Famous people who journal rarely use the page in the same way. Some keep diaries. Others fill notebooks, commonplace books, sketchbooks, work logs, or private pages where they can think without an audience. A journal, in this broader sense, is a place to observe, test ideas, rehearse beliefs, track progress, and remember what the mind would otherwise lose. I’ve spent years reading the journals of successful people and historically significant writers, artists, scientists, and leaders. What interests me is not …
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The most honest sentence ever written about a notebook is in the afterword to this one, and it was written by the author’s son: This notebook has been lying among Muhammad Iqbal’s papers. According to this notebook Iqbal started writing it on 27th April 1910. It appears that he continued to write it for several months and then stopped for some unknown reason. Stopped for some unknown reason. Javid Iqbal published his father’s private notebook in 1961, fifty-one years after …
The document begins with an exclamation mark: Thirty-three and an income of $50,000 per annum! It is headed St. Nicholas Hotel, New York, December, 1868. Andrew Carnegie was living in the hotel with his mother, and at some point in the last days of that year he sat down and added up what he was worth and what it was doing to him. The memorandum itself, in his hand, with 'Dec /68' and the hotel noted at the top right. …
The first surviving column opens like this: I wonder if any one else glories in cold and snow without, an open fire within, and the luxury of a tray of food all by one’s self in one’s own room? She had shut her bedroom door at half past seven. The house was full of young people. Her husband had a cold and was in bed having milk-toast for his supper. She lit her fire, read for three hours, and went …
The notebook was a present from the jail’s doctor. That is the first fact in Jawaharlal Nehru’s prison diary, and he puts it there himself, in the second paragraph, before anything about why he is in prison at all: The book is a present from Dr. Asharfi Lai the sub-assistant surgeon of the jail. I begin this diary from Dec. 3rd. He was writing on 9 December 1921, in the District Jail at Lucknow. He had been arrested three days …
On a Saturday evening in March 1897, at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in New York, the richest man in America reached into his pocket and took out a small book wrapped in paper. “It is the first ledger I kept,” John D. Rockefeller told the young men’s Bible class. Ledger A is the personal expense book Rockefeller opened at sixteen, a few weeks into his first job: what he earned, what he spent, and what he gave away, entered …
A mood tracker works when each day’s entry records four things: how much your mood interfered with what you had to do, how many hours you slept, one line on what happened, and one word for how irritable you were. The rating is the smallest part. The three fields beside it are what turn a column of numbers into something you can read. Almost every mood tracker template online asks you to shade a box from one to ten, or …
A weekly review is a clearing pass, not a reflection session. Once a week you empty everything that has accumulated, look at what is actually in front of you for the next fortnight, and then let yourself think about what you might do next. It is closer to tidying a workshop than to writing in a diary. The original checklist is published free by the David Allen Company. It is eleven items, it fits on one page, and one of …
Six months into anything – a renovation, a thesis, a side business, a long repair – you can usually remember what you did. What you cannot remember is why you chose it over the other option, what the result actually was, and what you had decided to do next before the project went quiet. There is a published specification for exactly this problem. The National Institutes of Health issued Guidelines for Scientific Record Keeping in the Intramural Research Program at …
A goal journal entry needs two things, and neither of them is a vision board. Write one goal specific enough that you could not fake having reached it, and hard enough that you are not sure you will. Then, underneath it, write the sentence that begins with “if” – the plan for the exact moment you would otherwise stop. That second line is the part with evidence behind it. The two statistics that hold up most goal-setting writing do not …
Isaac Newton kept two notebooks as a student, and neither of them is about physics. One is a pocket-book he bought blank for eightpence, whose first three pages are a coded list of every sin he could remember committing. The other is a list of things he did not know, written under headings he invented himself. Both survive. Both have been transcribed in full and put online for free. And between them they show a nineteen-year-old using a notebook for …