Thread by @rroudt

How good are you at focusing?

If you’re a knowledge worker, being able to direct your attention is crucial.

Without the ability to decide what to work on from moment to moment (and acting on that decision), you won’t add any value.

🧵 A thread about journaling to gain focus.

This thread is a distillation of my 2,000-word article on using @RoamResearch to journal for mental clarity and focus.

If you're in a hurry, read the thread—it's much shorter.

If you prefer longreads and nuance, you can find it here:
roamstack.com/roam-journal-m…

Like time, our attention is in limited supply—yet we spend much of it unwillingly.

Notifications rarely pull our attention to what we should focus on. And in business settings, there are often other people telling us what to do via calls, email, and direct messages.

We spend much of our days staring at screens. All the while our attention is pulled in all ways by algorithms others created.

How can we break this cycle? How can we discover what’s worth focusing on from moment to moment?

I believe that writing a journal is the answer.

Journaling has been the most effective tool for me to gain clarity and set course towards my vision.

For more than five years, I’ve been writing for and to myself. In that period, I’ve become aware of unhealthy behaviors and nudged myself onto a straighter path.

Journaling has saved my life, literally.

By writing, I started to hold a mirror to myself every day. What I saw was an unhappy, obese, and alcoholic kid who never grew up. I was still a scared boy, not taking ownership.

Journaling made me see it, and work my way out of it.

One of the realizations that journaling has given me is that I’m not a single person.

I see myself as a trinity, as roughly three persons; there’s my past self, my current self, and my future self.

By thinking and caring for all three of my selves, my life has improved a lot.

This is the the cycle of self-improvement that I found by journaling consistently:

1) I learn from my past self in the present.
2) My present self distills lessons from the past and sends them to my future self.
3) Repeat.

By journaling every day, I've gotten to appreciate the process of change.

Instead of setting outcome-based goals, I try to set process-based goals.

Only what’s in my control is worth focusing on. I now see that I do have agency, no matter on how small a scale it might be.

While still not easy, my journal gives me the guardrails to discover what I need to focus on—and then act on it.

As long as I stick to my process goal of writing in my journal, I know I’ll learn and become a tiny bit better every time.

Since I discovered @RoamResearch, keeping up a journaling habit has become a breeze.

I use three templates:

- Morning orientation
- Interstitial journaling
- Evening reflection

Together, they form a system that powers the cycle of setting intentions and checking up on them.

In the morning, I like to freewrite to offload anything that came to me in my dreams.

I then write down what I'm grateful for, before setting my intentions for the day. Often I'll have done the latter the day before to reduce decision-fatigue, although I allow myself to adjust.

Here's my template for my morning orientation:

- #roam/templates Morning orientation
- ## Morning orientation
- On my mind this morning::
-
- I'm grateful for::
-
- I want to achieve today:
-

To repeatedly bring my attention back to my intentions, I write short journal entries throughout the day.

Every time I check my TODO list, I write a few lines about what I did before, what I’m about to do, and what I want to achieve.

It's called interstitial journaling. Try it!

So why journal between doing tasks?

Because when you switch tasks, part of your mental space will still be occupied by the previous task.

Journaling between tasks gives you an opportunity to put a pin in one thought and free up that mental space for the next.

Use this template to offload your thinking about the previous task, focus on the upcoming task, and decide what you’d like to achieve:

- #roam/templates Interstitial journal
- I've done::
-
- I'll do::
-
- I want::
-

I’ve done = what you’ve just worked on. This will clear your mind.

I’ll do = what you’re going to work on. This will prime and focus your mind on the task ahead.

I want = what you want to achieve next, your goal. Try to set process-based instead of an outcome-based goal.

At the end of the day, I want to know how well I did fulfilling my intentions.

In the silence of the night, I scrutinize my behavior of that day—while being as patient and loving for myself as possible. After all, everything is feedback.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca encouraged people to ask themselves at night:

- What bad habit have I put right today?
- Which fault did I take a stand against?
- In what respect am I better?

I like to use the Plus, Minus, Next framework:

- #roam/templates Evening reflection
- Plus: What did I do well today?::
-
- Minus: What could I have done better?:
-
- Next: How could I act next time to be the best version of myself?::
-

These are the templates I use, but there are thousands of other variations possible.

What matters is that journaling raises your awareness and helps you do things in a way that you desire.

While perfection is impossible, we can still increase our odds.

If you liked this thread, consider reading the entire article I published over at the @RoamStack blog.

And when you sign up for the free newsletter, you'll be the first one to get any content I release about journaling.
roamstack.com/roam-journal-m…

Want to talk about journaling with a group of like-minded people?

Join @tracyplaces and my on Friday for a public session about using Roam to cultivate a focus habit.
lu.ma/rscfhrj

And tomorrow, @tracyplaces and I will host a Twitter Space about using a journal to structure your day.

Set a reminder and join us:
twitter.com/i/spaces/1lPJq…