That’s because maintaining a blog requires focus, creativity, and a lot of energy. You need these long after the excitement of doing something new wears thin. I always have to bribe myself with my favorite Korean drama just to sit down and come up with something new to upload to this site.
Coming up with blog post ideas make keeping a blog doubly difficult if you don’t have a plan for the next 52 weeks of posts. There’s a way to get around this hurdle though.
The Benefits of Journaling
One of the main things that keeps me blogging is my journaling habit. Every day—or every other day, when there are lots of deadlines to meet and errands to keep—I whip out my trusty notebook to scribble anything I could think of.
I journal about many things—dreams, reflections on quotes, book and drama reviews, one-liners, places I’ve visited, slice-of-life remembrances, memories… There’s a huge reservoir of topics to write about.
One thing that I love about the exercise is that I can write junk anytime I want. No scolding me for dangling modifiers, wrong word choices, cringe-worthy subject-verb agreements and grammar rules that I keep breaking.
Journaling has not only improved my blogging but it has helped me hit my writing stride quickly when I’m pressed for time.
And as much as it doesn’t take much of my time from the business of making money, journaling for a busy entrepreneur like yourself shouldn’t also be difficult. It only needs 20 minutes a day to jot down something on a notebook—even if it’s just a one-liner—but the benefits are priceless:
1. Journaling improves your focus.
One of my favorite quotes about writing is from Lord Byron: “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.” Writing down on my journal allows me to slough off the useless buzz that goes on in my head so I could concentrate on one thing at a time.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that my journal writing doesn’t meander. It does, plenty of times, but when I start writing I find that I’m able to think more clearly for a longer stretch than when I’m staring into space percolating stuff. When I’m dealing with a particularly pesky problem, I write everything that I know about it. I call it thinking out loud on paper. After reading the entry, I discover new perspectives that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
2. Journaling facilitates decision-making.
Like I said, I wrestle with problems on paper because it opens new perspectives. I write down the pros and cons, opportunities and threats of a particularly problematic situation. Journaling allows me to cover the bases better. This often leads to new insights. The bonus? I get a firmer grasp of what I want...which, in turn, informs my decisions. It might seem a long-winded approach to making choices but if you have the time and it’s a particularly important decisions, writing can encourage breakthroughs.
3. Journaling leads to a deeper level of learning.
Writing by hand works your mental muscles. Studies have shown that when we write, our brains receive feedback from what we’re doing, setting of sensorimotor events that trigger learning moments.
4. Journaling tracks important events and measures results.
Normally when I journal, I write about things that currently occupy mind. It could be a problem, a new decision, or a new resolve. Whatever it is, when I review my journals, I discover that I have a physical record of what has happened from the time I first dealt with the issue to the time I resolved it. I have documentation of what the problem is, the steps I made, and the results of my experimentations.
5. Journaling connects our experiences with our learnings.
On the heels of having a written record of the past, I also get a handy way of integrating what has happened with what lessons learned from the experience. Decisions made, failures and success that ensued, best practices discovered—all of this coalesce in my journal and in my mind.
6. Journaling establishes patterns between disparate things.
When you journal, your mind is sorting through everything that’s happening in a natural way. Since your brain automatically groups the bits and pieces it receives, journaling assists in creating these patterns to help you come up with the Big Picture. It’s a handy way of finding the missing pieces in problems and puzzles that you’re facing.
7. Journaling improves your storytelling prowess.
Business blogging is about telling stories. It may not be the conventional fodder for fiction that we’re more familiar with—boy-meets-girl, hero-battles-dragons sort of tales. Storytelling in business blogging is all about the little stories that help our audience learn new skills or solve problems.
When you write down about what has happened through your day, you’re telling stories. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end, and more importantly, there’s a moral of the story—the takeaway that you learn from your experience.
It’s similar when you’re writing for your business blog. You begin with a problem that connects you with your audience—pains, fears, dreams and aspirations—followed by details on how to address it, and the expected resolution—the happy ending. A blog post is a story all its own.
Take the time to write each day because after a time, you’ll find that blogging for your business comes more naturally. The flow of ideas and words are faster, and your blogging task is over before you know it.
Don’t sweat it if you can’t journal every day or you only have a 5-minute window. Write when you can. And just write what comes to mind—forget grammar, style, or structure. The important thing is you’re writing something and that’s that.
PS:
Next week, we'll start with 52 Squiggles, a weekly journaling project that's designed to help improve your writing. Every Saturday morning, I'll deliver 5 writing prompts and creative inspiration designed to start you journaling daily. Watch out for it!
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