Whether or not your online business plans include you writing anything, there is a lot to be said for developing a consistent journaling habit. Many, many people (especially those who have to be creative on a daily basis) attest to the fact that doing a morning \”brain dump\” of all of your worries, ideas, plans, etc. by writing them down helps to clear you out to do your best work later in the day. This is a habit promoted in the book The Artist\’s Way, and now there is a website that helps you get your daily writing done at www.750words.com. The site will even track certain statistics about how you complete your daily quota.
What\’s the Point?
At first, this may seem like a useless exercise, especially once you\’ve been writing for a few days and find yourself writing pure drivel on purpose just to get to the end of your 750 words so that you can move on to something else. But there are several benefits to doing this kind of writing, besides the basic head-clearing mentioned above. The first is that, given three blank pages to fill up with what\’s currently on your mind, you can\’t help but write about things that are bothering you – aspects of your life that you may be unhappy or dissatisfied with. And the beauty of the 750 words daily is that over the long haul, you actually get sick of seeing yourself write down the same complaints over and over and actually begin to take steps to change things. It\’s a way of the problems becoming too obvious for you to continue to ignore, because they are right there in black and white.
The next thing that starts to happen as you continue with the daily writing is that you start to really think about where your life is headed and what you need to do to get where you want to go. You start focusing in on your goals, long-term and short-term, and as you\’ve probably heard before, there is something so solid about writing down your goals that that single action can be a deciding factor in whether or not you follow through on them. If you stick to the daily writing for a few months, you may just discover that things you\’ve been trying to do (or not to do) for years suddenly becomes possible. Is it because you wrote them down? Is it the daily self-reflection or simply taking time out to look at where you are? Hard to say, but the important thing is that it works. Try it and let us know what you think.