I was reviewing my logs and journals for 2022 just now. I was happily reminded of the good times I had as well as the difficult moments I had to deal with last year. I’m glad I took the time to record all that.
If you can, I recommend you do the same. Reading about your good times can make you feel good about your life. And reading about the difficulties you had to deal with can make you appreciate how well you deal with things.
Writing about good times is fairly easy. Writing about difficult times is not. To log my difficult moments, I phrase them in the way of praise. So instead of writing something like:
Absolute disaster at work this week. I hate my project!
I’ll write:
kudos for dealing well with the difficulties at work this week by persevering and staying calm
I find phrasing it that way helps to read about it later. (This is my approach: you may be fine with going with the first approach.) It also reminds my brain that I can deal with similar difficulties in the future.
Be prolific if you can. Note simple observations. Consider all your senses. Write down many good memories and good feelings you had throughout the year. It’s easy to forget about them, but like snapshots, just reading them will bring back vividly thoughts and emotions you want to recall years from now.
Log them using the media best suited for you. You might covet one of those One Line a Day journals. You might like scribbling in a plain notebook. Some people might default to their smartphone and social media to log things. (I find Instagram is good with that….Twitter…not so much.)
I depend on a little program I wrote called easylog that I use to record things. It stores the information both in a local XLSX spreadsheet and a Google spreadsheet. Of course there are countless ways you can log or journal, but that suits me. It takes me a few minutes every day…no time at all, really.
Good luck. I wish you fond memories of 2023.
P.S. This post was inspired by posts from bloggers I admire:
Austin Kleon in particular is a master at logging things. You might not want to do it to the extent he does (at first), so start with just a line or two. You’ll be glad in 6 months, a year, two years from now when you get to re-read them.
I was almost inspired to write my own wonderful things in 2022 in a blog post, but I am trying to focus my social media content to things that benefit people vs things about myself. My goal is to have a ratio closer to 80:20 or even 90:10 (posts benefitting people: posts about myself). Let’s see.
Smart People I Know 