes throughout the day. But if you write once a week, every week, then that's great.

    In order to make records, you can use special programs such as day one, plain text file, or just a pen and paper. Classic option, of course, is a diary in the form of a beautiful notebook. If you don't want to write, you can make audio or video recordings. The cost of storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, so keeping your life story in audio or visual form is now more feasible than ever. There is something special about saying your thoughts out loud. It may seem crazy to talk to yourself, but before you give up on this idea, it's at least worth a try, especially if you don't like to sit and squeak over text.

    understand yourself, understand own desires and to analyze the errors allows the constant keeping of the diary. When a lot of thoughts gather in your head, it is best to throw them out on paper. By recording the events that occur during the day in a personal diary, there is a unique opportunity to carefully analyze the mistakes made, actions and deeds. You can conclude how correctly you acted under the circumstances. In general, solid pluses.

    10 Key Messages About the Importance of a Personal Diary

    So, in order to understand why keep a diary and write down all your thoughts, actions and plans there, you should study the main advantages of this activity.

    1. A personal diary allows you to achieve your goals.

      All plans or desires must be detailed on paper. An unwritten goal can be forgotten over time, distracted by other activities, relegated to the background due to circumstances. And the written goal is sure to be firmly fixed in the mind, it becomes a guideline for movement in life. The brain independently begins to look for all possible ways to achieve the intended plans. Some scientists compare this behavior of the brain with the work of an autopilot in an airplane. If you ask people who could not get desired result, whether their ultimate goal was written down on paper, they will answer no. Conversely, many people who get what they have planned always record their thoughts in a personal diary. Ask them why they should keep a diary, and you'll hear a whole host of reasons. Writing down wishes on paper in most cases guarantees success.

    2. Helps to lead a conscious life.

      By recording daily in the diary their thoughts, comments or observations, people get the opportunity to look at themselves from the outside after a while. This allows you to think about the way of life, to analyze its correctness and your purposefulness. We can forget a lot, it's human nature. The diary will tell you. Are you living the way you always wanted to? Are you doing what you planned? Or are you “mired” in everyday problems, difficulties at work and do not strive at all for what you really wanted?

    3. Personal diary save ideas

      All people are visited from time to time. But if they are not written down on paper, they are lost and forgotten. To prevent this from happening to you, enter all brilliant thoughts in a diary. Even those ideas that seem unrealizable today may "shoot" tomorrow. You don't want to forget about them tomorrow, do you?

    4. Personal diary disciplines

      If you write down in the diary all the things that you plan to do in the near future, then the likelihood of their implementation increases significantly. The point here is not only that you will not forget about them. You can classify the tasks recorded in the diary according to the degree of importance for you, and develop a plan for their implementation in the same place.

    5. The diary teaches you to express your thoughts competently and clearly

      If you are disciplined, get along with ideas and achieve goals, and still do not understand why keep a diary, what exactly this activity will give you, then you should pay attention to this point. Keeping a personal diary is a kind of story about the life of one person. You become a writer who improves his skills daily. This way of presenting thoughts motivates you to make your story better and more interesting.

    6. Allows you to learn from your mistakes

      Looking at the events and actions described in the diary, you can look at them from the other side. In this sense, the diary is a powerful transformational tool. You should use your experience in the future to avoid similar mistakes.

    7. Strengthens self-confidence

      The question of why many people keep diaries is very relevant today. Many of them eventually become more self-confident, analyzing the past, changing the future, understanding themselves. To do this, it is enough to open the notes made several years ago and read the recorded thoughts. This effective method to understand how much you have grown in a particular area, how much your attitude to certain issues has changed. And the analysis of a children's personal diary can not only energize and positive emotions after reading touching "problems", but also find an absolutely non-comical solution to critical situations of adult life.

    8. Increases the effectiveness of actions

      To understand why other people keep diaries, try to write down all the experiences gained in a day for a month. After reading these notes after a while, you will notice how much wiser and more experienced you have become. Emotions thrown out on paper, ideas written down, goals written in stages in a personal diary help to structure life and act more effectively.

    9. Gets rid of negative emotions

      It is no secret that all positive thoughts written in the diary acquire special power. Thus, keeping a personal diary allows you to get rid of sadness, envy or anger. If during the day you have accumulated a lot of experiences, you should not splash them out on loved ones. You just need to start a personal diary and write down your thoughts there. Share your experiences with your diary, this will help not only to avoid scandals, but also to understand the problem.

    10. Personal diary - tutorial

      Answer all questions that concern you. If you decide to start a personal diary, then try to concentrate on what really matters to you in life. It's no secret that the beginning of a personal diary rarely coincides with its middle. Your thoughts and goals change, become clearer. You develop, allow yourself to look at your life from the outside. Try to get the results you deserve. Teach yourself to live, think and feel correctly.

    In conclusion, it is worth noting that any beginning of a personal diary is a modest attempt to write down your actions and plans on paper. But over time, this behavior will become a habit and the records will become more sensual and meaningful. From banal descriptions of events, you will move on to an in-depth analysis of situations. This will help in completely unexpected life situations. Try it.

    It is amazing that such a simple thing as a personal diary can simultaneously be a creative laboratory, a caring psychotherapist, a source of memories, a tool for self-development, and most importantly, a reliable shelter behind which you can be absolutely honest with others and with yourself. It is even more surprising that all these qualities are often not realized even by those who once tried to keep regular records in their notebooks, notepads and diaries.

    Keeping a diary is not fruitless self-digging. This is not an activity reserved exclusively for young girls and teenagers who need to sort out their feelings and sentimental experiences. And this is not just a prosecutorial businesslike fixation of the events that happened to you over the past day.

    It is also wrong to think that journaling is only for outstanding people who "have something to say." It is true that among famous writers, scientists or artists it is difficult to find someone who would not keep records intended only for themselves. But even if you do not claim to be a genius, this is not a reason to abandon this useful practice. In addition, there is always the possibility that you are still a genius, and many years after your death, the heirs will receive substantial royalties for the publication of your diary.

    Jean-Paul Sartre

    Nausea

    To turn the most banal incident into an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient to tell it.<...>Each person is always a storyteller, he lives surrounded by stories, his own and others, and sees everything that happens to him through their prism. So he tries to fit his life to the story about her.

    Diaries are written to be written, read and reread. Here are some answers to the reasonable question “what is it for?”:

    • to pour out on paper and realize those feelings that cannot be trusted to others;
    • to figure out what you want from life;
    • to understand how your plans correspond to reality and whether you are moving towards their implementation in the right way;
    • to better understand other people and learn to take into account their point of view;
    • to train in the expression of their thoughts and learn to reason;
    • to recognize and change harmful thought habits and behavioral patterns;
    • to develop intuitive thinking and creativity.

    What to write about

    Who am I?

    A piece of paper that "endures everything" is almost the only place in this world where you can be yourself. This may be said too categorically: in the end, each personality is multifaceted and needs different contexts for its realization. But the honesty and openness that can be achieved in a diary is very rarely available to us in other areas of life.

    In the diary, you can reflect on your past and make plans for the future. This is a well-known exercise: try to imagine what kind of life you would like to lead in 5/10/15 years? Then relate what you are doing now to your long-term intentions. If the pictures don't match, maybe it's time to change something. In this practice, it is the recording procedure that is useful.

    If you think about the future, then the gaps between dream and reality are smoothed out. In the recording, they appear with all obviousness.

    If you don't know what you want to do in this world, a diary will help you come closer to understanding your strengths and deep intentions. Record in a diary what brings you joy and causes sincere interest. A person immersed in business may suddenly realize that the soul of a poet has always been hidden under a business mask. The diary will give him the opportunity to develop this particular side of his personality, not forgetting about the others.

    If you have been keeping a diary for several years, when you reread it, your personality will be revealed to you in dynamics. How have your priorities and values ​​changed? What was important to you then and what remains now? So keeping a diary helps to see your life as a whole, albeit an incomplete picture. The diary brings unity and length to a series of broken moments, in it "each moment carries the burden of everything previous and the germ of everything that follows" (Lydia Ginzburg).

    Lev Tolstoy

    Resurrection

    For two years I did not write a diary and thought that I would never return to this childishness. And this was not childishness, but a conversation with oneself, with that true, divine self that lives in every person. All the time this I was sleeping, and I had no one to talk to.

    With the “true me”, perhaps Lev Nikolaevich went too far. The diary does not record everything social masks, because it is impossible. But it helps to understand which one fits you better. Perhaps this understanding will lead to a change of masks, a change of personality. As Susan Sontag wrote in her diary, "by masking my behavior, I do not protect my personality - I overcome it". The right way change something - understand how it works. The diary does not just record what is happening around; it changes its owner. Usually for the better.

    If you suffer from low self-esteem, self-doubt, and see only the negative side of everything, diary entries will help you overcome these bad thinking habits and look at the world more realistically. This is how the diary is used, for example, in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. This is not only useful, but also absolutely free (unlike visits to an analyst and antidepressants).

    Recently, there has been scientific evidence for the benefits of journaling. Psychologists from Duke University (USA) have found that writing down exciting events and your own experiences not only improves memory and well-being, but also reduces the frequency of visiting doctors.

    Timothy Wilson, one of the authors of the studies, writes about it this way: “Such written interventions can really help people start thinking positively and believing in their own abilities”; “Writing lyrics makes people understand everything that bothers them and find new meaning in it.”

    People who are prone to self-flagellation usually pass praise on deaf ears, but they react extremely sharply to any critical remarks. If you record in your diary when you were explicitly or implicitly praised, you may be surprised to find that others treat you not at all as badly as you thought. When you are depressed after another failure, re-read the entries about joyful events and situations when you showed your best side.

    After that, it will become much easier to believe that the world is not so bad and hopeless, and all difficulties can be overcome.

    As one of the Buddhist thinkers said, the “I” given in reflection is not the true “I”, it is constructed by the mind. But it is a mistake to think that this "I" can be found in some other place. Think that real man does not reflect, but does things, at least naively and unfairly: you need to do both.

    How do I treat other people?

    The constant heroes of the diary are not only ourselves, but also our loved ones. Some keep a diary solely to vent their resentment, anger, feelings of loneliness, abandonment and misunderstanding that haunt them in relationships with others. And here you can figure out how these relationships work: why do you repeat the same mistakes? What do you expect from loved ones and how justified are these expectations?

    You can take notes in the "unsent letter" format, saying to the end what you cannot say in real communication. You can try to take the position of another person and write a monologue on his behalf: how does he see the current situation? maybe you are missing something and from his point of view everything looks completely different? Such exercises help develop empathy and the ability to see the world as a multidimensional space of choice and evaluation, in which everyone is right in their own way.

    The diary will not replace live communication and real relationships. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “we become free people not because we ourselves, as they say terribly, implement each alone, but because we go beyond our own limits, enter into relationships with other people and, in a sense, deny ourselves in them. For self-development, it is not enough to create a safe platform for yourself, where you can “water and grow yourself like flowers” ​​- this requires other people and real actions. But the diary will help you understand what you want from them, what is really important to you.

    If you can give yourself an honest answer to these questions, then building relationships with other people will become much easier.

    An example of using the diary to solve personal dilemmas can be found in the biography of Charles Darwin. When it comes to marriage, he writes down, with the meticulousness of a naturalist, the cons (“an endless amount of trouble and expense ... disputes due to lack of society - morning visits - a daily waste of time”) and pluses of this enterprise (“it is impossible to lead a life alone, without participation, without children ... Cheer up, trust in chance - take a close look around - there are many happy slaves"). And in the end he makes a decision: he must definitely get married.

    Diary as an intellectual and creative laboratory

    The diary can become the place where vague thoughts and experiences are melted into precise formulations and artistic images. You don't have to be a professional writer or artist to think and imagine. Creative skills These are not class privileges. They are available to anyone, but not everyone uses the entrance. A personal diary is exactly the place where you can think and fantasize as much as you like and not be afraid that someone will judge you for naivety and graphomania.

    Write down thoughts and ideas from the books you read that hooked you in a diary. Make lists of literature. Create verbal portraits of people and thinkers close to you. Make sketches. Compose . Paste photos and magazine clippings. Make collages. Write down your dreams (the list is endless).

    Pablo Picasso

    Spanish painter, sculptor and designer, founder of cubism

    Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

    The diary assumes complete freedom of expression: here you can do whatever you want. But over time, you will realize that certain forms of utterance are easier for you than others.

    The personal diary as a form of writing appears to have first appeared in Japan. The diaries of Japanese court ladies and poets, written in the 10th-11th centuries, have come down to us, where prose easily flows into poetry. Some fragments from these diaries may touch the modern reader:

    “If only my thoughts were the same as those of others ... I could find more joy, I would feel not so old and would observe this transient life with peace.<...>When dawn broke, I looked outside and saw ducks swimming serenely in the lake.

    Ducks in the lake -
    Can I look at them
    Indifferent?
    Crossing the swirling waters
    Sad world and me.

    The birds looked so serene, but they, too, must often suffer, I thought ”(Murasaki-shikibu. Diary. XXIII. 13th day of the 10th moon).

    As writer Tristina Reiner points out in her book The New Diary, the form of a diary corresponds to all four basic mechanisms of human perception, which include emotions, sensations, intuition and intelligence. Try to develop each of these qualities, avoid monotony. And then, quite possibly, the diary will become for you a fertile ground for the development of ideas that will go beyond its limits and find embodiment in real creative projects.

    Five rules for keeping a diary

    1. Write honestly.

    As honestly as possible. Even in records that no one but you will see, you will be embarrassed or ashamed to write about some things. It is worth taking a closer look at where this awkwardness arises, where you yourself hide the truth from yourself. No one so often and successfully deceives a person as he himself. But it is much easier to recognize the sources and causes of self-deception in a diary than in mental reasoning.

    2. Keep your inner censor and critic in check.

    We not only hide the truth from ourselves, but also strive to expose our sincere experiences in an unsightly way. This role is played by the internal censor - the embodiment of Freud's "super-I", that is, the assimilated social attitudes and ideas about "how it should be." He is accompanied by an inner critic, for whom fine artistic taste and depth of reasoning are more important than sincerity. To get rid of these annoying creatures, try writing in stream of consciousness mode. Write down everything that comes to your mind: images, experiences, vague sensations and memories.

    Reflection is useful, but it's far from the only way to understand what's going on with you and your life.

    3. Write for yourself.

    We are used to the fact that any message is intended for some addressee. But a personal diary should not be oriented towards the public (this, by the way, is one of the many differences between a diary and a blog). If you are writing for an audience, even the narrowest one, your internal censor and critic will ruthlessly edit any of your messages. Better try to write for yourself. Perhaps a good target would be your "future self" who will be reading the diary in a few years.

    4. Pay attention to details.

    So that you can then resurrect past events in your memory, try to capture the details and shades of what is happening. If you just write "it was bad", then it will tell you much less than "I'm lying here on the couch, kicked out of the world with one kick, lying in wait for a dream that does not want to come, and if it comes, it will only touch me, my joints ache from fatigue, my thin body is exhausted by a tremor of unrest, the meaning of which it does not dare to clearly understand, it knocks at the temples ”(quote from the diary of Franz Kafka).

    5. Use paper and ink.

    This recommendation here is not due to inertia and retrograde. When you take notes by hand, handwriting can say as much about feelings as the words themselves. In addition, a paper notebook can be carried everywhere with you, unlike a laptop (and taking notes on a smartphone is not very convenient). Sometimes it's enough just to feel the rough surface of the paper notebook in which you write in your hands to feel a sense of confidence and security. It is better, by the way, to use notebooks with blank sheets, rather than lined diaries. The main thing is to choose writing supplies so that keeping a diary gives you pleasure.

    Some believe that diary entries should be made daily. It seems to me that this is completely unnecessary.

    It is better to write when there is a desire or need to figure something out, so that keeping a diary does not turn into another boring “must”. But at first, until the habit has formed, you will have to force yourself to open a notebook and write at least something. But if the first words were found, there will be others.

    Do not forget that each diary is a reflection of the personality of its owner (albeit incomplete and distorted). Therefore, these recommendations are somewhat generalized. But even they should not be taken too literally. What works for a conventional Leo Tolstoy may be completely useless for you. The individual style of keeping a diary develops over the years and changes over time. But in order to understand what benefit the diary can bring to you, you first need to start it.

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