Two is the start of a habit.

Journaling in 2022 was like a bird learning to fly. It flaps vigorously its wings for a few seconds or minutes to quickly fall to the ground. But it will try again and again.

First, small, unsure steps have led me to establish a solid habit.

Ship 30 for 30, the perfect breeding ground

Writing on a consistent basis gave me 2 fundamental things:

• a constant flow of ideas derived from the reading and research needed to keep writing on a daily basis.

• a community to share and contrast ideas and experiences.

Regarding journaling, among the first ones is finding the number of happiness. To be able to counteract that very human tendency to perceive negativity with 2.9 positive things for every negative one. The community brought me multiple journaling ideas, not necessarily to implement them all:

Interstitial journaling, morning pages, 5-minute journaling....

The importance of starting (very very) small

In March 2022, following a Twitter space on the practice of journaling, I set out to regularly implement a relatively simple system:

• 2.5 minutes in the morning to write down 3 things I want to live/do during the day.

• 2.5 minutes in the evening to wrap up the day with those 3 reasons for gratefulness and 1 thing to improve.

• once a week, the 3 things that stand out most from my weekly writing.

• each quarter, my 3 main takeaways from the previous weeks.

Writing on a daily basis was hard at the time; weekly and quarterly reviews still seem like a pipe dream.

The next logical step was to group the days into weeks and make 4 groups of 13 weeks (to complete the 52 weeks per year) in Q1 to Q4.

Even so, I completed 111 entries for the entire year.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior. —Christina Baldwin