The Benefits of Keeping a Private Journal

A private diary is tremendously powerful. It can help you to greatly improve your business or website. If you want to be a success, you need to think and act strategically. At the very least, you should keep your goals in mind in order to work towards them daily.
And a private journal achieves all this more effectively than a static to-do list, which only lists end goals and results to be achieved.
Unlike a to-do list, a well kept journal provokes introspection. It is a liberating and productive outlet for random ideas, thoughts and feelings.
Keep a daily journal about your business/website and write about your day in relation to your site. Make this journal private: This stops you from censoring yourself unnecessarily. Talk about your plans and most importantly, how you feel about your business or blog. Muse upon the objectives you’ve achieved or set for yourself.
Have a conversation with yourself and question your current strategies or aims. Criticize yourself. Praise yourself. Give yourself advice. Reflect on your mistakes.
Recent research in the medical field shows that keeping a daily journal improves the quality of life for cancer patients. In an experiment, patients were asked to write in a journal while waiting for their appointments. They were asked to answer one question: How has cancer changed you and how do you feel about those changes?

After the writing assignment, about half of the cancer patients said the exercise had changed their thinking about their illness, while 35 percent reported that writing changed the way they felt about their illness. Three weeks after the writing exercise, the effect had been maintained.
While a change in the way a patient thinks or feels about a disease may not sound like much, the findings showed that the brief writing exercise led to improved quality of life.

The key point to note is not the therapeutic effects of writing in a journal but rather the fact that regular journal keeping will influence the way you think or feel about an specific topic. If you’re an entrepreneur, blogger or marketer, reflection via a private journal will give you a fountain of ideas and initiatives to pursue.

Image Credit: mi moleskine folio
I know this because I’ve kept a private online journal for Dosh Dosh for 7 months and I’ve written in it every day. I write down random thoughts, possible marketing ideas and my feelings about the site: how I hate it or how it has changed me. All of what I write is uncensored and free from pretty grammar or fluffy, melodious words.
I don’t make an effort to sound good. I don’t check my spelling nor do I edit the post to make sure I don’t use the same words too often. The most I’ll do is to bold certain sentences which I find important after I’ve finished writing. This deepens what I want to remember and keep it in mind for the next day.
A private journal can be created and maintained through localized diary software or web-based blogging platforms. I’ve used Wordpress.com as a platform for some private journals because they give you the option of making your site entirely private and only visible some. You can also use Twitter or a basic paper notebook.
I like to use Wordpress blogs because it allows me to organize my thought processes. For instance, I have categories with names like ‘Achievements‘, ‘What I’m Unhappy With’, ‘My Competitors’ and ‘Marketing Ideas’. Careful filing of your thoughts can make the personal journal a motivational and useful breeding ground for change.
Here’s a simple question you can ask yourself while writing in your journal: How is my brand or website developing and how do I feel about it?
If this has piqued your interest, do try to keep a private journal for some time: you’ll get to experience the benefits for yourself. If you want to improve yourself or your website/business, I can’t offer a better low-cost, hassle-free solution than this.