Journaling has been attracting a lot of attention. Its influence on personal growth and productivity has made it worthy of anyone’s attention. 

Keeping a journal can be a very effective way to keep track of your progress and thoughts. It can also allow you to find new ways to tackle certain issues and approach your goals.

Are you aware of the power of journaling? Do you know how journaling can help you reach a better version of yourself?

If you are inquisitive about journaling and you want to push towards your goals, you are in the right place. We present to you 6 ways through which will journaling can help with promoting productivity and personal growth. Let’s get started!

1. Write Down Your Most Important Goals

What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to become? What are your short-term goals?

These are just some of the questions you can answer while journaling. The journal is the perfect keeper of your goals. Writing your short-term and long-term goals in the journal can keep you focused on what you want to accomplish.  

What's more, writing down goals has been linked to a higher achievement rate. According to research, if you write down your goals regularly, you are 42% more likely to achieve them. 

When you write your goals down, you're activating both the logic-based left hemisphere of the brain and the imaginative right hemisphere. Thus, you'll be more inspired to work on those goals, and you'll also stay on track with your objectives. 

Still, we all would like to make our goals and objectives more tangible and goal-oriented, which is why you simply ought to try a helpful app called TickTick. What makes it unique is you can also input your goals in the app's goal-tracking to-do list feature that lets you write them down, analyze, and finally organize them accordingly right inside this handy app! 

2. Pick a Daily Motivational Quote

Boost your motivation with quotes. A powerful quote that builds up excitement within you can help you start the day on a positive note.

Every day when you open your journal, write down a motivational quote for the day. By writing them every day, you’ll be consistently invested in building up your positive mindset.

You are what you think. Therefore, fill your mind with productivity-related quotes and quotes that will help you grow.

Here are some motivational quotes to get you started:

• "Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most." — Buddha. 
• "Action is the foundational key to all success." — Pablo Picasso
• "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." — Stephen King
• "Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It’s your masterpiece after all." — Nathan W. Morris
• "Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." — Theodore Roosevelt

If you like to pull out quotes from less ordinary sources, you can try looking into essays. For starters, browse this site with free essay samples, and you can surface quotes from topics you are interested in. 

3. Don't Overthink about What You Want to Write

Your journal is only for your eyes. It is probably the only form of expression that doesn’t demand any kind of filtering. What you think is what you should write about.

Spilling all your thoughts in the journal will clear your mind. It will also give you a better perspective on your fears, doubts, frustrations, and accomplishments. 

You can do 5 to 10 minutes of "stream of consciousness" writing. Simply sit down and write whatever comes to your mind first. The thoughts can be jumbled or disorganized. It doesn't matter. 

It is vital to get your thoughts and ideas sorted because if you focus on the chaos and have ideas scattered all over your journal, it may decrease your creative flow and make it look pressured. Some great things are rather simple after all, which is why journaling acts as a great way to free your mind and make some room for positive thinking and work-related tasks. 

4. Use Colors and Shapes To Promote Your Writing

Who says that journaling is limited solely to writing? With the help of color and shapes, you can get inspired and promote your writing. 

Get yourself more pumped up about journaling by using different-colored pens, including images, collages, and shapes. Express yourself freely. 

Adding color and variety to your journal will make it more personal. Embrace your creativity and let the journal showcase your personality. 

Visual prompts can make you more inspired to be consistent in journaling. Besides, your journal can be a form of expression, not just a safe place for sharing your thoughts and dreams. 

5. Keep Track of Your Daily and Weekly Objectives

Introducing healthy habits and a productive routine is beneficial for both your personal and professional success. Use the journal to keep track of your daily and weekly objectives.

Staying true to your promise of jogging 3 times a week will be easier if you write that objective down. 

The fast-paced life often swallows our short-term objectives. A new habit you wanted to embrace can get lost among your daily obligations. The journal won't let that happen anymore.

When you are dealing with some short-term and long-term goals, remember to keep track of your daily or weekly objectives as well. Some things will be usual to you just like habits while some challenges will seem difficult, which is normal. You can also use the great Habit Tracking feature in TickTick, which is exactly what its name implies – it helps to track down your habits and will train you as you start with something new like exercising or reading a chapter of an important book for your job and the personal growth. 

6. Organize Your Thoughts

Is there anything better for organizing your thoughts than a journal? 

The journal gives you a retrospective of what you have on your mind and helps you organize those ideas.

But how to keep your journal organized? If you want to be more productive, you also want to display your productiveness in the journal. 

What can help you organize your thoughts is using a bullet journal. This journal can be used for many purposes. No matter what you used it for, it will ensure that your thoughts are organized and efficient. You can also create different sections within your journal. One section can be for goal-setting, another for "stream of consciousness" writing, and the third one for essay-like storytelling.

The beauty of any journal experience is that it can easily become whatever you would like it to be. You can simplify the majority of your tasks. For example, using the Note feature of TickTick, you can simplify your note-taking process, which is an essential part of successful journaling. You can organize your ideas and goals all within a single format. Taking notes in TickTick is quite intuitive and is a breeze to work with. It reminds you of journaling with a pen and paper, yet with a comfortable digital tool that will make you feel right at home. The trick is to stay creative and add descriptions to each step that you take to serve as reminders! 

Final Thoughts

Journaling is more than writing down your daily activities. If you give it a chance, a journal can embody your life. This seemingly small habit that is journaling can help you grow and become a more productive person.

Give journaling a try, and let us know whether you’ve noticed some changes in personal growth and productivity levels. If you have some other useful journaling prompt, share with us what those are.

Note: This article is written by Marques Coleman, a content editor at Subjecto education website, where he combines his passion for writing with an interest in research.

Keeping your motivation up when you're working in an office is relatively easy. You need to get your work done before you can return to the comfort and privacy of home, so dragging your feet will only cause you further inconvenience. And with your colleagues surrounding and observing you, you’ll at once be reminded that you’re part of a team and driven to show productivity.

For most of us, though, that office life is behind us: gone for the foreseeable future, at least, and plausibly gone for good. Unless you've been hibernating in a hermetically-sealed underground chamber since early 2020, you know perfectly well why it isn't advisable for people to gather in significant groups. Regardless of the broader consequences, remote working is the new normal.

So how are you supposed to stay motivated when you’re working from home with your colleagues many miles away? How can you achieve focus when trying to get things done in an environment designed and built for comfort? It isn’t easy, but it can be done, and in this piece we’re going to set out five tips that can help you manage it. Let’s get started.

Assemble a solid home office

Slouching on the couch with your laptop on your lap can sound like a good idea when you’re used to a stuffy office. Isn’t that an ideal scenario? No more needing to sit at a desk under harsh fluorescent lights (per this piece, they can really bother some people). With your mind at ease, you can truly focus on getting things done. Well, things don’t work that way. Not only does such an arrangement lead to lowered productivity due to reduced concentration, but it also becomes uncomfortable remarkably quickly.

You need a proper home office — or as close to one as you can get with the resources and space available to you. At a minimum, that means a desk, a practical chair, enough artificial light to keep you awake during the winter, and whatever computer peripherals can help you work efficiently. Multiple monitors are particularly useful, for instance, and you can use a laptop dock to make it optimally easy to take your laptop elsewhere for the occasional change of scenery.

Rely on the right tools

Getting lost in admin is one of the fastest ways to get bored and disillusioned, and it’s a major risk when you’re working remotely. Digital communication within an office is often lax because the workers can simply talk directly when necessary, and any confusion concerning time or task management can be resolved through impromptu in-person meetings. But if you allow such poor digital management when people are working remotely, admin tedium will build up.

There are two components to good remote-working admin: using the right tools, and ensuring that everyone knows how to use them appropriately. The importance of SaaS is why businesses everywhere are scrambling to find and deploy the best task management apps on the market — and while options proliferate (as evidenced by myriad roundups featuring varied tools: examples here and here), you can stay exactly where you are.

TickTick makes it vastly easier to manage a remote business, allowing you to keep tasks managed across all major platforms. You can queue up all your key actions, giving each one a suitable priority level and deadline along with a custom prompt to nudge you into action ahead of time. Speaking of prompts, the Daily Alert feature is great if your mind drifts due to the weight of your workload (understandable when you don’t have colleagues or employees around to keep you sharp). It pops up at a set time every day to let you know what you need to get done that day.

And with TickTick Premium, you can make good use of Smart Lists. Using core logic operators, you get to create task lists to help you focus your attention on the most pressing concerns. For example, if you want to plan your schedule, you can create a Smart List showing only the top-priority tasks with start and due dates within the next week. I find this hugely useful because it lets me set up and knock down the most onerous tasks first, leaving time for other things.

Work towards small goals

To a major extent, our actions are governed by psychological rewards. When you do something right and achieve a victory, your emotional state improves (particularly when it comes to your level of confidence), and that feeling encourages you to keep going so you can reach it again. This is why people who pursue goals are so much happier. Even when they encounter setbacks, they can stay fixated on where they’re going and what they want to do.

Since the days can start to blur together when you’re working from home, you need something to break up the monotony, and that means pushing towards small but meaningful goals (more on this). Maybe you can aim to get a particular project done by the end of a working week, or set yourself a challenge of cultivating and demonstrating a new skill. However you define and approach your goals, simply having them in place will make a huge difference.

Maintain a clear routine

As much as people have always liked to complain about the daily grind of commuting to and from work, there’s a lot to be said for the clear distinction it established between their professional lives and their personal lives. When they were at their places of employment, they needed to get work done — and when they were home, they didn’t need to think about work.

Now that so many of us are working from home, we’re finding that distinction much harder to achieve. What does it mean to finish a working day now that you’re not necessarily going anywhere? Worrying about how much you’re getting done can lead you to feel that you should work longer hours to make up for it, but that’s a mistake. You can’t stay motivated if you reach the point of burnout due to too much work. When your day is done, log off, and go elsewhere.

Relax and take regular breaks

Even if you get into the habit of starting and finishing work at sensible times, the lack of anywhere to go (and colleagues to hang out with) can lead you to stay at your desk for the entire day. And since there’s no realistic way for anyone to mandate that you take a break, you can just keep on working through the time you would have taken for lunch.

Don’t do that: you need breaks. There’s a reason why good managers talk about them so much, and it isn’t that they’re trying to sneakily extend the working day. The longer you spend on a task without letting your mind fully wander, the worse your mood will get. You’ll become impatient, frustrated, and prone to making mistakes — and all of that will sap your motivation. So take a deep breath, relax, and take the day as it comes.

Note: Laura May is Digital Editor at Just Another Magazine. We write about beauty, fashion, lifestyle, relationships, travel, trends, and anything else that matters to you. Name throwing you off? Don’t take it too seriously — we intend to stand out from the crowd.

I’ve said it multiple times, I’m not big on tech. I love technology, but I make a point to not let it invade all aspects of my life, and I only use 6 apps at most to keep track of my tasks and my success rate. One of these apps is TickTick, which I use for 3 things:

• Calendar
• Todo lists
• Habits

The calendar feature in TickTick tops everything I’ve seen in the past, because it’s synced with your todo list. This means you can visualise each day either as a list or as an hourly calendar (or weekly, monthly…) The integration is seamless inside the app, and much better in my opinion than with other productivity apps.

Todo lists work like in most task management apps. I love that you can drag and drop items with no due date straight into the calendar to organize everything on the spot. Again, I haven’t seen that done anywhere else.

Finally, habits is a new one for me. Up until recently I always tracked my habits the old school way, with pen and paper in a journal. But this came with a couple of downsides:

• Even if it’s small, a journal is not always easy to carry.
• I would sometimes be too tired and forget to have my habit check-in at night.
• I could only see the Xs in the table, but I had to do the maths myself if I wanted some cool insights into the data.
• If I decided to add or remove a habit, it would always be a messy process to update the table.

The habits tracker has been around for a long time in TickTick (over a year), but I only started using it around 2 weeks ago, to cope with these analog downsides.

Let’s look at how I made the switch.

Transferring the data

The first step was to “copy-paste” the data from my journal to my laptop. I say laptop and not phone, because I barely ever use my phone. I do 99% of my tasks on the computer.

Lately, I’m tracking 8 habits. I don’t believe in tracking dozens of habits at a time. In my opinion, it’s a recipe to overwhelm yourself and not get anything done. With that in mind, I simply added my habits to TickTick one by one.

Note: By default, the habit tracker is not enabled on the desktop version of TickTick. You have to click on your profile icon in the top left corner, and then Settings. From there, click on Habit, and click on the first Toggle:

The Habit section will now appear in the lefthand side menu. From there, all I had to do was to click on the “+” icon, and add my habits one by one.

Tip: set up a custom habit icon by clicking on it in the Edit Habit window. The customisation part brings a little extra motivation. When your list of habits look good, you’ll want to perform good.

The habit log option

Most of the options when adding a habit are pretty intuitive, so I’m not going to talk too much about them. The only thing I want to talk about is the “Auto-Display of Habit Log” toggle option. I turned it on for all my habits without knowing what it was in the first place, but it took me only one habit check-off to figure it out. If you have Habit Log enabled, you will get prompted with this window every time you check off one habit:

This is exactly the kind of “feature” that is not really possible for me with a pen and paper. Whether it’s for normal journaling or habit tracking, I love logging exhaustive reports of how I feel, what went well, what didn’t, how I can improve… In a journal with a tiny habit-tracking table, there’s no real way to do that. But with this feature, I can log my thoughts and write as much as I want.

The monthly report

In the beginning of this article, I mentioned that getting insights on data written by hand is not really feasible. What I mean by that is that plotting curves, finding patterns and averages would take a lot of time. Thanks to the power of technology though, you can get all that on your laptop, everytime you click on a specific habit.

Let’s look at this dashboard section by section.

Streaks

As I said I only started tracking my habits 2 weeks ago, so I don’t have that much data yet. But already, I can see how many times I logged in the habit, what my best streak for that habit is/was, and what my current streak is. It’s important to note that the streak is relative to the frequency target you set for yourself. In this example, my chess habit target is to check it off at least 3 times a week. So as long as I do that, the streak will increase by one every time I check it off. If I only check chess 2 times in one week, the streak is broken, but my best streak data remains.

Monthly overview

The template I used to log my habits on paper was a weekly table. With this feature, I get a bird’s eye view of how well I am doing over the month. It’s very important, because it has the power to reignite my motivation after a tough week. We all hit rough patches once in a while, but it’s all about seeing the bigger picture. One week of down performance shouldn’t overshadow the whole month.

This is very important to remember. Too many times people give up because of one dip in performance, while all there is to do is to learn from the mistakes, keep pushing, and regain momentum.

Getting a monthly overview of each habit also enables me to spot patterns I might have otherwise missed. Maybe I watch less youtube on the days I play chess. Maybe meditating is easier on the days I also workout…

Monthly check-in rate

Just like the streaks, the monthly check-in rate is calculated based on the frequency target you set for yourself. You don’t need to check off a habit everyday to get a 100% check-in rate. What matters is to check off each habit as often as you said you would in the beginning.

In the case of chess, I need to play at least 3 times a week, every week for the whole month, to get a 100% monthly check-in rate. But for journaling, I need to check it off every single day, for 30 days straight, to get the same check-in rate of 100%. It’s all relative to your target.

Habit log

Here is our habit log again, and now we get to experience its full power. This is impossible for me to get on paper, because as I said I write a lot. Here, I get a full overview of everything I wrote for each habit check-off, on a neat vertical timeline. This is so insightful, and it shows one of the major upsides of journaling gone digital.

Implementing the routine (not forgetting)

Going to bed at night, I would sometimes be so tired and done with my day that I would forget to do my daily habit logging. By going digital, I was able to solve that problem. Here’s how.

I implemented piggybacking on one of my already existing habits: TickTick. Every morning, I wake up, go stretch on the terrace, and by 6:30am I’m on my laptop, getting ready to work. I’m really consistent with this routine, so it’s very safe for me to capitalise on it for a new habit implementation.

At 6:30am, I turn on my laptop, and I instantly switch on the “Do Not Disturb” mode (on Mac). If I check my emails in the morning (instead of focusing on my Most Important Tasks) and forget to close my email client, the program will keep running in the background. This means that if I get a new email, I will get a notification. The “Do Not Disturb” mode prevents that from happening. I will not get any notification until I turn it off myself or until the next day.

Once I’ve switched that on, I open up my digital journal (more on this in an upcoming article), and I start up my TickTick desktop app to look at my tasks for the day in the calendar. That’s where the piggy backing comes into play. Once I’m done with planning my day, the Habit Tracker is literally a click away. All I have to do is go in there, log my habits from the day before, and move on with my day.

TickTick even has the option to display the habits in the calendar. I don’t use this option because it clutters my calendar and makes me lose in clarity. I prefer to go to the dedicated habit section. But if you’re curious, this is what it looks like in the calendar:

To enable that option, go to your Profile > Settings > Habit, and click on the “Show in calendar” toggle.

I found out a long time ago that I’m most operational in the morning. For many months, I still tried to keep the habit logging for bed time, but it just doesn’t work for me, and I’m okay with that. After 8pm, I’m done, I relax, do the chores, and around 10pm I’m in bed, too tired to compute any sort of information.

I was never consistent in my habit tracking, because I never implemented it at the right time, nor with the right tool. What worked for me was to use a feature from a tool I already knew, and to completely shift the schedule around my habit tracking. I now do it in the morning when I’m most productive, on my laptop, instead of at night when I’m most tired, in my journal.

Conclusion

I started successfully tracking my habits by piggybacking on already using TickTick. If you’re having a hard time setting up a productive routine for yourself, you can try the other way around: start tracking your habits in TickTick, then move on to the calendar and how you can organize your day.

The reason I only use a few apps to stay productive is because the more apps I use, the more I feel like I waste my energy at keeping them all in sync. TickTick is great because it bundles everything together in one platform. Up until a few weeks ago, I only used it for my todos and my calendar. Now it’s helped me solve one more issue, and for that I recommend it even more.

This Article was originally posted on https://josephmavericks.com/ticktick-habits/.
Writer: Joseph Mavericks

We’ve all been there, in search of that one app that is going to turn us from master procrastinators into the next Tim Ferris. I’ve tried my hand at different apps to get things done, but I’m always left wanting. My search has finally concluded. TickTick is my number 1 productivity app.

My app of choice over the past year has been Notion, which upped my productivity game. I use it for project management and general organisational things but I don’t think it handles task management well. I also tried my hand at Things 3 and Todoist, but didn’t take to them. 

I want something that works across all my devices – iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, and also something which showed my calendars. This led me to my new number 1 productivity app: TickTick.

What is TickTick?

On the face of it, TickTick is another to-do list app. But as you start to use it you realise it can do a lot more than just manage your daily tasks: to-do list, built-in calendar, pomo timer, and habit tracker. It’s not perfect (which app is?) but it does some things better than the other apps I’ve mentioned, and does some things they don’t – like show my calendars.

An overview

On the left is your main library. Your actual tasks are in the centre. And on the right is a section for more information. Your library has the following sections: Inbox, Today, Next 7 days, and Calendar. You can also create your own lists or folders, view tags, or create and see smart lists. I‘ve created folders for my projects to help organise my tasks and see what needs doing for each project.

Here’s a breakdown of what you can do in each view and how I use it.

Inbox

Any ideas or tasks fresh in my mind go straight to the inbox. I don’t worry about setting a reminder or a due date at this point. I use it as a brain dump that I’ll review each morning and add a reminder and tag it if needed. I’ll also review the inbox when I carry out my weekly review (a post for another time).

Today

This shows me today’s tasks in chronological order so I can see which tasks are due when. You can change this view and sort by things like tags or priority if you prefer. There’s also a small but handy feature called “Plan Your Day” (mobile only), which allows you to quickly schedule your Today/Overdue/Inbox tasks (See their tweet there).

Next 7 days

The next 7 days list is the same as the Today, but shows…you guessed it…tasks for the next 7 days. I don’t use this view much but can see how it might be helpful at the start of a new week.

Calendar

Calendar lets me see all my tasks alongside my personal and work schedule. This view is great for seeing what I’ve got planned for the entire week or month ahead. I can add new tasks by double-clicking on the calendar or rearrange existing ones by dragging it. By tapping the ‘sand clock button’ on the top right, you’ll also be able to see all your tasks sorted by Priority, Tags or Lists. Then simply drag and drop tasks to any blocks.

A feature I’ve found useful – I can share a URL link for my TickTick tasks which I’ve connected to my iCloud account. I share this with my wife so she can see if I’m in ‘do not disturb’ mode working on certain projects. 

Lists

As mentioned above, I’ve created lists for different projects I’m working on. But here’s where TickTick rises above being a simple to-do list app. I can view my projects on a Kanban board, letting me manage tasks in phases. For example, I have a project folder set up for this blog and a subfolder for blog posts. This is set up as a Kanban board split by various stages of the blog post journey, from idea stage to publishing. I can create tasks and drag these from one stage to another. I’m able to use TickTick to manage projects and I’m finding I spend less time in Notion as a result.

The small things

Natural language input recognition

TickTick will set the due date or reminder of a task itself through my input – whether by typing or speaking. For example, I can ask TickTick to remind me to write for my blog every two days, and it’ll set a recurring task. But it’s smarter than this. In the screenshot below, look how it recognises that I want the recurrence to start from tomorrow. This makes adding tasks a breeze.

Shortcuts

On my Mac I can use the keyboard shortcut ⌘A to add a task from anywhere.

Availability

TickTick works across Apple products, Android, Windows, web browsers. It also has extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Outlook.

Sub-tasks

Some tasks have smaller actions required to complete. TickTick lets you add sub-tasks to main ones. Each subtask is empowered with all the features a parent task has, including reminders, priority and tags. 

Progress viewer

TickTick uses stats to show me how productive I am.

Habit tracking

A basic habit tracker built in with reminders.

Pomodoro

A 25-minute timer to help you stay focused.

Things I dislike

Syncing between my calendars is slow

I often have to click refresh and even then there’s a delay.

I wish all calendar integration was two way

It’d be useful if I could add new calendar events into my iCloud calendar from TickTick. At the moment, I have to switch to the Apple calendar app to do this each time.

(Update – you can add new calendar events into your connected calendars but only on iPhone and iPad – it’s not in the Mac desktop or web browser versions. TickTick tells me the Gmail Integration is two way, and others are in development. Thanks reddit user u/mrmetronome1234 for pointing this out)

Takeaway

It’s not perfect, but it ticks a lot of my boxes (pardon the pun!). I find that TickTick simplifies things for me. I can store away random ideas and tasks and not deal with them until I’m ready to. It even lets me manage projects.

If you’re looking for a new productivity app to manage your tasks or even your projects, give TickTick a go. There’s a free version, but to get the most out of it you’ll want to subscribe, which costs $2.40 per month or $27.99 for a year.

(Disclaimer – this post is my own personal opinion. I have no affiliation with TickTick)

https://www.hardeepsnagra.com/ticktick-is-my-number-1-productivity-app/