The Benefits Of A Work Journal

The classic to-do list can be useful tool to facilitate productivity, but it’s not without shortcomings.

For instance, assignments on your list may involve a series of interconnected tasks, or require multiple steps that you can’t easily describe in list format. Sometimes in the midst of carrying out one duty, you’ll identify other issues that require attention, but which you don’t necessarily have time for right now. Instead of crossing out items on your to-do list, you may find yourself modifying and even extending it as the hours march on.

For these reasons, you may find it useful to keep a work journal, to either supplement or substitute for your to-do list.

Self-awareness

By simply taking the time to write down your goals, lessons, and experiences you draw from each day, and any feelings or thoughts you have about them, you afford yourself a chance to troubleshoot, and engage your self-awareness and critical thinking skills.

Have you been avoiding, procrastinating over, or struggling with a task? If so, your difficulties may owe to an emotional obstacle, such as the fear of failure, an unwillingness to check your ego and ask for help, or confusion over the next steps in the process. Journalling forces you to put these barriers to success into words.

Paper or digital?

Of course, this is a matter of personal preference. A digital version offers the advantages of searchability and easy modifiability. A paper (book) version helps to reduce your daily screen time, and you won’t risk losing your journal entries due to a computer malfunction or virus.

Regardless of the medium you choose for your journal, organization is key: each entry should be clearly dated and easily retrievable. You may also benefit from headlining each entry with two or three main themes, for purposes of future reference. For example, “Order confirmation for Mrs. Jafari; keyboard shortcuts”.

Honesty and confidentiality

Like a personal diary, your work journal should be a safe forum for you to express thoughts and concerns related to your job, including the state of interpersonal relationships at the workplace. For this reason, confidentiality is important.

If you believe there’s a risk that another person will discover your journal, and that this discovery may affect your relationships with colleagues or superiors, you’ll censor yourself. The more extensively you engage in self-censorship, the less meaningful your journalling will be to you, especially as the passage of time places distance between your present state of mind and the content of older entries.

Learning from experience

By writing down observations about your own performance, new information you encounter, and lessons you learn from day to day, you’ll stand a better chance of recalling those items when you need them. For example, if an IT technologist at the office shows you a nifty trick for accessing files on a database more quickly, your journal is a great place to record the steps involved. Journalling can also help you learn from your mistakes by noting both the specific details of an error, and the reason(s) why it occurred.

Consider making two daily entries.

A morning entry allows you to envision the day ahead, and draw up your game plan. A second, follow-up entry in the evening allows you to handicap your performance and hold yourself accountable.

Did you accomplish all of the goals you had set for that day? If not, why not? Did you exceed your own expectations? If so, what were the keys to your success?

Overcoming Writer’s Block At Work

We’ve all had the experience of sitting down to pen a new article, marketing e-mail, or blog post, and struggling to get the words out. Even professional authors find that writing can be either simple and straightforward or slow and cumbersome. The first sentence is often the hardest.

A bout of writer’s block is frustrating regardless of the circumstances. But it’s especially annoying when you’re at work, time is of the essence, and you have a lot of other assignments to complete.

If you find that the writing process is challenging or stalled completely, try the following tactics to get yourself back on track.

Make a list of essential items you plan to mention in the piece

This will help to guide and constrain your train of thought. You can also use the items on the list as “seeds” for your paragraphs—start from each individual point, then elaborate upon it in full sentences.

Begin at the end

In writing, as in many other endeavours, it sometimes helps to reorient yourself, or approach the problem from a different angle, when you find yourself stuck. To defeat what I call the first-sentence blues, try starting your written composition at the end—with the last sentence or paragraph. Rather than obsessing about how you want to lead off, think about how you plan to wrap up.

Alternatively, you can simply pretend the first sentence doesn’t exist, write the rest of the article without it, and then add a “first” sentence once 99 percent of the task is already complete.

If time permits, step away and engage yourself in something else

Your writer’s block may be partly attributable to a mental block, which you can remedy by either stimulating your creativity and problem-solving skills, working on a different task for a while, immersing yourself in fresh air, and/or improving circulation of blood and oxygen to your brain.

If you have time for a break, devote a few minutes to a pleasurable activity—like reading, ping-pong, a full-body stretch, or a walk around the neighbourhood. Ideas may occur to you more readily upon your return.

Freewrite

This is exactly what it sounds like: just jot down whatever pops into your head.

Freewriting offers numerous advantages: it helps you structure sentences and express yourself in imaginative ways, enables you to purge distracting or tangential thoughts, and temporarily quiets your inner critic. It can also help you develop a feel for and ease with writing, and furnish ideas that can inspire future articles and posts.

Change your environment

Creativity is among the most complex and mysterious of all human attributes, and surroundings that are conducive to exceptional creativity for some writers are like intellectual deserts for others. For example, at a busy coffee shop, you may be stimulated by the ambient noise, or distracted by conversations at neghbouring tables, order-taking, and the grinding, whistling, and gurgling sounds continually emitted by the machines.

Sometimes our subconscious is acutely aware of barriers to creativity in a particular environment, even when our conscious mind is not. If you find yourself unable to get writing done in one place, try moving somewhere else.

If you don’t need the internet right now, disconnect

The internet is the most powerful informational resource that human beings have ever created, but also arguably the greatest single purveyor of distractions—e-mails, social media, news headlines, celebrity gossip, funny videos of animals doing zany things, to name just a few. This is why Zadie Smith and many other wordsmiths advocate writing on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.