Journals are meant to be a place to store your day-to-day that can be a reflection upon events that have happened to you or that you have noticed yourself doing. # Overview of Properties | Structure | Main Concern | Organization | Strength | Weakness | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------ | --------------- | ---------- | ------------------------------------------------ | | "Such and such happened on/during the period of time and I think this about it" | Time | Chronologically | Reflection | Difficulty of review & extraction of information | ## Structure It's structure will typically be in the form > "Such and such happened on/during the period of time and I think this about it". ### Examples - I did XYZ, and JKL, in project ABC in the past week I will probably need to do it again maybe I should do DEF. - I talked to John Doe on Tuesday we talked about project ABC and he thought MNO was a good idea ## Main Concern __Time__ is the significant unit for journals. >Although, it is possible (and common) for journals to be done daily but you are likely going to gain a lot more insight from journals that summarize longer stretches of time like weeks or months. The focus of a journal tends to be an outlet for events that have happened throughout a unit of time(typically a day). They offer more insight into the events that occurred and how you felt about them at the time in a sort of reflective dialog. ## Organization Journals' organization is primarily __Chronologically__. > Although, it is possible to be organized by project or, if the journal is written to span longer periods of time by category. The main focus is the capturing of journals - not so much how they are actually organized, or reflected upon; but, simply around their capture. Whether that is within the same system as the Second Brain or otherwise. ## Strengths Journal's primary strength is __reflection__. A journal allows for introspection and reflection of pretty much anything that has happened or been happening. This reflection is very important because by writing you are actively thinking through the situation you were in and likely will have more insight than if you were acting directly. ## Weaknesses Journal's primary weakness is their __difficulty of review & extraction of information__. A great property that journals have is that they can be reviewed later to extract patterns of situations that occur that you may not even be aware of. The only problem with this is the reviewing part is pretty difficult because journals tend to be almost rant-like with long paragraphs that go in, out and between topics. So it is recommended to review journals on some longer interval of time (e.g. every 3 weeks) to be able to extract as much value in as a summarization of that period of time. TODO link here on how to summarize TODO extract the following to another note on action items Journals have action items, they are what you uncover as you reflect on your day and you realize that you should do something. They are more of a "should do" than a "to do". In summarizing you'll have all these action items built up as part of your summary. These items are back-linked (for full context of why it was that this item was brought up as needing to be done in the first place). Then items will be placed into the backlog of items that can be done at any time, because they are a "should do" it is not too important that they were completed at any one time. The backlog is organized by category so that when you have time you can pull from the category that you want to accomplish work within. The backlog should be filled with tasks that could be the size of a todo (i.e. not projects) so that it's queue can be pulled from whenever time is unstructured As tasks are completed: - journal what happened in the day (noting resources used) - journal summary should prompt: "What during this week will I use again?" - store into 2nd brain knowledge gathered - 2nd brain is a knowledge cached for easy access