Leadership — Seeing Yourself Through a Journal

Seeing yourself through a journal

Last time we covered self-blindness, the first obstacle to innovation — you can’t change a thing you haven’t seen. The author’s fix is unexpectedly simple: spend five minutes a day writing a journal. And the most interesting part is that the act of starting trains and reveals several things at once.

One: your first reaction on hearing it

When you hear the assignment “write a journal every day”, don’t rush into doing it — notice your first reaction. Resistance, it sounds like a chore? Or “I’ve been doing this for years”? That reaction is itself a mirror — it tells you what your attitude to self-observation actually is.

Two: how you plan to write it

Then the mechanics: what time of day, fixed? By hand, on a computer, or on your phone? There’s no correct answer here; the point is to find a way you can genuinely keep up — the method you can sustain is the good method.

Three: what to write

And the content? Answer: anything to do with you. If you don’t know where to start, follow a simple structure — facts → feelings → lessons: write down what happened, then how you felt, then force yourself to distil one small lesson out of it.

What makes journalling unusual is this: you can’t know in advance what you’ll learn today, but as long as you write, you’re almost guaranteed to learn something. And reading your own entries back after a while tends to produce insight you didn’t have at the time.

Reflection

My first reaction to the assignment was “I’ve been doing this for years”. Every day I write a three-line mood journal in a tool I built myself, TheBlock6 — only three lines, but I think it covers the core of what a journal is for. I use the same tool to plan the next day’s schedule, and it also holds quarterly OKR planning and GTD-style project breakdown. As for the “learning journal” part, my plan is to write it as blog posts or series entries — like this one.

So for me the hard part was never “what to write, how to write it”. It’s whether I actually carve out the time to write and reflect. Right now I do it before bed; TheBlock6 works on a phone, so even on a day with no time, three minutes is enough to finish it.