I journaled my private thoughts about a lover in middle school in a spiral notebook that I decorated with construction paper daisies. I then destroyed it after an embarrassing discovery by a friend that opened it up and laughed at my woes of unrequited flirtation with a boy I adored. I vowed to avoid that feeling ever happening again by never writing in a journal again that documented my teenage angst at its finest.

But journaling has been a struggle, and it’s real.

Fast forward to my late twenties, I decided to revisit the idea of tracking my time in a calendar book to reach my goals and pay better attention to how I was spending my downtime. More and more experience led me wanting to expand out from the cages of lines on a pre-made agenda format.

What the hell did I do again last year?

I found myself hearing about the bullet journal craze and began to investigate this freeform way of creating my own formatting systems. It was a fight to follow the rules and then to break them up all over again. More importantly, I wanted to make it worthy of flipping through them again, even if it was briefly. That meant exposing myself by writing down more of my thoughts, slowly but surely.

One of the worst feelings I had one time was recounting all the interesting things I did whenever I met someone new during a networking thing, dating or meeting friends of friends. It suddenly became important that I reflected on what I did instead of leaving it to pull out my photos app on the iPhone. Because sure the picture has a thousand words, but then also it was important that those words were fresh to refer to on a page.

Take smaller steps first and find a habit to attach it to.

I wanted to fill up a whole journal and be able to flip through it like a personal time capsule, but one year into it, and I realized that I only filled up half of it. I was letting gaps in my life go undocumented and wasn’t building a great habit of visiting it daily.

I had to scrap a lot of original concepts that I borrowed from others, kept what worked, and experiment with changing out systems to make sure I kept writing in it all the time, even if it was just a small notation somewhere.

I had to resort to tactics that would help automate my sense of reaching for the journal on a regular basis because it at first was a drag to remember to write in it all the time. What helped was that I made sure it was always within reach and in my peripheral, and that it was a nice quality, and that I started off my mornings writing in it.

Asking the right questions will help you write more.

Before I found meditation to help me with intrusive thoughts, I found it cathartic to dump out everything on a page as a series of intense lists of things to do in one day. It was helpful to a degree because I would walk away a little lighter, but then when I saw a bulging piece of writing, it felt very unorganized and chaotic when I would look at it again.

So there was an idea I came across that helped me systemize what I wanted to document about my day that made it easy to understand when I referred back to it, and also gave me the flex to journal my hardest thoughts. I’m proud of the blended system I came up with that I have stuck by for the longest, but not so married that I wouldn’t be up for trying something new to improve it and help me reach things faster. My asks: