Trying out journalling

This month, I decided to start a journal. A real, hand-written journal. I've tried journaling a couple of times before and it didn't really catch on but something about this time is slightly different.

I'm trying to take a bit of a step back from actively posting my thoughts to Twitter every few hours and I'm making more of an effort to write here on this blog again. I think this shift in being a bit more considered with where and how often I'm choosing to write down my thoughts has fed into this desire to have somewhere I can write other thoughts but just not for public consumption.

As I said, I've tried to journal before and failed miserably. Having looked into how others go about journaling and going back over my previous attempts, it seems I'd fallen into the trap of just writing about the bad stuff. Just focussing on negative stuff isn't the nicest thing to go back and read and it's doesn't really seem all that conducive to cultivating a healthy practice. Who wants to just keep track of all the bad stuff?

This time around, I'm leaving myself open to write about what I want when the mood takes me. My main focus right now is on building up the habit. I'm not setting a specific goal like writing every day just yet. For now, I'm just making sure I have my journal near to hand as much as possible so when a thought hits me, I can quickly jot it down.

As I get into the habit of writing on a fairly regular basis, I guess some of the deeper self-reflection stuff will come but for now I figure at the very least, it's a record of my thoughts for me to explore in future which may well prove useful to me.