Introspection

Journaling is good for detecting maladaptive patterns and tracking your progress.

Borretti keeps a hierarchical journal in Obsidian with entries for days, weeks, months, and years:

Journal/
  Daily/YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD.md
  Weekly/YYYY/YYYY-WW.md
  Monthly/YYYY/YYYY-MM.md
  Yearly/YYYY.md

Morning: finish yesterday’s entry, begin today’s. Sunday: review the week. First of each month: review the previous month. First of each year: review the past year. Time allotted is in inverse proportion to frequency — a monthly review might take an hour, a yearly review a whole morning.

Daily reviews are freeform. Weekly and above have more structure: salient events, what went well, what went poorly, how to change behaviour for next time.

Benefits

• Pattern detection: To change bad patterns, you have to notice them. Very easy to travel in a fixed orbit and not notice it. Writing it out helps you see: when event X happens, I react with Y.
• Default capture location: Today’s journal entry is a good default for writing ad-hoc notes when you don’t know where to file them.
• Morning orientation: Creating a journal entry is a good opportunity to go over goals and priorities for the day.
• Retrospection: Looking at the past to see how life has changed. Often positive — the things that worried you didn’t come to pass, the things you struggled with are now easier.

There’s a paradox with productivity: when you grind executive function enough, things you used to struggle with become quotidian. The ceiling becomes the new floor. You might feel you never get to “productive.” Journaling combats this because you can see how far you’ve come.