Just forwarded this to my son. He's trying to get started.
I've been writing thoughts and quotes and ideas and shopping lists in 'Notes' for the past bit. I suspect this will be as far as I get. It actually feels like a bit of an achievement at this late stage. :-)
I keep a handful of different journals, but here's a daily system I started this year in case it helps anyone:
Each day, I keep track of the 4 things I want to have done: move a creative project forward to completion, learn something, have a worthwhile experience, spend quality time with family. For each day, I tally up my day's experiences in terms of these 4 buckets. (If I spend a lot of time at work, but it satisfies none of the buckets, it doesn't go in. I only record what I've decided is important.) The whole process at the end of the day takes about 4 minutes.
At the end of the week, I count all the tallies in all of the buckets and take a look. This allows me to see how I actually spent my time, compared against how I'd actually like to have spent it. I consistently come to these conclusions:
1. I get done more than I think, considering everything going on in the day to day. I need to be less hard on myself.
2. That said, still a lot of room for improvement. I could be a lot more judicious with my time. I just shouldn't be a tyrant to myself.
3. A day putting one tally in each bucket feels a lot more full than putting four tallies into one.
Like you I've tried journaling in various forms -- Julia Cameron's Morning Pages, etc. -- but none of them stuck. The closest I came to keeping a journal was having a Commonplace Book. I got the idea from Ryan Holiday: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/.
I write down quotes and sentences from the several books I'm reading at any given time, or my thoughts on films I"ve seen, or quotes, poems in progress, ideas for screenaplays, even drawings. It's a messy bag of things that may look like nonsense; but I find that writing down ideas in longhand (I use a fountain pen, so it feels real :)) makes tiny grooves in my brain where important thoughts and ideas breed. I may be kidding myself, what the hell, it's better than nothing.
Just forwarded this to my son. He's trying to get started.
I've been writing thoughts and quotes and ideas and shopping lists in 'Notes' for the past bit. I suspect this will be as far as I get. It actually feels like a bit of an achievement at this late stage. :-)
I keep a handful of different journals, but here's a daily system I started this year in case it helps anyone:
Each day, I keep track of the 4 things I want to have done: move a creative project forward to completion, learn something, have a worthwhile experience, spend quality time with family. For each day, I tally up my day's experiences in terms of these 4 buckets. (If I spend a lot of time at work, but it satisfies none of the buckets, it doesn't go in. I only record what I've decided is important.) The whole process at the end of the day takes about 4 minutes.
At the end of the week, I count all the tallies in all of the buckets and take a look. This allows me to see how I actually spent my time, compared against how I'd actually like to have spent it. I consistently come to these conclusions:
1. I get done more than I think, considering everything going on in the day to day. I need to be less hard on myself.
2. That said, still a lot of room for improvement. I could be a lot more judicious with my time. I just shouldn't be a tyrant to myself.
3. A day putting one tally in each bucket feels a lot more full than putting four tallies into one.
Like you I've tried journaling in various forms -- Julia Cameron's Morning Pages, etc. -- but none of them stuck. The closest I came to keeping a journal was having a Commonplace Book. I got the idea from Ryan Holiday: https://ryanholiday.net/how-and-why-to-keep-a-commonplace-book/.
I write down quotes and sentences from the several books I'm reading at any given time, or my thoughts on films I"ve seen, or quotes, poems in progress, ideas for screenaplays, even drawings. It's a messy bag of things that may look like nonsense; but I find that writing down ideas in longhand (I use a fountain pen, so it feels real :)) makes tiny grooves in my brain where important thoughts and ideas breed. I may be kidding myself, what the hell, it's better than nothing.