Updating A Diary
|| Article written on December 31st, 2018 ||
As a new year is upon us, I now feel motivated to ramble a bit about my diary. 2019 will be the first year that I actually start while writing a diary regularly and, following 2018’s rather good evolution of my diary, I now feel I should update it to make use of it more. Or at least prepare to let myself be able to use it more later in the year.
I figured that writing about it would allow myself to organize my thoughts more clearly and may help someone doing a similar task so here we go.
First, here’s my status for the 2018 diary :
On the right:
- 5 lines every day in Korean composed of 3 things I am thankful for and 1 or 2 things I want to accomplish during the day.
On the left:
- My wake-up time
- The number of push-ups and crunches accomplished in one set on said day.
- My sleeping time
- If plans with people during the day: written on the white space on the left.
This is a rather simple set up that has been working extremely well for the past few months.
So why change you ask? (Or at least, I ask myself.)
Well, I feel that there are potential improvements that could allow me to make the best of a diary even more.
For this reason, before the holidays, I bought a new diary for 2019 which has half a page available per day instead of only 5 lines on both pages.
This should allow me to write a lot more but giving myself the goal to write the full page every day might make me give up so I need to find something for which the risk of giving up wouldn’t be so high.
The good news is that transferring the way I wrote until now shouldn’t be too hard so I should be able to keep the same data on myself every day.
Furthermore, I wanted to change the way I wrote what I am thankful for: I’ve been using full sentences, but I feel the use of “I’m thankful for” 3 times in 3 lines was a bit much. I’ll now try to change it to avoid this repetition. For this reason, I will use bullet points for this part for now.
As I am planning on diving deeper on Mandarin this year, I will start with writing what would make my day pleasant in Mandarin instead of Korean and leave a few lines under it to allow for corrections to be added later on.
I also want to do a bit of Burmese every day to learn the basics slowly but surely. For this. I will write one word or sentence in the language’s writing system, the pronunciation and the translation in English.
Finally, I believe I should also get out of my comfort zone more often so I will add one weekly goal that would contribute to my long-term goals but that I sometimes would have just pushed to a later day. I will fix a start date for this and write a line or 2 about the evolution along the days of the week. This will wait until I get back to work to allow myself not to get used to crazy tasks and give up in two weeks.
It appears the above rambling allowed me to find a way to push the use of my 2018 dairy to a more developed one for 2019.
This is still just the beginning though and much more rambling will be needed in order to have a perfect handle of how I want to use my diary, especially since I also want to start writing down ideas that come up out of the blue.
I deeply trust that the experience of trying is what makes us learn.
I tried using a diary in 2018 and it worked for me. Now, how about we see how I can work for it and make it evolve further with me.
If you haven’t given up reading this article until here, you’ve certainly been writing a diary yourself. How are you using it and if you’ve been using is for long, which evolution did it go through?
Originally published at yuhakko.wordpress.com on January 7, 2019.
