Just start. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Almost unhelpfully so.
But if you’ve been thinking about journalling for a while – and a lot of people have – the longer you wait, the heavier it feels. The expectation builds. If you have a perfectionist streak, and I say this as someone who absolutely does, the longer you think about starting, the more impossible it becomes. You build it up into something it doesn’t need to be, and then you don’t begin because you’re not sure you can do it properly.
But how do you fail at journalling? It’s for you. Only you. There is no properly.
Why I actually started
I’ll be honest about my reason for starting because it wasn’t therapeutic or particularly considered. I’d read so much about the best CEOs and highest performers journalling that I just wanted to be part of that. I wanted to belong to the club. That was it. No deeper reasoning, no moment of clarity – just a fairly shallow desire to do what successful people supposedly did.
I’d been thinking about it for years before I actually started. I can’t remember what finally pushed me to pick up a pen, but I remember the first entry clearly. It was about visiting a wedding venue with my partner. That was it. No insights. No reflections. Just a description of where we went and what we saw.
The beginning was awkward
It was. And it probably will be for you too.
Even just describing events felt strange at first. Writing down what happened, what I noticed, what we did – it felt oddly formal and slightly pointless. And emotions? Not a chance. I was a grown man writing in a notebook – what if someone saw it? The idea of putting feelings on paper felt completely unnatural.
So I didn’t. Not for a while. I just described things. And that was enough to start building the habit.
It took time before I started putting anything deeper into it. I needed to trust the process first – to prove to myself that it was worth something before I was willing to open up, even to myself. That’s not a weakness in the method. That’s just how it works. You have to earn your own trust before the honest writing comes.
Six years later
I’ve journalled every day for over six years now. Every day, without exception.
That’s not said to impress – it’s said to give context to everything else. When I write about journalling in this series, it’s not theory. It’s the accumulated result of six years of daily practice that has, genuinely, helped me understand myself in a way I don’t think would have happened otherwise. The clarity, the decision-making, the self-knowledge – all of it traces back to the habit of sitting down and writing honestly every day.
None of that was visible from the first entry about a wedding venue.
What actually works
My style has changed many times over the years. I’ve tried different formats, different structures, different approaches. What I do now is simple – one page about the day, what happened, what’s worth remembering. Another page for reflection – how things made me feel, why, what they revealed.
That separation works for me because I arrived at it through years of trying things. It’s not a prescription – it’s just what I landed on.
Which brings me back to where this started. You don’t need a method before you begin. You don’t need to commit to a page a day or fifteen minutes or any particular structure. Set no targets for the first entry. Write one sentence if that’s all that comes. Describe something that happened today. That’s enough.
The method finds you eventually. But only if you start.
The only rule
Don’t wait until you’re ready. You won’t feel ready – that’s the trap. If you tend toward perfectionism you will find endless reasons why now isn’t quite the right time, why you need to think about it a bit more, why you should find the right notebook first.
Pick up whatever you have. Write something true. Do it again tomorrow.
Six years from now you’ll understand why.
If starting is the part that’s been holding you back, we made the journal for that. View the journal.