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I Journaled Everyday for 90 Days. Here’s What I Learned.

2022-09-09 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 19:28 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

After journaling every day for 90 days from May 2022, Ali describes his two methods (morning pages by hand in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook and typed entries in the Day One app), the benefits he found (creative unblock, processing thoughts and emotions, the journal as a personal therapist, written-up decisions to test with friends) and five tips: no rituals, no rigid method, anchor it to a habit, use prompts, and journal first thing in the morning.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Intro: 90 days of daily journaling and the four parts of the video

  • ★★★ Ali has journaled on and off for five years; from about May 2022 he decided to take it seriously and journal every single day for 90 days. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Ali says journaling is surprisingly good for you: there is a bunch of evidence that it has physical and mental health benefits. — 00:00:29 · Mental health
  • ★★ The main reason Ali took journaling seriously was its productivity benefits: journaling every day calms the "monkey mind" that is always off in different directions. — 00:00:29

00:00:34 — Part one: why bother journaling in the first place

  • ★★★ Evaluating his life choices in his journal helps Ali settle which areas of life he wants to spend his time on, which boosts his productivity, since productivity is just using your time well. — 00:00:58

    “productivity is just using your time well”

  • ★★ Many entrepreneurs, authors and creators Ali admires, such as Tim Ferriss, say journaling changed their lives; having only dabbled before, he committed to a 90-day experiment. — 00:01:27 · Tim Ferriss

  • ★★★ Ali keeps both a physical and a digital journal and recommends having both, to get the benefits of each. — 00:01:27

00:01:44 — Part two: the two journaling methods, physical and digital

  • ★★ Ali has used Leuchtturm1917 notebooks (A5, dotted paper) for over three years and calls them by far the best plain paper journal he has found; he has tried the Moleskine ones and prefers Leuchtturm. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ A pen holder attached to his journal, a few pounds on Amazon, made an enormous difference for Ali: before, struggling to find a pen was too much friction. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Ali carries his paper journal, with its pen attached, in his bag pretty much everywhere he goes. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Having tested dozens, Ali calls the Lamy Swift the best pen he has found for journaling, though any pen will do. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali explains morning pages, from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: first thing in the morning, write three pages by hand of whatever comes to mind, and it does not matter if it is garbage. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Ali's editor Rachel, who is helping with his book, also recommended morning pages to him. — 00:03:43
  • ★★★ Writing his three morning pages by hand unclogs Ali's brain, so that when he writes, makes a YouTube video or writes a lesson for Part-Time YouTuber Academy his thoughts flow. — 00:03:43 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Ali's digital journal is the app Day One, which he calls great and has used since about 2016 or 2017. (hedged) — 00:04:12 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali keeps a nice comments folder in Day One: kind comments sent by email or Instagram and Twitter DMs go in as screenshots, hundreds by now, which he flicks through when feeling down. — 00:04:41 · Day One, Instagram, Twitter
  • ★★ First thing in the morning, before work, email or Slack, Ali normally opens Day One on his MacBook, locked with Touch ID and encrypted, and writes whatever comes to mind. — 00:04:41 · Day One, MacBook
  • ★★ Ali sometimes writes his morning pages by hand in his Leuchtturm1917 notebook, as intended, but sometimes cannot be bothered and types them in Day One. — 00:05:27 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali names the real benefits of Day One: it is fantastic as an archive, and it has an On This Day feature. — 00:05:27 · Day One
  • ★★ Day One's On This Day entries showed Ali his thoughts from two years before, when he had just left medicine and was in his second week of being unemployed after two years as a doctor. — 00:05:56 · Day One
  • ★★ The entry from a year before was from when Ali moved to London for the first time. — 00:05:56 · London
  • ★★ A year after moving to London, Ali and his team are thinking of moving the studio and expanding the team. — 00:05:56 · London
  • ★★ Ali scans everything he writes in his paper journal into Day One, which makes Day One the single source of truth for all his journals. — 00:06:37 · Day One
  • ★★ Day One data can always be exported as JSON or PDF, so it is not locked into the Day One ecosystem. — 00:06:37 · Day One
  • ★★ Looking at his previous journal entries fills Ali with gratitude and helps him appreciate the present, by connecting him with his past self. — 00:07:06
  • ★★★ The main benefit of journaling for Ali is creative unblock: on days when journaling is the first thing he does, he is more creative and has better ideas for his book, videos, business and podcast. — 00:07:30

00:07:37 — Part three: benefits he has got from journaling

  • ★★ Journaling helps Ali process business decisions: who to hire or fire, the direction of the business and which projects to work on. — 00:08:00
  • ★★ Ali read an article by a psychologist saying men tend to benefit more from journaling than women, because women tend to be more open about talking about their feelings with friends. — 00:08:29
  • ★★ Ali says he is very bad at voicing his feelings, or even at being aware of his own emotions. — 00:08:29
  • ★★★ Writing down feelings such as fear, anxiety or stress, Ali asks why he feels them and whether he wants to, and so can, in his words, CBT himself out of emotions he does not want. — 00:09:26
  • ★★★ Ali sees his journal as his own personal therapist: in it he asks himself the questions and gives himself the advice. — 00:09:49
  • ★★ Ali has weekly coaching sessions with Corey, now a friend, who does executive coaching for entrepreneurs, which Ali calls basically therapy for entrepreneurs; they discuss much the same things as his journal. — 00:09:49
  • ★★ For big decisions, Ali writes up in his journal his reasons and the steel-man argument against, then shows it to his brother, his housemate Lucia or close friends to test his reasoning. — 00:10:47 · Taimur Abdaal

00:11:59 — Part four: top tips for getting started with journaling

  • ★★ Whenever Ali tried to build an elaborate ritual around something, he kept it up for two or three days and stopped when something got in the way. — 00:12:00
  • ★★★ Ali's first tip from 90 days of daily journaling: journaling can be done anytime and anywhere and needs no elaborate ritual. — 00:12:00

  • ★★★ Ali's second tip is to skip any rigid journaling method and lower the bar: rigidity kills creativity, productivity and consistency, and even one word in his journal for the day is a win. — 00:12:46

    “rigidity is the ultimate killer of creativity and productivity and consistency”

  • ★★★ To people who struggle to make a YouTube video every week Ali says lower the bar: the more perfectionism you hold yourself to, the less likely you are to post. — 00:13:25

  • ★★★ Ali's third tip is to anchor journaling to something you already do: an easy way to build a habit is to anchor it to a habit you already have. — 00:13:25
  • ★★ To increase his hamstring flexibility, Ali stretches each hamstring for one minute while brushing his teeth for two minutes twice a day. — 00:14:04
  • ★★★ Ali has anchored journaling to transport: in an Uber or on a train his default is not to scroll his phone or listen to an audiobook but to journal on his laptop. — 00:14:04
  • ★★ Ali gets carsick looking at a screen in a car, but in Day One he can type without looking, gazing out of the window; a 10 to 20 minute journey gives a few pages. — 00:14:54 · Day One
  • ★★ Anchoring journaling to train and Uber rides has been Ali's biggest hack for actually journaling more. — 00:15:23
  • ★★ Facing a blank page, Ali sometimes writes that he has no idea what to write, repeating "I don't know what to write" until something starts to happen. — 00:15:23
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth tip is prompts; besides how he is feeling and why, he asks where his life will be in five years, what he would do with only two hours of work a day, and how he feels about his channel, book or relationship. — 00:16:10
  • ★★ Journaling prompts are useful, Ali says, but being overly wedded to them is not; he balances them with free writing. — 00:16:10
  • ★★ Ali's fifth tip: it is surprisingly helpful to journal first thing in the morning, the idea behind morning pages. — 00:16:40
  • ★★ Ali does about 60% of his journaling in his morning routine and the other 40% in Ubers and on trains. (hedged) — 00:17:05
  • ★★ Ali's morning routine: he gets up, makes coffee in the living room with the apparatus his friend James Hoffmann gave him, then gets out his laptop or journal and writes in one of them. — 00:17:05

00:17:20 — Sponsor read for Morning Brew inside his morning routine

00:18:33 — Podcast plug, pointer to the writing-online video and sign-off

  • ★★ Some of what Ali tells in his video How Writing Online Made Me a Millionaire stemmed from his fledgling journaling habit in 2016. — 00:18:58

In the description and comments

  • ★ Asked whether he cringes at his past journal entries, Ali replies that he loves looking back at them. — creator comment
  • ★ Told that morning pages should be three sides of A4 paper, Ali replies that he does not like the A4 part. — creator comment
  • ★ Asked when to write morning pages, Ali says whenever, though he mostly does his in the morning. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Day One · Leuchtturm1917 notebook · morning pages

Also: People: Alex Lieberman · Corey · James Hoffmann · Lucia (friend, mentioned from 2018) · Neil Gaiman · Rachel (editor, mentioned from 2022) · Taimur Abdaal · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Deep Dive · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Organizations: Moleskine · Morning Brew · Uber

Concepts: cognitive behavioural therapy · habit stacking · Mental health

Places: London

Products: Lamy Swift · MacBook · Touch ID

Only in the description or credits: Julia Cameron · The Artist's Way

Also centred on Leuchtturm1917 notebook: Monthly Favourites #10 - Ali Abdaal

Also centred on morning pages: My 3 Favourite Ways to Journal #ad #sponsored · I Tried 137 Productivity Tools. These Are The Best.

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