Taking note: Keeping a work journal can help professional, personal growth
By Marco Buscaglia
Keeping a journal continues to be a popular way for people to express their feelings but when most of us think of journaling, we think of a nightstand notebook that includes personal thoughts, dreams and feelings. Although it’s not a usual place to keep a journal, creating a work journal can be a valuable practice and can offer several benefits in your professional life.
“It’s a great way to track your professional growth and to look back on what’s worked and what hasn’t,” says Derek Quinn, a career consultant in Fort Collins, Colorado. “If you’re honest, you can use it to shape your plans for the future based on what you’ve done in the past.”
Still, Quinn says a work journal is more than a collection of the positives and negatives of your job. If done correctly, a work journal can help you gain personal growth as well. “It can help you find out more about yourself—what makes you tick, what sets you off, what frustrates you and what inspires you,” Quinn says. “And then you can use that information to assess where you’re at in your life and why—and where you want to be. It can offer you some insight on how to get there.”
Write it down
A work journal allows you to document your daily tasks, projects and accomplishments. It serves as a written record of your work-related activities, which can be helpful for future reference, performance reviews or resume updates. “In the past, when it was time for me to do a review, I usually relied on my emails to summarize what I’ve done. I basically scrolled through the year to see what jumped out at me,” says Rick Durham, a sales rep in Iowa City, Iowa. “After I started journaling—and trust me, I’m not consistent with it but I do it enough to summarize the things I accomplished and the things where I fell short.”
Durham says his journal now includes details that are useful when it’s time for his review. “I can’t recall some of the most important aspects of a sale after it’s complete,” he says. “But when I journal, I can recall who was receptive, who was hostile and who gave me some information that may be helpful in the future.”
Durham’s journal also helps him share credit with others. “I like to look back at the end of the year to see who did something helpful or something that helped me close a sale—something out of the norm—and then make sure I thank them and include their help when I write my self-review.”
Quinn says journaling is a good way to set and track goals. “It’s helpful for short-term or long-term goals,” he says. “You can see your progress toward your goal and look at the setbacks you faced. It helps keep you honest and motivated.”
If you have problems at work, journaling about them can help you overcome them. “Not only can you take a fresh, objective look at the problem, you can take some time to brainstorm potential solutions for when it happens again,” says Quinn.
Durham says he uses his journal to track key points from meetings, casual but job-related conversations, and training sessions. “It helps you go back and look at something and maybe turn it into an email or a proposal,” Durham says. “If a journal is done right, you can use some of the entries to form a blueprint for a plan.”
Ease your mind
Roberta Kelly, a high school teacher in Columbus, Ohio, keeps a work journal to “leave my job at the job and to release some of the stress from the day.”
According to Kelly, journaling is the perfect stress management tool. “It helps me process things. It helps me spend a few minutes to reflect on it but that’s it. I don’t journal about bad things to dwell on them,” she says. “To be honest, I don’t even look back at what I wrote that often. It’s more for cathartic purposes. When I have a bad day, journaling about it helps me get it out of my system so I don’t bring it home to my husband and my kids.”
Kelly says she also loves writing about positive events in her journal. “It keeps me grounded. The act of writing it out makes me proud of what happened,” she says. “It’s a great way to share something good that happened with me. Writing it out makes it more real.”
