The Power of Journaling

We recently had a community meetup on Traveler’s Notebooks since many of our members own these nifty journals. If you’re not familiar with TN’s, I have a  video here . We had such an interesting conversation because it went from “what are those cool inserts in your notebook?” to “what is the ego?”…welcome to another day at MMN! 😁

Below are my reflections from the session where I reveal my relationship with writing, why it differs from mind mapping, and how I use my notebook to appreciate each life phase and overcome writer’s block.

Writing Letters

How I got into journaling is deeply personal. It began in a 2-week wilderness survival course in 2019 where for 3 days I was left by myself in the mountains with little more than a knife, wool blanket and a tiny field notebook.

While I was short on modern comforts, I was rich with time, so I decided to record my experiences. I had inadvertently opened the flood gates as the words kept coming. Before I knew it, I had filled the entire notebook with my runaway thoughts. I felt like I had stumbled on something incredible.

September 2019. My only companion in the mountains

Of course like many things we adopt under extraordinary circumstances, writing didn't translate to long term habit once I returned home. It wasn’t until a bad breakup that really started my introspective journey. I remembered how relieved and clear I felt after writing during my solo in the wilderness and decided to pick up the pen once again.

I’d wake up at 5am to read and write for five hours every day for those first rough five months. This was my attempt to figure out the deep mental and behavioral patterns that got me down this road. But instead of free form journaling, I actually addressed each entry as a letter to my ex-partner to share what I had learned every day. This made me feel less alone and helped with the self-reconciliation and healing process.

I didn’t realize it at that time, but I was taking on a long tradition of many poets and philosophers who used letter writing to clarify their own inner workings.  Letters of a Stoic  from Seneca is literally a collection of letters that he wrote to his friend. The same with Rilke’s  Letters to a Young Poet  and Marcus Aurelius’  Meditations , which were letters to himself.

There’s something about letter writing and addressing to a friend that creates a rich narrative that to this day still influences my journaling style.

January 2020. From the woods to the desk. Some of my best works were made during this time like the 3rd Line Framework for maxing life's meaning

Writing vs Mapping

Mind mapping and writing have fundamentally different uses. Mind mapping is a very logical endeavor, where you’re deconstructing things, making connections and spatially arranging nonlinear elements. It’s much more thinking than feeling.

Writing by hand is much more emotional and forces me into a linear synthesizing mindset. For example I’ll sometimes get writer’s block when I’m on my computer, starring at my screen and keyboard. The way that I get past that writer’s block is to go back to my journal.

Two very different ways of thinking in one notebook

Then it’s like I’m writing a letter to a friend or to myself. It’s very different. There’s not as much expectations or ego. There’s no set word count or distractions. It’s just me, the paper and a pen. It’s very intimate.

Word Mind Maps

I don’t really draw pictures in my maps. Instead I use concise words to convey big concepts. It comes from my obsession with the definition of words, because words are just symbols representative of deeper meaning.

So it’s less about having a big vocabulary, so much as trying to figure out what is the right word that summarizes concisely what we’re trying to trying to say. I’m not one of these people who has a big vocabulary. I instead try to figure out how to best use common words.

I was inspired by the poet David White’s book  Consolations , which he takes every day words like “Disappointment” and “Beauty” and writes whole essays on them. For example, he’d write: “Disappointment is inescapable, but necessary” or “Beauty is the harvest of presence”. Then he goes on about what that actually means.

So from him I learned that there’s so much power and meaning behind some words that you can write entire chapters about them. This inspired me to try to define what I read and experience using short words or phrases. We see this with science writing and industry jargon. “Network effects” means a lot of things in the technology sector.

Seasons of Life

How we journal and mind map reflects the different seasons of our lives.

I go through a new lined journal insert every 3 months. On the cover, I like to draw diagrams and art that represents a major theme of that period. I usually keep the last journal insert, which preserves my perspectives from 3-6 months ago.

November 2020 . The leaf is from the autumn wonderland of the Adirondacks in upstate NY

It’s helpful to read my thoughts, my worries my desires from a previous time because it makes me appreciate how much I’ve changed and reminds me that these same feelings I have today will also pass.

As you as you accumulate more of these inserts over time, it’s really interesting to see what kind of mind maps you draw at particular periods of time in your life. This observation was prompted by MMN member Saji.

Saji, being a talented artist, illustrates gorgeous mind maps. So he asked to see my notebook’s mind maps, and I flipped through my recent ones and realized they’re all pretty ugly 😅. They’re very operational, which is reflective of my mental state in the last three months, which had been in crazy build mode launching MMN and afterwards jumping straight into the LinkedIn Creators Accelerator.

That’s why my current notebook’s just full of  to-do mind maps  and  2-week sprints . My first reaction was: wow this is quite boring! If I look back on my notebooks and from previous eras, I can tell I had the time and space to think more deeply rather than operationally.

Analog vs Digital

This dichotomy is a recurring theme in MMN where many of us struggle to leverage powerful digital tools without being distracted by the vast number of choices and endless content our devices provide.

As a former UX designer figuring out the most intuitive ways for humans to interact with machines, I sometimes wonder that with the digitalization of everything, are we losing amazing analog experiences like writing in a physical journal?

My philosophy has always been to find the lowest tech solution to the problem at hand. Because it’s the least complicated. How many of these shiny new productivity “solutions” are trying to sell us stuff vs actually solving our core human problems?

I bet that the majority of them are not doing the latter.

Make the most of your mind maps

Thanks for reading this article. If you found it useful, you can get a new mind map in your inbox every week. Epiphany is your dose of structured thinking and ordered chaos.

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