One of the things that turns off a lot of technical people about journaling is that nearly everything you can find about it focuses on topics that most techies just aren’t interested in, at least not in the soft way they’re treated. A lot of what’s written about journaling is introspective, examining your life or other people’s lives. More like a young girl’s diary than a journal.

If you go into a store to buy a journal and look at what they offer, you’ll see covers with flowers, and jewelry, and all sorts of other things associated with femininity and not with technology. I have yet to find a notebook offered as a journal with pictures of computers on the cover. :o)

That being said, a journal doesn’t have to be about self-exploration or keeping a record of life-events. I’m afraid that I learned to keep a journal more in the spirit of the stereotypical 19th century gentleman scientist. It’s a place to record notes, observations, sketches, or whatever associated with what I’m working on. As Steve Pavlina discusses in his recent post Journaling as a Problem-Solving Tool, it’s also a great place to think about problem solving. This alone makes it an ideal tool for making your ideas clear.

I learned journaling by keeping lab notebooks in college. I expanded to using notebooks for all my courses and eventually for all of my learning as well.

Using a notebook for problem solving was best expressed in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“When you’ve hit a really tough one, tried everything, racked your brain and nothing works, and you know that this time Nature has really decided to be difficult, you say, “Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,” and you crank up the formal scientific method.

“For this you keep a lab notebook. Everything gets written down, formally, so that you know at all times where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and where you want to get. In scientific work and electronics technology this is necessary because otherwise the problems get so complex you get lost in them and confused and forget what you know and what you don’t know and have to give up. In cycle maintenance things are not that involved, but when confusion starts it’s a good idea to hold it down by making everything formal and exact. Sometimes just the act of writing down the problems straightens out your head as to what they really are.”

Categories: Practical Applications, The process
No Comments »

Some people seem to believe that ‘think before you write’ means that you need to through a long process to write something. Nothing of the sort is necessary. Thinking before you write is about engaging your mind before you start moving your hands. It helps to think out the process, but the whole thing can be done in minutes.

There are some people I’ve met who are good enough to write and think at the same time, but I’m not that good. I need to put my thoughts in order or I start going off on tangents as I write. If I want to COMMUNICATE, then I want to be clear. To be clear, I need to think about WHAT I want to say and HOW I need to say it.

I can do this quickly when I’m writing something short. This morning while replying to an email, I read the original email, spent a few minutes thinking about my response, then wrote it. I re-read it to make sure I said what I’d intended, fixed a few awkward phrasings, and sent it off. My reply was a few lines and everything was done in just a few minutes, that’s all.

Once it gets important to make your point clear, or the point is more involved, or there is more than one point … you need to take more time. This is where my journal comes in.

My Journal

I keep a notebook with me all the time and use it for note taking, thinking, journaling, and more. I’ve been doing that since the 1960s, so I have quite a collection of notes. I started using notebooks for classes at university, but when I left, I kept using them for notes in meetings, notes from books, for thinking and planning, drawing, and even just to do lists. it’s my ‘rough draft’ location for most things.

When I need to really make my ideas clear, I work through aan informal process like this:

1. I pull out my journal and start a mind map with the core idea in the center of the page. If I think it’s going to be a big idea, I’ll put it in the center of a two page spread.
2. I fill in everything I know about the subject, expanding as I need to and linking ideas one to another
3. With my knowledge dumped on the page, I use the map to determine what I still don’t know, what holes need to be filled in, and what questions other people might ask about the subject
4. If there are any questions that appear important or holes that I need to understand, then I’ll do any additional research necessary to fill in the map
5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 if necessary, but usually I don’t need to
6. I’ll convert the map into an outline by the simple expedient of numbering the major points in the order I want to deal with them. I might actually type this outline into my Word Processor to give me a place to start my written draft. If the map is for a presentation, then this will be the outline of the presentation.
7. Now I can draft what I want to say, raising and answering questions or whatever is necessary to get my point across.
8. A critical step: Put the draft away for a period of time. It might be an hour, it might be a day. What I want to do is be able to come back and re-read it with a fresh perspective as if I’m reading it for the first time.
9. Now I’ll edit the draft, correcting problems I found in re-reading it. These might be grammar, spelling, phrasing, or even rewriting a section to eliminate anything that isn’t clear
10. Repeat 7-9 as much as necessary
11. Publish it

Sounds pretty complex right? Well it’s not. For something short that I know well, Steps 1-6 take just a few minutes and everything is in the journal. Steps 7-10 may take only as long as I need to write it. For something really important, I might delay a day between draft and edit to clear my mind and be able to see what I’m writing more clearly. For something like a BLOG post, I might come back to it after getting a cup of tea or coffee.

How much time it takes to write something depends on how important it is to write it, but even something simple should get some thought before you write it.

Categories: The Basics, The process
No Comments »