Focused - 172: Journaling & Focus

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

David & Mike dive deep into the topic of journaling and share their workflows for making it stick.

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hello, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Excellent, man. I am having fun here talking to you about Focus. I was just thinking about that title as I read it in. So much of productivity is about cranking widgets, and that's such the wrong message. I really love that tag line for us yeah i do too what whatever sort of difference or dent we can leave in the universe

in terms of getting people to think about productivity more about intention than output i am happy with amen speaking of output that i really don't have a segue for this, but I'm selling shirts. Yeah, like three or four years ago, I did a Max Barkey shirt drive, and a bunch of people have been asking for it, so I've got a new one. And there's a link in the show notes for it. You can get a sweatshirt, a zip-up hoodie, or a t-shirt, but they all have embroidered Max Barkey bolts on them. I'm really happy with the way they came out.

Please go check them out. When the show publishes, it'll only be a short time left. So if you want to get it, you got to get in there soon. And if you're in the Max Barkey labs, you would have got an email from me by now because there's a special version for the labs people. But yeah, go check it out if you're interested in a fancy Max Barkey embroidered shirt. Nice. These look pretty cool.

I hope so. I hope so. I can't wait to get one myself to tell you the truth. I've really been enjoying sweatshirts this year because it's been cold here. You know, cold is a relative term in California. I realized as I said it, I was talking to a guy in Wisconsin. So, you know, it's been colder than usual. Let's just leave it at that. That's fair. Journaling is a topic that comes up frequently on the show. And it seems to be getting a lot of email and contact from listeners lately about like, what is this journaling thing you talk about in terms of focus? I mean, is there truly a relationship or is this just a thing you do?

And like, how are you doing it? And Mike and I decided, well, let's just make a show and kind of break it down and talk about it in detail. And that's why we are here today. Awesome. Yeah, I did a workshop for our mutual friend, Nick Milo, at his Linking Your Thinking workshop. He invited me to be one of the subject matter experts.

I don't know that I live up to that term, but I did a session on digital journaling. And it was interesting because I started the session by asking, what does journaling mean to you? And I got a whole bunch of responses from people who are all in with the quantified self sort of stuff where they're tracking all of the the numbers yeah the people who viewed it as like a traditional diary and they're just writing about their feelings and they don't want anybody to to see it so maybe that's the place to start is just talking about what do we mean when we are talking about journaling yeah it really does have a lot of meanings to

different people. Like you said, the one about people who write about their feelings or reflections. I think that's a really good use. In an age of social media, too many people go to social media sometimes with stuff that really is probably for themselves privately. I kind of treat my journaling app as my private Twitter, you know, in that sense, like I don't need to share this with the world, but I do need to work through it. So I'll just do it right here in the journal. I think that is a great use. Yeah, it's definitely a valid use. And that's the thing about journaling is you kind of have to figure out what it means to you and what's the best version of this, because there are lots of different ways

that you can do it. And it's easy to get inspired when you see somebody doing something a certain way and be like, oh, that's the missing piece for me. I totally need to do that. One of the aspects of that that kind of fits in with journaling is the idea of daily pages. I remember when I read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and I first encountered that idea. I was like, this makes so much sense. I am totally going to do this the rest of my life. And it lasted, I think, about a week. But what I learned from that is that there are elements of that that I want to incorporate. I really like the stream of conscious writing idea, but I've applied that a little bit differently.

And there's two ways to look at that. You can view it as like, oh, well, Julia Cameron is the person for this, and I didn't do it her way, so I've failed. And that's kind of my traditional approach. I measure myself against the rigidity of the systems that seem to be prevalent in productivity books. But that's not really the way to extract the most amount of value from it. It's really about, okay, so I've looked at all this stuff and what is of value here to me? And usually it's not applying the whole thing or even 80% of it. It's not applying the whole thing or even 80% of it.

Usually it's just the one small thing that adds a significant benefit to the way I'm already doing things. But that doesn't mean that you don't look for those things because it's those small changes that add up to the significant results over time. And to apply that logic to journaling at a deeper level, you should not be journaling with just one, for one reason. I feel like the way, the reason I journal is a combination of a lot of these, these inspirations and ideas. And while I do sit down and write about my feelings, that's not the only thing I do with my journal. So I don't think they're mutually exclusive is what I'm saying. So as we go through them, as you think through today, maybe you want to start thinking about your own recipe of journaling, about what it would encompass for you and what parts would be helpful and why. Another reason people do journaling is for gratitude. do journaling is for gratitude. Yeah, this one I love. And there's a bunch of research that shows all the benefits of the gratitude practice. I think one of them said that people who have a gratitude habit, they keep a gratitude journal and they write in it every day. They're 25%

happier. I don't know what those numbers really mean necessarily, but I think there is a positive benefit from this. When I was preparing for the talk, I came across this quote, which I think is great, by Jessamyn West, who says, those who keep a journal get to live life twice. And that struck me, especially as it pertains to gratitude, because gratitude is the kind of thing that is easily overlooked in the busyness of the day-to-day. And when you think about keeping a journal as a way to live life twice, I want to live the good parts twice. I want to keep a journal that's going to provide me future value. And so that's not saying that the processing what happened and the writing about how I feel and the reflection stuff has no place, but I also want to

keep a forward eye on the things that I'm collecting to my journal. I'm writing in it not necessarily exclusively for the benefit now. There is benefit now, but also I believe if you do it with the right perspective, it can provide you benefit for the future too. It's kind of journaling for personal growth, I guess. Yeah, but I would add to that that because I do reflective journaling about things that go wrong, too, and some of the worst parts of life get journaled. And I think the process of journaling, and then we'll get into this deeper with this show, but the process of journaling helps me get past that. some feeling of frustration, fear, anger, anything that leads to the dark side. You can carry that around with you, or you can journal it, process it, and get past it. In a way, journaling and meditation to me are like my own private therapist. So I don't just journal about the good stuff. I journal about the bad stuff too. But to get back to the point, I gratitude

journal every day. I love it. And I do think it changes my outlook on life. But I do also question these things where people say it's 25, you're 25% happier. Well, why not 24.7%? It's like, what are you talking about? It's good enough to know that if you do gratitude journaling, it's going to help you. It puts you in the right mindset. So much of the world today is negatively focused. I mean, that is what sells. I mean, go on YouTube.

Anytime there's an Apple announcement or anything that you like, like a movie you like, and just look at the numbers of the people who trash it. And there are way more views for people saying, you know, Disney blew it with this animated movie or Apple blew it with a new iPhone or whatever it is. It's a game YouTubers play because it gets them views and that's how they make money. But there's some part of our human makeup that is just biased to wanting to see the negative. And one way we fight against that is gratitude journaling. You can skew it. We are barely evolved monkeys, but we are barely evolved monkeys,

right? We can take an agency with this. And I think gratitude journaling is a secret weapon in that war. Yeah, the word agency, I think, is important. And that really is at the heart of journaling for me. It's so easy to react to what happens to you. And that's where the emotions come in. And that's why processing and reflecting is a valuable practice. And a gratitude is, on the other side of that, the positive focus is a valuable practice. But that really is what this is for, is it's a practice. And by actually writing things out in a journal, whether that's by hand with a fancy fountain pen or on a clicky keyboard in Obsidian like it is for me, there is ownership that happens there. And instead of just reacting, you get to choose how you respond. And it's interesting to me

that as we think about journaling and what comes to mind when you think of journaling, I think the standard picture is probably like a journaling app like day one, or I have a physical book that I write in every day before I go to bed. And these are all different aspects of that, that you could actually apply that specific way. But as I reflect on my own journaling workflow, and I know we're going to get into that in a little bit, I realized that things that have kind of started off in my journal have crept into other aspects of my daily routine. And I think that's still a valid expression of what we're talking about here today with journaling, because ultimately this is a practice that is going to give you some mindfulness benefits. Yeah. Another type of journaling people do is called interstitial

journaling, where you journal throughout the day. Like you said, the image that usually comes to mind is you've got a book with a lock on the front and a pen, and at the end of the day, you sit down and you reflect and write in diary your day, dear diary, right? But interstitial journaling is kind of in the heat of the moment type of journaling. I stumbled into that two or three years ago. And that is a part of my workflow. And I like it because I like to address things when they're fresh. And that is one of the focus elements for me, is that it also allows me to close the book on one

thing and move on to the next yeah i was going to ask you if this has been a sticky part of your journaling process because i know you brought it up a while ago and i've tried to incorporate pieces of interstitial journaling into my journaling workflow as well i've got journal entries that i try to enter the immediately after a significant event or something that feels significant. I want to capture, like you said, how I'm feeling at that exact moment. There's a lot of value in that. However, I don't get a chance to do that 100% of the time. And that brings up another point with journaling is that I feel the practice of it is important to be consistent. But as you combine different aspects of this, give yourself some grace. You don't have to do this one thing over and over and over again every single day.

The fact that I'm trying to do this interstitial journaling and I occasionally succeed at it, I feel like is a win. Yeah. And with all the advice we give, nobody's perfect at this stuff. As a point of irony, I have not done my morning journal yet. And we're recording this today at 12. Just things got really busy this morning. This is my second podcast of the day.

And I had a lot of prep and everything. But I'll journal as soon as we finish this one. And so it happens. And I don't think you should feel bad about it. You just use it as a tool when you can. And when you can't, you can't. Although I would say that I have found the times that I lapse in my journaling is usually when I need to be journaling the most. It's very similar to meditation in that way. Another type of journaling that you see out there, and this is probably the one type of journaling I would encourage you to question, is what I'm calling posterity journaling.

Thinking that like, hey, you know, someday I'm going to be dust and maybe my kids will want to read it. And, you know, I can I can understand that. I would love to read a journal my father wrote. But I think as soon as you start thinking that way, you journal in a way that you lose most of the other benefits. It's like the people who go on Facebook and write those crazy posts on Facebook that don't actually reflect who they are. I think posterity journaling just brings out our worst impulses. And I would try to avoid that. Even if you are okay with your kids reading it down the road or your grandkids, you shouldn't be writing for them. You should be doing the journaling for your own benefit right now. I agree with that. And this type of journaling has never appealed to me.

I don't know why. I even probably take this to an extreme with just my attitude towards photos as another form of journaling, right? You can capture those things and you can have the memories be jogged. And I, over the last several years, we've talked about this before, I've kind of forced myself to shift from trying to capture the moment to enjoying the moment when I'm with my kids and they're doing something silly. Not to say that I don't ever want to grab those pictures and have those reminders, but I try to change my default to just being in the moment. And the posterity journaling feels to me, at least with my personality,

like a push in the direction that I have identified as dangerous. I feel like I could take that too far very easily. So I haven't touched that one. Yeah, you don't want to be like the man on the mountain telling everyone how it is. And honestly, if you act like that, they're not how it's, how it is. And, you know, honestly, if you act like that, they're not going to want to read it either. So, you know, I mean, even if you were to do posterity journaling, right, there is probably a 50% chance that

journals is going to get thrown out after you're gone. You know, sure. It's just, there's just, the world is a weird place. And so what are you investing your time in? I'm not sure it's worth it. And there's so many positive benefits to journaling that we've already talked about and we're going to go over today. Make journaling a tool to make you a better person right now.

And don't worry about, in fact, that's probably the best way you can influence and help future generations is being your best self right now and not getting too hung up on what them reading about it later. Exactly. Yep. Journaling and focus. I mean, we are a show called Focus. Why are we talking about journaling? I think this is a great tool to help you stay focused. It is so easy in the modern world to get disjointed and distracted. And coming back to journal your day in most of the ways we've talked about already, especially interstitial journaling for me, it's really a tool. And it's a way to help you transition from one context to another. It's a way for you to document your wins, which we don't do enough of, which is kind of related to gratitude, but it's gratitude towards yourself.

When you journal and you get the end of the day and you look back on what you did, you can finish the day feeling pretty good about yourself. And quite often, if you don't stop to reflect on what you've done well, you go to bed feeling empty empty like you didn't do anything because you just didn't take the time to look back at it. Yeah. The focus part of this is interesting because focus is all about perspective. What are you giving your conscious attention to? And is that the right thing? You can define what right is. You can define your intentions. And then really productivity, in my opinion, going back to the opening is, are you able

to follow through on the intentions that you set regardless of the output? And journaling is a great way to shift your perspective and shine the light on the things that really matter. And I think that's probably why I tend to shy away from viewing journaling as the practice of sorting through how frustrated I am about things. Not that I don't do that. We'll get into that in the workflow stuff. because that's where I tend to get stuck. And then pretty soon, if I don't break out of that, if I don't recognize it and then dismiss it because it's no longer helpful, then I just continue to get frustrated. We, as humans, will tend to judge others by their actions, but ourselves by our intentions, right? So there's a snowball effect here, especially with somebody close to you because you feel like, oh, they should know better and they pushed my buttons on purpose. Well, probably not, but that's where my brain tends to get stuck. So

journaling is a way for me to shift out of that negative thinking, focus on what really matters. And then the other part, I mentioned the future focus, measure my progress. That requires focus as well. Where do the areas that I want to grow in? What are the things that are going to help me become, I should say, the person that I want to be? Those are the things I want to track and measure. Again, not the output, not to achieve a goal, but these are the things that if I show up every day and I do this, then that's going to help the score take care of itself. Yeah, agreed. And I want to talk more about that as we get deeper in the show when we get through our workflows, because this is another thing where we're a little different

on the way we handle this stuff. But all of that makes sense. But I guess a good point here is that journaling really can be what you need it to be. Yep. And you have to make it your own, I would argue. If you don't, it's got a very small chance of sticking. Yeah. I enjoy the habit. I've been doing it. I have day one entries going back now over 10 years. I had some journals before that, but I really, this last decade is where I've been really more focused on it. And even then, having done it a decade, there are days that I miss and it's okay. You know, it just happens. But particularly when I'm going through something, I love having my journal there to kind of help me through. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by ZocDoc. Go to

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Many are available within 24 hours. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash focused. ZocDoc.com slash focused. And our thanks to ZocDoc for the support of the focused podcast and all of RelayFM. I've always felt like there's a close relationship between journaling and meditation and that's because for me they are kind of like cousins. I meditate usually in the morning and it gives me time to reflect on what's going on through my brain but when i journal as i get through the day that's like a different version of that that's like coming at the problem from a different angle but i find those two inextricably linked for me

how so i mean i guess just for personal context I have struggled with mindfulness meditation off and on. It's been a recurring theme and you have been trying to get me to make it a consistent practice. And I feel like I start to gain some momentum and then it goes away. I definitely see the benefit of it. But the benefit I have realized, I think for me, is kind of like with the interstitial journaling. The more that I do it, the more benefit it has. But I have had to release being so rigid with it. Am I totally off in that approach? Well, I think meditation is probably another topic someday, but it's not for everyone. And if it doesn't work for you, then it doesn't work for you. But what it gives me is the ability to stop and focus. I mean, it is the whole goal is just to count your breath or observe your breath, which is really hard because we are so distracted in the modern world. But if you can build the muscle that can do that, you can apply it in other areas of your life. And for the first year or two

that I was meditating, I mean, I started doing this in, I think, 92. That's all I did. But then I started getting good enough at it that I could also take the muscle and apply it to a problem. Or for me, it was usually an underlying condition. Like if I had something deep level bothering me, I could in a meditation session kind of break it apart. And usually if you break it down to it's like base emotions and then you do some other practices like you say well okay what if that actually happened what would you do and as you start getting better at that um it really helps you kind of break those worries up where they don't become a worry anymore but then you do the same thing in journaling at least the way way I journal. So that's why I find them so closely

related. And maybe, I mean, I was meditating long before I was journaling. Maybe I'm just bringing a meditator's attitude toward it, but I do find them related and they help each other. Like sometimes I'll be journaling and I'll see a thing coming up in the journal repeal. I'm like, oh, this is a problem. I need to stop and think about this. And that may be what I do the next time I'm on the cushion. Sure. Yeah. I think if I'm hearing you right, basically there are multiple roads to mindfulness here. And that's really what we're after. Yep. Awesome. So how do you make journaling stick? So many people have written in and said, look, I tried it. It didn't work for me, but I keep hearing you talk about it and I want to make it work. How do you make it stick? Yeah, well, I think one of the things that

is required in order for journaling to stick is having that proper mindset. And mindfulness is one of those topics that really fascinates me, even though I have trouble getting the mindfulness meditation habit to stick. I definitely aspire to be more mindful, more present, more engaged every moment of every day. And I think if you go into it with the goal of, I'm going to achieve this outcome and do all these things and answer all these prompts every day, that is not going to seem worth it after a little while. But if you buy into the idea of, I'm going to just try and become a little bit more mindful through this practice, then that's really where it can provide some tangible benefits. One of the ideas I think that maybe produces a lot of motivation, for me

anyways, with journaling is this whole idea of the gap versus the gain which i think i've shared before but just real briefly we feel what we feel and we see what we see in the the current moment right and we have especially if we are outcome oriented this picture of our ideal future or what we're working towards. And that's great, but we've kind of been conditioned in the productivity world, I would say, to set smart goals and achieve them, right? Well, the problem with those goals is that as soon as you achieve them, the goalposts move, and then eventually you'll not achieve one as fast as you think you should. And at that point, you start to get frustrated. At least, I have historically gotten frustrated at that moment where you measure where you are versus

where you think you should be. And that is the gap. And that makes you feel like, well, this is so hard and I should be making more progress. And what's the point? But with journaling, what you can do is you can shift that focus. And this is where the reflection piece comes in. You look at where you're at, but then you compare that to where you started. And instead of beating yourself up about not getting to where you wanted to fast enough, now you start to see all of the growth that's occurred. And that becomes very motivating and helps create the urge to keep

going. Yeah, it's just amazing. We were talking earlier about negative YouTube videos, but also just negative self-talk and the way as humans we do that. We measure the gap gap not the gain that's our default behavior yep it's like so much of the things we talk about here are just to overcome that basic default that that we all have written wrong right and the environment is kind of working against us so we have to wrestle back control and dictate the perspective with which we're going to look at things. Because if we just, again, react to all the messages and the information that we are receiving, it keeps pushing us back towards the gap. I mean, especially with social media, you compare your reality with everybody else's best version, right? They're sharing the highlights and you're like, oh, that's what their life is like. It must be amazing all the time. It's puppies and rainbows.

And that's not the case, but that's not what people will share on social media. So that tends to create this dissatisfaction with where we're at, just kind of feeds that gap. It keeps growing. Are you familiar with this social media app called Be Real? I've heard of this. I don't have any desire to use it just because I'm not really using social media at all. Yeah, I don't either. I'm not good at it. But Be Real is an interesting take because it got the Apple Design Award or App of the Year Award last year. And it's a social media app.

But what it does, it sends you a note or a notification that says you have two minutes to post your daily Be Real. And then you take a picture and it shoots a picture with the front-facing camera and the back facing camera. So whatever you're doing and your face and you do it and you have to get it up within two minutes. And so you don't have people, you know, posing in their luxury condo or a picture of their fancy food. It's just actually people what they're doing in the moment. And I thought that

was a refreshing take on it. And it's kind of fun to do with like your family members and see, like I have a kid in college, so I like to see her be real and then see what she's doing. But you know, it shows you that most of our lives are kind of boring and that's okay. That is okay. Yeah. That we should be more boring. Our brains needed, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that you're right. It is a refreshing take on it. However, just my situation, I understand the use case you just described of being able to see what your daughter's doing and she's at college like that, that makes total sense. However, where I am right now, I think using a different version of social media

is a different way of solving a problem that I don't really have. The best version of this for me is just let's disconnect entirely, which I basically have. I still am trying to write and publish with some tools that publish things multiple places, but I'm not really checking anything on a regular basis anymore. And honestly, it's had a big benefit to my positive focus. But you're doing social media with yourself in your journal, right? That is true. That is a personal version of social media. Yeah. Especially if you use something like day one, I would argue where it can kind of show you the things from the previous time periods and surface that stuff automatically. That's a very appropriate description of an app like that.

But getting back to this idea of making it stick, Mike, tell us about your three pillars of journaling. Sure. So as I was reflecting on what has made journaling stick for me and just full transparency, this has come and gone over the years, but I feel like I've finally kind of landed on something that just really sticks for me. And so what has made it stick? I think there are three things here. One is that gratitude piece, that positive focus, because I have no trouble being negative on my own. I need to force myself to be more positive. Another piece is the reflection. That kind of feeds the gain versus the gap that we were just talking about and appreciating the progress that has been made as opposed to beating myself up for not accomplishing things as quickly as I have wanted to. And then consistency. So I really do think it's important that your journaling practice, I know this is general, but I really do believe this, the journaling practice I think needs to happen every day.

But what you do for your journaling practice doesn't have to be, you don't have to do it 100% every day. This is kind of like with a morning routine, for example, you would have like an ideal version, but then when you're traveling or something, your morning routine gets disrupted. What is like the bare minimum of the morning routine that you actually do? I've taken the same approach with my journaling habit. And there are certain things that just are non-negotiable. I'm going to do these every single day, but I'm not going to do all of the different pieces if I don't get around to it,

interstitial journaling being one of those. But those three things, I think, are really what has created a lot of positive momentum for me with journaling, gratitude, reflection, and consistency. All right, so I want to break this down a little bit more. In terms of gratitude journaling, how often do you do it?

I try to do this every day. This is one of the pieces that is negotiable for me because I have also built this into a regular routine with the people that are in my life. So I have regular practices of expressing gratitude that aren't strictly confined to the journal, which is why I feel like this is a little bit more optional for me. But I have as part of my journal a gratitude section. And as I am going through at the end of the day, I try to make sure that there's always something in there. I'd say about 80% of the time I have something there. I'd say about 80% of the time I have something there. Occasionally I don't.

But I really do think that the positive focus is really the outcome I'm after here. And sometimes if I'm doing something, like we've actually built gratitude into our date night routine, my wife and I, the very last thing we do, we physically, verbally express gratitude to one another for something specific. And that changes the atmosphere. And if I do that and I'm crunched for time at the end of the day, maybe I won't have an entry in that specific spot. But in my mind, I've expressed gratitude already anyways. I can tell when I've neglected the positive focus for a while and I start to get more negative.

So I know what that sounds like and what the warning signs look like. So I know when it's time to buckle down on that again. And it is totally a hack of your brain, but it totally works. It just does. You know, I mean, and you always feel good after you do a gratitude journal entry. It just makes you feel better. And whatever was bothering you when you started doesn't bother you quite as much. And that's the thing.

You know, and the other, the third tier of your, of Mike's three pillars is consistency. And I think that we're going to get into our workflows. three pillars is consistency. And I think that we're going to get into our workflows. But I think both of us have optimized our journaling practices in ways that makes it easy. And I think that's a key component. If you make it too hard on yourself to do a journal, that's going to ultimately stop you from doing a journal. When you build a journaling system, make it easy on yourself. system, make it easy on yourself. Exactly. Yeah. You want to make it whatever system you create for journaling. You want it to be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Yeah. Right. So incorporate the pieces that are going to provide you benefit, but maybe don't beat yourself up so much if you don't do them all, which is kind of where I've

landed with this. I should also mention real briefly these three pillars. This actually comes from a video course I put together. I updated the journaling bootcamp course that I've had for a while. And I've got another one, which is the digital journaling in Obsidian, which I mentioned very briefly in the last episode. So I don't want to plug these too much, but if you're interested in diving deeper with these, I'll have links to both of those in the show notes, and there's even a bundle with a discount if you wanted to get both of them.

Yeah, you should check them out, and especially if you are going to journal in Obsidian, Mike is the authority on that. Well, thank you. Another way you make it stick is you see the benefit of it, and I do think that there is benefit from reviewing your entries. And if you want to make it stick, start doing it, but go back and read some of your earlier entries.

I like to read them during my review periods, and I get insight from them. And you start to feel benefits from them. Because I think there's a benefit to the process of journaling and working through things, but there's also a benefit to reviewing your journal entries because you start to see trends and things. And when you're running through the hustle and bustle of every day, it's hard to observe that stuff in yourself. But when you're able to put it into the pensive and go look at it separately, it's much easier to see. Absolutely. And this is kind of the genesis of that quote I shared earlier, those who keep a journal get to live life twice. If you don't go back and review your entries,

you're missing out. There's a lot of value to be gained from going back and looking at those things. But again, for me, the way I've set up my journaling workflow is with that in mind. I've kind of optimized for that, I guess, is not just doing it in the moment, but also I have the intention of going and looking at this again. And that kind of changes a little bit the types of things that I'm going to capture there. I'm okay with that. I feel like that's, for me, the sweet spot and the way I'm able to extract the most value out of the time that I invest in journaling. But I encourage people to think of it that way as an investment in the future. And you're robbing yourself of that investment if you never

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expressvpn.com slash focused. Visit expressvpn.com slash focused to learn more. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. All right. So, David, how do you make journaling work for you? What does your workflow look like? You know, one of the reasons I was looking forward to the show is I feel like both you and I have been exploratory with journaling throughout the run of the show and even before. And we've been trying a lot of different things, but it seems like we've both kind of settled

in the last six months. And now that we've kind of had the benefit of that journey, I wanted to share that with the audience. And I can tell you that I have tried a lot of journaling over the last couple of years. I mean, I journaled in day one without really questioning it for a long time. And then two, three years ago, I started doing things. I listened to the Pen Addict podcast, which was a mistake. I mean that in a loving way. But, you know, I got some nice pens. I'm like, well, then I'm going to use them to write my journal.

So I was journaling in some various forms of notebooks for a while. And that was good. You know, you get a nice bound notebook. You carry it around with you. You write in it. That evolved eventually to the Levenger system, you know, with the punch where you can change the paper in it. And I did that for about a year. And that was good too.

And all of these experiments I did were long-time experiments. It wasn't I just tried it for a few days. But I missed pieces of day one. But at the same time, this is kind of also my honeymoon with Obsidian. There's an arc to using obsidian where you discover it then you overuse it and then you find your balance when i was at phase two i wanted to do journaling in obsidian as well as everything else and i say that knowing mike's using obsidian but that's cool that's cool mike um but you know ultimately after all my time in the wilderness, I came back to day one and started using it in earnest, like last, maybe I think October or September.

And it just immediately landed with me. But I even got questioned that when I read Chris Bailey's book about calm and he made the point of if you could do it on digital or analog, you should always lean towards analog just to kind of help yourself be calm more. But I am a unique case in that way. I'm a special snowflake. I don't get hung up on my digital devices like some people do. Like when I'm journaling in day one, I don't get tempted to go check my email or the social media platform of note. You know, I just do day one. I'm very good at staying focused on one app when I'm on digital stuff. So that doesn't really matter.

But what I did find was journaling with a pen for me is fun and interesting, but it's a little too slow. I don't write very fast. interesting, but it's a little too slow. I don't write very fast. And the entries were not as long as when I picked up day one again, and I just hit the microphone and start talking to day one. And then I felt like I got more benefit out of it with dictation into my journaling app than I did with a pen and paper. And that's one of the big reasons I stuck with Day One. But I also really like a lot of the features. I mean, Day One is an app that's built to make a journal in.

And it's got a bunch of really cool features for that. Like it has the ability to set up templates. Like one of my templates, you know, is I call it daily meditation. And when I go through ReadWise And when I go through ReadWise, because I go through ReadWise pretty much every day, and it's a application that combines highlights from all my Kindle books I've read. And I've got like, I don't know, 300 books or something in there. And so I've got a bunch of books. So I get all these random highlights thrown at me, but it's like spaced repetition.

You know, you see it, but you highlighted it two years ago, and then it brings it back. And what I've come to do is, in Readwise, they've got a little sharing button there, and it makes a nice little graphic of the quote that you read. I read 10 a day, and I pick one. But it makes a nice little graphic with the cover of the book, the name of the author and the quote. And then I just import it into a day one template. And then I talk about it, you know, or, or I'll type about it, but usually I talk about it. You know, I just hit the microphone and start talking about why that quote is important to me, why it's a challenge to me, why it's something I'm working on, why it's something I'm proud of, you know, whatever I'm feeling about that quote. And so every day I do that. And day one just makes that so frictionless, you know, to grab an image

and let me journal on that topic. And that's just one of my many templates in day one. I also have one called daily priority. And what I do is in the morning, I go through several templates. I used to have it combined into one template, but then I decided, oh, I want to be able to see these things in isolation. So like the daily priority is a separate journal in day one. And if I go look at the day one daily priority journal i can just see my daily priority for every day for the last you know many days and or if i just want to see the daily meditations i can see those too so i

break them into separate journals so i ended up with I think like 25 journal. I have a lot of journals, but then you, because it's an app, I can slice and dice it and have it just show me certain ones or not other ones. Um, another thing day one does for me is it combines with if this than that. So all of my blog posts get added to one journal and I find it kind of fun to go back and read those and reflect on those. And I know I could go on the web and see them, but having them all in one place makes it really easy for me. And another thing I like with day one is that it makes interstitial journaling just dead simple because I spend most of the day in front of my Mac working and I just have a menu bar button.

You know, day one has a menu bar thing. You click it, a text field opens, you can type in it, you can dictate to it. When we finish today's recording, I'll probably dictate two or three sentences in there about today's recording. And then it goes into my podcast journal and it's there for posterity. If I go back and look at the day, I can look back at, you know, the time we finished recording, what I was thinking at the time. And it allows me to say, okay, now that's done. What's next? You know, it gives me a focus tool to move on to the next thing. It kind of like closes the chapter properly.

And I'm sure people are rolling their eyes. They're listening to it, but it works for me. And that's the whole point of this is to find what works for you. That was a lot. I think I just realized I've been talking a long time. Yeah. I think the last point you made there is real important. So I'll echo it that it's really important to find something that works for

you. I do have a question about your 25 different journals, but I want to go back to something you had kind of glossed over in terms of the arc with Obsidian, where you use it for something, then you try to-anything apps, is that you use it for one thing. That's the gateway. And that's where the real value is, actually, is going into it with a specific use case. And if you do that, there's a good chance that it will stick for you. And then the next thing is, well, I can use it for all this stuff. And yeah, everybody, I think, has gone through that in terms of, I'm going to try it for this and that and the other thing. And it is very important to recognize that where you choose to draw the lines is going to be different. I don't use Obsidian for everything,

but I do use it for digital journaling. That's one of the lines that I've decided to draw there. And I think that's, I just want to call out that because I think a lot of people are looking for the perfect PKM app, and it doesn't exist. But PKM also is kind of the next level of this. So journaling is part of your personal knowledge that you need to manage, I would argue. And you've got to figure out what your stack looks like. What are the apps that you're going to use for specific jobs? And then use the thing that best suits your needs these are all tools in your your tool belt but well we we can talk more about that

when you get into your workflow but i can tell you for me the the reason i did the obsidian experiment and again i used it for like six months was the idea that it, because it's PKM, if I journal about the focus podcast and I link it, then I can go in the focus podcast page and see all the times I journaled about the focus podcast. But what I found was in six months of using it, I never once did that. And I, some of the features the features that day one had, I missed

more than I enjoyed using that linking feature of Obsidian. And I can honestly go into day one and search for the Focus podcast, and I'll probably get the same result. But I want to talk more about Obsidian when it's your turn. But yeah, that's why I did it. And I fully intended to stick with it. But ultimately, I came back to day one. Another part of the reason I'm using day one is the mobile experience is so good. I mean, my journaling, I try to, in the morning before I do any work, you know, after I get through the

morning routine, before I kind of start working, I try to journal in day one and I have a chair sitting next to my desk. It's not, you know, my computer, it's really my iPad. And I sit down with the iPad, I open day one and I just start talking to it and adding journal entries. And I find that a very nice way to start the day. It's like, it's my version of a cup of coffee. You know, it just kind of helps me get things going. But sometimes if I have a crazy day, I'll take a screenshot of my calendar and put it in the day one entry and talk about that or whatever. You know, this is my ongoing therapy with myself. my ongoing therapy with myself.

And so day one makes that kind of stuff really easy and Obsidian does not. But Obsidian has other things going for it. But like I said, let's wait on that. Yeah, day one is a phenomenal app and you're right that it's easy to get stuff in there. I like some of the specific things that you mentioned, like the dictation and the grabbing the screenshots and stuff like that. And another benefit of day one is like you had alluded to, you can have multiple journals. I'm curious if you're willing to share what are

your 25 different journals. You ready for this? Do it. I'm not sure I'm going to get through them all. Because at some point, we're going to lose our entire audience. But I have some that are based on daily practices, like the Daily Priority. I call that the one thing journal. Same thing with Daily Gratitude. I do that every morning. I have one, a gratitude journal, where that stuff is kept. And I have the Daily Meditation one I've already explained. I have one called time blocking. And that's just where sometimes I will take a screenshot of the blocks at the beginning of the day and I'll go back and journal at the end of

the day to see how I did and reflect on that. I have a journal just called the journal. That's the one I started 10 years ago. That one has 1,765 entries in it. My total day one journal, by the way, is 4,913 entries. That's a lot. I have because we've talked about this before, but I use the RTA, you know, roles-based productivity. It's not really even a productivity system. It's just a life, you know, how do i make myself better i use i do that based on roles and so i made journals on my roles so husband is one father is one brother uncle friend some of the the roles that i do i journal on those so i'm dealing with

something with my wife i'll put it in the husband journal and you don't have to do that. This is a sign of madness, possibly. But I like doing it because then I can segregate them and go read on one thing. When I'm doing my quarterly review and I want to think, well, how am I doing as a husband? I'll go look at my journal entries as a husband. And I find that useful. And then I have work-related stuff like Max Barkey field guides, podcasts. I have one for the blog post that just sucks in some of the blog posts. I have a journal called Focus where I deal with productivity stuff. When I'm thinking about, I have one called Wellness where I put in stuff about medical, but also meditation, just wellness in general. I have one called responsible and that's based out of the responsible human role that I take on.

And I just added that one about three months ago. And it's like, when I go to the, get the car fixed or whatever, I just put it in there so I can find it easily. And I take a picture of the invoice and I have paperless systems and all this stuff, but a day one is always in my pocket and it starts to do more, carry a little bit more load that way. I have one called planning and review, which is cause I have templates for weekly, quarterly and monthly reviews. And all those go into this planning and review journal. So I can just, once again, keep them separately. I have one called Travel. So when I'm traveling and have interesting thoughts about travel, that's good.

I have one called On the News. Occasionally, something in the news happens, it gets me wound up, and I'll just work through it in a journal post. Do you want me to keep going? I could. Yeah. I think we've got to be getting kind of close to the bottom, right? I'm getting there. I have, I have one for sparks law that doesn't get many entries anymore, but I used to do some, so it wasn't client stuff, but just stuff related to that business. Personal Socrates based on us reading that personal Socrates book. Every question I answer

as I'm going through the personal Socrates book, I just answer in a journal. Gardening. I've got some fun craft-related ones. I have one called gardening because I've got really into gardening since I stopped being a lawyer. And I kind of track my plants and keep track of things about them. I take pictures.

Same thing with the wood shop. And I've been trying. I just started one this year with the Ugmonk daily task carts, where I just made one where I just take a picture of it at the end of the day and add it to a journal just so it's there. But that's basically it. I left a few out. Yeah, but I think those are great examples. And the reason I wanted you to share them is I think they will spark some inspiration for other people, even if they're not exactly the same. So thank you for running through those.

Yeah. So I have a long list. And obviously, I don't add to everyone every day, but they're there. And when the mood strikes, I do that. But what I really try to do every day is that morning session. And I try to do some interstitial journaling during the day, especially as I transitioned from one major thing to the next. And I tried to do a little bit at the end of the day and almost all of it is dictated, but occasionally it's typed. It just depends on the context. Like what I like to journal

at Disneyland. You know, when I talk about working at disneyland a lot of times i'm in day one and uh i'll just type i mean i'm not going to sit there and dictate my journal entry in the middle of batu you know but uh that's one of the things to do i also am a fan of photos in the journal i i find it fun to reflect on them i usually on sunday as part of my weekly review, I just open up the Photos app. Or actually, in day one, you can do it in day one too. You just pick some of the photos you've taken over the week.

And I don't take a lot of pictures over the course of the week. But I'll take a picture of the dog after she took a bath. And I'll do a little entry on that. Or if the kids come down, or if I spend some time with my kids, we may take a picture. And one of the benefits of that with day one in particular is when you import the picture, it sets the journal entry to the date and time that the picture was taken. Like I went up, I went and spoke at my daughter's class and afterwards we went out to dinner and then we took a picture together. Well, that picture was like the thumb tack that put the date on the journal entry. And I could just write about the whole day, but the picture was there to kind of, uh, it put a geo tag and it put a date and time on it.

Sure. And it made sure I journaled about it too. You know, it's a, it's a good way. Like when we're off doing stuff together, Daisy and I had a day together. We went on a date, took a picture, and then I knew, okay, I took that picture, so now I know I will journal about this because I've got the picture. When I do the review, I'll see it there. So it kind of helps me that way too. Throughout this discussion, though,

I've been talking about dictation. I just cannot understate for me personally, how much easier it makes journaling to be able to just push a button and talk. And if someone reads my journal entry someday, they're going to find some typos in there because I don't always go back and fix them. But I know what they say when I go back and read them. And the dictation software has gotten really good, so there aren't that many mistakes. But that method of entry for me is what I've discovered is, for me,

the best way to get to the bottom of what's going on between my ears is to hit a microphone and just start talking. Is that a surprise for a guy that has three podcasts and used to be a trial lawyer? Probably not. But it was a surprise for me, you know, because I thought going to pen and paper was going to give me all this great insight. And it does to a certain extent, but I actually think I get more insight from dictating

these journal entries than writing it out with pen and paper. Yeah, I'm not surprised by that. And I think it really is personal preference people got to figure it out there's a saying that thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips i think people probably gravitate towards one of those but for me it's also clicky keyboards yeah and i do type entries but you know it turns out captain picard had a pretty good idea with his captain's luck right he didn't he't write it out. He dictated it. And I do the same thing. And the beauty of day one is I can go upstairs.

Actually, this is a solitary thing for me. I don't really like doing it, even with my wife in the room. I just feel this is something that is for me. I'm not doing this for posterity. I'm doing it for myself. for me, you know, I'm not doing this for posterity. I'm doing it for myself. And so like, if I go to bed before her and I'm upstairs, I'll just take my iPhone out and add the end of the day entry with my iPhone. Cause I can do, you know, with day one, I have so many options and that's what ultimately after this weird journey of journaling just said, okay, stop playing around with all these other

tools. Use the one that you started with and the one that I like I'm comfortable with. And the great news is for me, day one eliminates so much friction that I do more journaling. Yeah. But we all have our own journeys. have our own journeys. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focus and join more than 3 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. No successful entrepreneur is an island. It takes a core team of trusted advisors to help build that business from the ground up. And when it comes to hiring, leave it to the experts. You need Indeed. Indeed is a hiring partner that gets you what you really want,

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to hire? You need Indeed. And our thanks to Indeed for their support of the Focus podcast. All right, Mike, your turn. Let's hear about your journey. You've already told us you're doing an Obsidian, but give us the details. Yeah, well, I will try to keep this kind of high level. But if you have specific questions about stuff that I have in here, I'm happy to go a little bit deeper. have specific questions about stuff that I have in here, happy to go a little bit deeper. And also, I think the journaling practice, like I mentioned earlier, it's important to recognize that there are aspects of this which don't fit into the traditional journal sense, journal

definition. But I don't have 25 different journals in day one. That has got me thinking, though. I really like the Readwise one you were talking about with sharing the images. Because those do look cool. And I realize that I've been keeping quotes in Obsidian. I never really thought of that as an actual journal. But it is a form of that, I feel. Well, it becomes a form of journaling

when you reflect on it. That's what I think. Yes, true. And I get so much more value out of it by not just putting the quote in, but talking about what it means to me. Yep, yep. No, that makes sense. I do have a version of that, which is built into my daily notes. So that's essentially my singular journal as I would define it in Obsidian is these daily notes. And that is a feature where it's kind of hand built for digital journaling, in my opinion, because you have a note per day. And I think the general idea behind daily notes is that it's a scratch pad for notes that you would take throughout the day.

And maybe there's like productivity uses for that beyond journaling. But for me, when I saw it, I was like, oh yeah, this makes total sense for journaling because that date basis, that can be applied to any of the types of things that I would put into that daily note. And over time, this has grown quite a bit.

Now, my daily note does pull in a different quote every day. It's a different type of quote, though. I actually have at the top of my daily note a verse of the day image that gets changed from this online. Faithlife is the company behind it, but there's just like a day image that gets changed from this online. Faithlife is the company behind it, but there's just like a different image that somebody has mocked up with a Bible verse on it. And faith-based productivity is kind of my thing, right? So I figured out the format that they used and created a code in my template in Obsidian, which loads all this stuff and formats it for the appropriate day.

So every day it pulls in a different visual image for me, which that's just kind of an inspirational thing. I like looking at that every day, but it isn't directly tied to anything specific that I want to track with my three three pillars of journaling other than this is something that I want to make sure I address the spiritual aspect of my growth. That's one of the things that I talk about with the daily questions, which I'll get into in a second. The other things I have on here at the top is just kind of like tone setting stuff. I have a little snippet. I think I've shared this with you. It's the progression of time. This is kind of based off of that book, 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. And the core idea there is he defines it as cosmic insignificance theory, realizing that your lifespan is limited. And yeah, I want to leave my dent in the universe. I even used that

term earlier in this episode. But recognizing that because my time is limited and I'm only one person, I'm not going to make that big a difference. And that is actually relieving because then you don't, my own personality, put all this pressure on myself to be the answer to everything. my own personality, put all this pressure on myself to be the answer to everything. I want to do what I can do. I want to make a positive impact, but I don't want to have to feel all the pressure of actually affecting all this, this, this change. Am I explaining this well? Does this, does this make sense? Yeah, totally. And, uh, I was thinking when you were talking about, uh, about Ford Prefect, right, right? The one fiction book you've ever read. That's true.

Because once again, Mike, fiction books can teach you something. But he gets put in a room where it shows the immensity of the universe and his insignificance inside of it. It's this room that makes people insane. They put you in there and you go crazy. And he comes out just fine. And they're like, I don't understand. How did he survive that? And he says, well, I'm the center of it.

Sure. Okay. You remember that? I don't remember that part. Maybe it was one of the later books. Yeah, probably. Yeah. But that is the basis for this progression of time that's a little bit of a deviation here what this is is it shows

uh it's a code snippet where you put in your birthday and then it calculates the percentage of your life that has expired based on an average 80-year lifespan. You can change the length of the lifespan if you want. But mine is over half done. And so looking at that every day, I know some people I show this to, and they feel like, oh, that's depressing. It's not for me. I mean, it's a fundamental precept of Buddhism and Stoicism

to acknowledge none of us are getting out of this alive. Yep. So that's the effect that it has on me. And then below that, as part of the same table, I've also got them for the year, month, and day, just because it's the same sort of code there. So there's kind of a yin and yang here. There's a balance between don't beat yourself up or give yourself all that pressure and responsibility to completely change everything, but also recognizing that time is continually ticking. And so I don't want to just sit here and do nothing either. And that's really the purpose of the digital journaling, the daily

practice for me, going back to those pillars. It's reflection, the gratitude, and the consistency. Below that, I have used the standard Obsidian task formatting for three specific habits. Now, habits are a whole other can of worms, and I do this a bunch of different ways. I've got the New Year calendar on the wall behind me, and I actually this a bunch of different ways. I've got the new year calendar on the wall behind me and I actually track a lot of habits there. Like I track my runs using that habit tracker. I track the days that I fast on that habit tracker, but those aren't every single day sort of things. The ones that I'm tracking in the daily note are the things that I really want to do every day. And so there are only three things in my habits list here. They are writing, reading,

and planning. Writing, and I keep this purposely general, I really do believe that writing is at the foundation of all of the stuff that I do online. And a clicky keyboard, as I mentioned, is one of the ways that I process my thoughts. So I want to write something every day. I also want to read something every day. And then planning, this is essentially using that template that we designed that goes with the New Year calendar. That's on my Onyx books, which we talked about in the last episode. That's on my Onyx books, which we talked about in the last episode. And I plan my day the night before. If I don't plan it the night before, I'll do it in the morning before I sit down to work.

But that means that this box does not get checked. And then I have another note which takes the status of those checkboxes, and it actually plots those so I can see in a month view, my streak, and it'll show the colored dots for the days that I completed it. And there'll be a line connecting them kind of like a lot of the habit tracker apps. And then the days that I don't, the chain is broken. And that is using a plugin. And again, all this stuff is detailed in the specifics in the course. I'm also happy to answer any questions that you might have about it, but a lot of it is really nerdy, technical, and probably not great podcast material. the days that I've tracked, you know, did I do this or did I not do this? Cause it's only showing the, the days, it only counts it for the streak when the thing gets done.

And then it also gives me some stats on the, the streaks themselves. So it'll show me the longest streak, the average, the average streak, the streak that I'm currently on those sorts of things. Can I just interrupt there for a minute? I find that type of quantification a distraction for journaling for me. But I'm not saying you're wrong and I'm right, but I think it's a good example of why there isn't necessarily a completely right or wrong way to do this. Yep, that is completely fair. And I think that when it comes to habits, there is a lot of emphasis

on these chains. But because you missed a day, that doesn't mean that all the progress that you've made is now gone. And that's kind of why I've put this together this way, is these are things that I would like to do every day, but I'm not doing them every day. That's why I like having that month view. I want to see more green circles than blank spaces on there. And that's part of the reflection piece of going back and looking at this, but I'll actually get to that in a little bit. This is just the stuff that I fill out every day. just the stuff that I fill out every day. Then below the habits is what I call daily questions. And this is an idea I picked up from Marshall Goldsmith in the book Triggers, which really, I mean, this is probably not a whole lot to do with the content of that book, but it was one

of those ideas that just really stuck with me. This is sort of like prompts that you would use for journaling, which I'm sure people are familiar with. The problem with a lot of prompts, in my opinion, is that they tend to be outcome-oriented. Did I do this thing this day? So like, what am I grateful for? What went well today? What was today's highlight? What did I learn? Those are all prompts, right? And they can reduce the friction in journaling for personal growth. But I found that looking at these things, if I didn't have something specific that I could put down there, I felt guilty. Like I should have something. But the more prompts that you add, the more friction

there potentially is for this outcome-based journaling. And what daily questions do is they remove the outcome piece of that, and it's all based on your intention. So it's really just, did I do my best to, and then you fill in the blank. So the areas that I have chosen for did I do my best to are grow spiritually, love my wife, love my kids, be a good friend, learn something, create something, and exercise. And then what you do is you give yourself, again, totally arbitrary score on a scale of 1 to 10. And those numbers, as I write them down, that's 80% of the value, but those also are going

to be collected and aggregated and displayed in graphs later when I reflect them. And just a little bit of clarification with these, it's all based on the intention, right? So I give myself flexibility with these. If I'm not feeling great and I just get outside and I go for a run, even if it's just a couple of miles, I'll give myself a 10. But if there's a day that I'm training for a half marathon and I'm supposed to put in 12 and I cut it short at eight, I'm not going to give myself that high of a score. So again, it's completely separated from the outcome and really just did I put forth the maximum effort that I wanted to in moving the needle in these different areas to borrow your term. Any questions on the daily questions? Well, no, like I said, to me, I think they're great.

I tried to do that for a while, but I just didn't find myself keeping up with it. But again, I just don't want that much quantification in my journal. I want kind of it to be more hippie-free in a sense. In terms of daily prompts, I have a bunch of them. I've collected them over the years. I've added a bunch of them that I particularly like to the weekly, monthly, and quarterly review, which is, I think, a good time to respond to good prompt questions.

But I have complete freedom as to which ones I answer each time. And I have no compunction about deleting some or all of them if I don't feel like answering them. It's just, it's there as a, you know, I was just telling one of my kids lately, the word consider can carry a lot of weight. Like you don't have to give yourself obligations to do things, but you can give yourself obligations to consider things and say, well, I consider these prompts when I go through these reviews i don't necessarily do them and but the ones that i do choose to do is usually for a reason and it's usually a good a good response and it helps me yeah totally fair but we do it the way that's okay you know

yep yep so this is sort of quantified self, but again, it's not based on the outcomes. That's the thing that really makes this click with me. I have complete control over whatever number I want to put there and I don't give myself any pressure, any sort of criteria, whatever I think is right. And then real briefly, I've got a couple other headers on this note where I will capture the traditional journal entries. So there's a section here for wins, a section for journal entries, a section for gratitude. And I have in Obsidian on my Mac, using the QuickAdd plugin, I have the ability to open up just like an entry box and type in a couple of sentences. No matter where I am in Obsidian, that will then put that in the appropriate

section in the daily note and give it the proper tag. So I'll put it, you know, a bullet point and then the entry, and then I'll have like hashtag journal slash entry i have all these as like sub tags yeah hashtag journal slash gratitude so that i can go back and i can click on those tags and i can see all the gratitude entries and sort them by date and all the wins and sort them by date things like that and that's one of the things i lost with um leaving obsidian because in obsidian i had like a list of them and they were organized by tags so i could always go back and see them together when i went over to day one i'm like well i kind of liked that i like the ability to do that and day one doesn't make that easy which is one of the reasons

why i exploded my journal list into even more i think it's kind of a hack really the way i do it like with the daily questions being a separate journal. I mean, ideally it wouldn't need to be, but I want to be able to separate them, so that's why I do it. Yeah, no, it makes sense. The thing I use

the tags for the most, though, in Obsidian is not those entries. It's the daily questions answers because there's another plugin the tracker plugin that i use for the the habit stuff can also be used for these values that i assign to these tags so in addition to like did i do my best to grow spiritually i've got the tag daily questions slash spiritual right after that is a colon and then whatever number i type after that is the value that's associated with that tag on that specific day and so what tracker allows me to do then is

create another note where i can embed these codes and it'll pull together all of the responses over i'm looking for the last quarter so the note i'm looking at right now has a start date of january 1st because that's a quarter that we're in. And it shows the scores based on these individual tags. And it also shows the average based on that time period. So I'll look at this as part of my quarterly personal retreats, and I'll see the average for Grow Spiritually was 8.7. And the average for Love My Wife was 8.22. And I'll look at those scores, and I'll pick the lowest one. And the average for Love My Wife was 8.22. And I'll look at those scores and I'll pick the lowest one and I'll really say, I should be a little bit more intentional in this specific area over the next 90 days. What are the things that I'm going to do in order to boost that score?

So in the Love My Wife one, for example, it's been a while since we've gotten away for a weekend. I'll try to book something and make sure that I'm being proactive in these areas, not trying to keep all of these plates spinning at the same time. That's the wrong approach. And I think that's kind of the implicit message that gets sent here with this sort of stuff. But this is sort of intentional imbalance

is the approach here. So we want to make sure that these things are doing well, all these different areas, but our focus and our attention can only be on one of these at any given moment. So it's really just constantly checking in on these things.

And again, this is tied to the daily actions and the daily questions. So am I doing my best in these different areas? And then occasionally looking at the scores and making sure, you know,

if this one needs a little bit more, a little bit more attention, I'm going to be sure to do that. And then try to do some things that are going to move the needle in that particular area. And that really, I think, is the thing that makes it all click for me is those personal retreats every 90 days when I'm going through, not just looking at this data, but also all of those different entries. And then the whole process of what should I start doing, stop doing, keep doing.

I won't get into all the specifics of that whole process. But that really, I think, helps me understand what has happened over the last 90 days and gives me confidence in setting intentions for the next 90 days. Yeah. And I think we're honestly doing similar things. Like I go through the journals for my wife and, and judge myself at that point. I just don't have a score,

you know, but we're doing the same thing. And I think that's something that people might want to try, but it may not be what you need. You know, as you're listening to the show, once again, getting back to the beginning,

I think you should be looking for your own journaling recipe. But what I can say is that I'm a better person because I journal. There's no question in my mind. And it helps me get better not only at doing things that pay for my shoes, but also just being a human. So for all these emails coming in about it, that's why, and that's why it's worth pursuing. And I think we've done a good job today of kind of explaining why, explaining our workflows, but our workflows are not necessarily your workflow.

But hopefully we've given you a little inspiration. I mean, I'm sure I'm going to hear from somebody that says, oh, you're crazy. You should just stick with a pen and a paper. That's the way to do it. And for that person, I would say you are absolutely right. That's the way to do it for you. Yep. I would also encourage people to be a little bit more broad in their view of what journaling is. It's like one additional piece, which I know some people are going to latch onto

as I never addressed this sort of thing, is that I don't have anything in here about my feelings, but that is because I'm not doing that on a daily basis. I may add some of that stuff in the journal entries, but I actually have a different process, which is again, based in Obsidian for when I'm trying to sort through what is frustrating me about a situation. And that's the whole idea of the map of content, as Nick calls it. It's really just whenever I feel those mental squeeze points. And I can identify those. I'm looking for those when I'm going through and I'm doing the rest of the stuff daily.

And that is a trigger for me to sit down and type out all that stuff. And I do have that stuff in my obsidian vault. It's just not how you would traditionally define even a digital journal. But I still think it's all connected. And I think that's the part people need to figure out for themselves is how does this stuff all connect and what's the right expression of these things for me. I have so many feelings in my journal i am definitely a californian well there's some thoughts gang why we think it applies to focus why we think you should give it a try let us know we've got a forum over at talk.macpowerusers.com just dedicated to the focus podcast you can share your journaling experience there or your questions that'd be a good place uh we are the focus podcast. You can share your journaling experience there or your questions.

That'd be a good place. We are the Focus podcast. You can find us at relay.fm. I want to thank our sponsors this week, ZocDoc, ExpressVPN, and Indeed. And we'll see you next time.