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Working from home can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can work in sweatpants all day while on the other, your work and home life can quickly become blurred. Having a daily journal when you work from home can not only keep things in perspective for you, it can help you be more organized and feel accomplished. Keep scrolling to read our top seven reasons why journaling daily when you work from home can be beneficial for both you and your work.
1. Mental Well Being
Perhaps one of the most important reasons to journal after a day of work (whether you work from home or not) is the mental and emotional release. Especially if you are the type of learner that absorbs information best when reading or writing things down. Not only will writing the events of the day down make your own memory stronger and clearer, it also helps you identify how you use your time throughout the day. This catalog of your daily work life helps your brain compartmentalize and process your efforts.
2. Review
It’s likely that when you’re at work, you keep a ‘to do’ list. Using a journal and keeping all of your ‘to do’ lists in one place lets you adequately look back and audit how you’ve managed your time on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis. You can also add to your list any ‘fires’ that sprang up that you were able to manage.
3. Recognize Your Successes
This may be one of the most important reasons to journal daily when you work from home. From an early age, we’re usually taught to focus on the negative instead of the positive. When you focus on the “wins” in your day this can shift the way you think about you and your work.
Perhaps you didn’t finish writing up that report or email, but you did solve a few other problems throughout the day. When you go to bed at night you want to focus on what you did right as this can motivate you and help you accomplish more the next day. It also helps you let go of a bad day so that you’re fresh and ready for whatever challenges come next.
4. Record Your Good Ideas
Your best idea may not come during a scheduled brainstorming session. Maybe you’re writing out an email or in the middle of a presentation when suddenly the other shoe drops and you have a great idea to solve a problem. Having a daily journal on hand makes it quick and easy to write down your stroke of genius so that you have a chance to workshop it later and flesh it out.
5. Vent Your Frustrations
Even if you’re currently working in your dream job, it’s likely that at some point you will run into a colleague, client or vendor that irritates you for one reason or another. There’s no place better to get out your frustrations than in your daily work journal. In your journal, you can write down what you wish you could say to your client or client. Read it a few times if you want to, close the journal and let it go.
6. Goal Set
Professor and researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky says that spending 20 minutes each day writing a narrative description of your “best possible future self” can help boost optimism and an overall sense of happiness. Instead of being stuck in a routine, think about and write down any opportunities you can think of for growth both personally and professionally. If you know where you want to go, it’s easier to set smaller steps on the path to getting there.
7. Write Down Advice
Have you ever heard an inspirational TED talk and then forgotten the details a week or so later when you try to recount it to colleagues and peers? This is where a daily work journal can be extremely helpful. When you receive great guidance from a mentor, peer or manager, writing it down not only helps you remember it better in the future, it also helps you remember it in case you want to pass it down to your own mentee one day.
In the digital age, we’re all very good at sharing quick and punchy information like easy DIY minimalist holiday pieces or our favorite tweets and infographics. However, having a safe internal space to document and share your professional experiences and thoughts lets you reflect and analyze your thoughts better. Using a daily journal when you work from home can help you unlock your professional and personal potential, so why not start today?
I never thought of this before. I love gratitude journals for my well-being. But I’ve never thought to use as a way to track success while staying home.
These are all such great ideas! I work from home and I need to implement these strategies.
I have so many journals but never actually write in them. I’ll have to give this a try!
These are all great reasons to journal! Thanks for the post.
I love this! These are brilliant ideas. I use scraps of paper and different apps, I really need to get my s#1& together and get a journal.
I find having a daily journal can be extremely useful and as you say, it is a great way to reflect on what you have achieved. Or if you didn’t where one can improve. Great post!
beautiful and helpful post! writing down our thoughts and what’s going on is SO important 🙂
Wonderful Ideas! Thank you!
I love journaling it makes me feel great and I definitely benefit from it as well
These are all very good reasons to have a journal when you work from home. I generally use printables to keep my thoughts organised and a notebook to vent haha!
I also like thoughts become tangible the moment you put them to paper and they are a lot easier to make sense of.
Overall a great post, thank you 🙂
Such great ideas. I have been struggling for months to get my thoughts together and move forward with my business. Since I’ve started a daily planner which allows for some of the things you mention, I’ve been so much more productive. I will definitely start journaling every day to boost that productivity.
There are some awesome ideas here! I’m working from home at the moment, while I search for a more permanent job, and sometimes it can get me down. I especially like the idea of recognizing and writing down your accomplishments. Sometimes at the end of a work from home day, I feel bad that I didn’t accomplish more. Writing down what I did may help me feel better about what I did and help motivate me for the next day. Thanks!
I journaled while traveling and whenver I needed to vent, I would write things done. Loved this!
I love this post. I am new to journaling but in a very short while, the daily entries have helped me find areas of my life that need some love. I work on my blog from home and use my journal to also track my blogging tasks. There can be no doubt that keeping a journal helps you to be a calmer, more organized person.
I have a folder I use, but it’s far from a journal. This is a great idea for 2020. I want to check out bullet journaling too. It looks really interesting. Thanks for the inspiration!
For yours, I’ve been wanting to start using a journal or planner, a combination of both, maybe. Every time I tried, I stopped. Now, with the new blog, this would be more interesting. I already am using a journal of sorts on livejournal.com but it’s not used for these purposes listed in your post.
Maybe 2020 will be the year 🙂
Such a great reminder!! Love that writing helps us learn and remember the important lessons in life. Thanks so much for the affirmation to keep writing!!! 🙂
Great idea! I don’t do this enough! This sounds like a great habit to get into for the New Year.
I love this post! I love to journal and I want to use it to focus on my blog more this year.
Thank you for the inspiration x
Great ideas. I have been journaling for one year now and I cannot go back. So helpful. Thank you
These are all great ideas. I have a planner that I write in daily to keep me on track.
I can’t really work from home, but I definitely like trying to have a space to record my thoughts/ideas!
Journaling keeps me sane! So glad you are a fellow journaler Claire xo
Jen – I adore bullet journaling and also printables. I just set up a shopify store and I am going to start blogging about my printables hobby heheheh
You will love journaling – enjoy my friend xo
doesn’t it!!! So glad to see you comment here CrazyFittnessGuy – Angela