It’s such a simple practice. Take 15 minutes out of your day, perhaps with your morning coffee, and write down your thoughts on paper, giving yourself time to reflect on the recent events in your life and work through better solutions and approaches.
This practice is called daily journaling and is followed by millions of people, including many great historical leaders such as Marcus Aurelius and Benjamin Franklin.
Today, many people use this as an opportunity to work through the issues that are troubling them, digging into why they feel concerned and what solutions are available.
This habit can also improve your financial health. Here are four ways in which daily journaling can help you improve your personal finances.
[See: 12 Ways to Be a More Mindful Spender.]
Journaling can help you figure out your worst spending mistakes. One common approach to journaling is to use an “after-action review” to dig in to the details of a recent situation in your life. Performing an “after-action review” means that you think about what you wanted to get out of a particular situation, what you actually did in that situation, what the differences are and what you can learn from that going forward.
You can apply that strategy to review your worst spending decisions. Isolate a recent spending misstep. Think about what you would have ideally done and write that down, then follow it with an honest description of what you actually did. What are the differences between the two actions? What can you do to make sure you eliminate those differences?
Addressing those issues can help tremendously when you’re trying to break some of your worst spending habits.
[See: 8 Big Budgeting Blunders — and How to Fix Them.]
Journaling helps you figure out your goals. All of us have big visions for the future, but they’re often shrouded in nonspecific thinking. We haven’t considered what we need to do to make that vision happen.
Journaling is perfect for working through this problem. It gives you an opportunity to break down a big vision into progressively smaller pieces. Take debt freedom, for example. Paying off your debt a big goal, but it actually becomes something real and actionable when you break it into bite-sized pieces.
Start with that big vision for the future. To head toward achieving it, what would you need to do this year? To achieve that, what would you need to do this month? To achieve that, what would you need to do today? Journaling gives you time to think carefully through those questions and start transforming your nebulous vision for the future into something concrete, which you can take action on right now.
[See: 10 Foolproof Ways to Reach Your Money Goals.]
Journaling helps you reach conclusions about big decisions. We’re often faced with big financial decisions in life. Do I take this new job or stay with the one I have? Should I start saving for retirement or do I need every dime I bring in to keep my head above water? Those kinds of decisions can be hard to think through.
Again, journaling can help you work through these conflicts. It provides an opportunity to make a list of pros and cons for each side of a decision, then work through whether those upsides and downsides make sense.
Make a list of benefits for each side of the decision and ask yourself how many of those benefits truly matter. You might find that the answer you’ve been looking for was there all along — you just need to work through it in writing.
Journaling helps you work through uncertainty. Why do you feel uncertain about a house purchase? Why are you worried about that big promotion at work? Sometimes, we feel worried without understanding why.
Journaling can help us break through this challenge as well. For unspecific worries, the technique of the “five whys” works well. When you make a big statement such as, “I’m worried about this promotion at work,” ask yourself why you feel that way, then write down the answer as honestly as possible. Look at that answer and ask yourself “Why?” again. Do that again and again and again. By about the third or fourth step, writing the answers will seem hard and deeply personal — that’s a good thing because you’re digging close to the right answer.
Usually, by the fifth time you’ve questioned your answer, you’ve reached a point where you’ve got a fresh, new grasp on the situation, often from a place where you didn’t expect to find an answer. For example, you might find that your hesitation to accept a promotion at work is due to a relationship with a co-worker more than anything else, something you might not have consciously noticed. You might realize that your worry about the house purchase is actually a concern about the long-term health of your marriage. Addressing the real problem can fix a lot of other sore spots in your financial life.
You can journal in a way that impacts your financial health in only 15 minutes a day. Start with your concerns and use these techniques to dig down to the center of them. You may find solutions that can help your financial life in ways you never expected.
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How Daily Journaling Can Help Improve Your Financial Life originally appeared on usnews.com
