A Day Worth Journaling About

What’s Needed to Plan Your Life In Days?

Budgeted Time – Part 8.3

As we end with budgeting for one day, we must go back and consider our “why” for budgeting time. Our main reason to budget time can be found in our daily journal or lack of journaling. People who journal have a goal of capturing their day. Why would a person wish to capture their day? Why would someone desire, like, and enjoy journaling? In order to answer this question we must first look at why a person doesn’t.

One of the main challenges I’ve found in journaling is that of being consistent. Most people who enjoy journaling and those who have a strong desire to journal find challenges in being consistent. The question becomes how can one become a consistent journal-er? Let me help you with this write off the bat. It’s not that one is lazy, even though laziness can be a problem. It might not be a problem with having enough time to perform the task because a person who likes to journal will make time. So then what’s the issue? Before I go here, this might just give people, who don’t regularly journal or those who don’t know they would like journaling, the motivation to pick up a pad and pen or smart device to begin. Now for the two major motivators for which one should journal and the implied explanation why a person doesn’t journal.

1. You should plan to have a day worth journaling about.
   How will you plan to make the best of your “today?” A person who journals about his or her day finds one of two things to express in her or his journal: 1) the huge negatives or 2) the huge positives.
   • Huge negatives are the situations that negatively impact our day and make “today” a bad day.
     The problem with only focusing on the negatives is that you will find what you look for. Looking for negatives produces higher awareness of the negatives in one’s life. The other misconception regarding negatives is there are very few in the grand-scheme of thinking. I often hear people say they had a bad year and I ask them a few questions to put it in perspective. A bad year implies that 51% (>186 days) or more of the days were bad. So are you telling me in a year’s time you’ve had over 186 bad days that you’ve tracked? Next question, if you had to guess, how many bad days did you have this year? If fewer than 186, then your year is mostly good. That being the case, it’s better to focus a journal on the huge positives.
   • Huge Positives are the events and activities that positively impact your life. In this case, what made “today” unique and special for you? Next question which is the most important. How can you make this day great? Don’t leave “one day” up to itself to be great. We make the day great. When you have a great day, that alone gives you the desire to remember it and we do this by journaling what happened. The motivation is to make your day a day worth journaling. The motivation for budgeting time for “today” is to make the day a day worth journaling about.
2. You should write a journal entry to God about your day.
   This idea is what changed my discipline for journaling more consistently. When you journal as if it’s to yourself, it also gives you permission not to journal. It impacts no one but you and no one else knows. When you write a journal for yourself it’s easy to not do because there’s no external accountability. Which is the implied reason for why most don’t. Therefore, I choose to write my journal to God. I answer this question. What can I share with God about this particular day? Allow me to explain in more detail how this process works.
   • Begin the day with a meeting with God.
     Pamela and I don’t refer to our morning prayer time as a time of prayer, but rather as our first meeting of the day which happens to be with God. It’s where we discuss “today” and all that we have going on for “today” with God. We allow Him to give us feedback on our closed, opened, pending, projects and action items. Our lives are our businesses that we report to God on. Therefore, I place quite a bit of what comes from this meeting in my journal, all the ideas, adjustments, insights, etc. So on the front end of “today” are our instructions on how to use “today.”
   • End your day with writing down all the things that made it special.
     This is where the actual journaling happens. I end most days by writing to God how things went “today”. My journal is what we call a hybrid system, consisting of both a paper-based and digital-based journal. Writing to God makes me accountable to Him and not myself. We do all of this in order to make each day not only a good day, but to make it count as a day that God has given us. What would you share with God about “today?”

Your life is the sum total of what you do with your days. Today matters and will not be what you want it to be on its own. It takes your intentional effort to make a day great. Have a plan that works to accomplish what you desire. A plan for your day isn’t meant to limit you, but it’s meant to give you the tools you need to say “no” to all the wrong things and “yes” to all the right. Your life is your business and it’s measured in days. Therefore, it’s critical to master one day as it’s the only day that matters because it is. “Everything matters” was a phrase often spoken by Jim Rohn. The point is not to take anything for granted, but rather understand that it matters. Do what it takes to make “today” matter even if it means being accountable to God for what you did with “today.”

Question: what would it take for you to create a habit of making “today” a day worth journaling about?

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