failing to scale a journalling habit

Since I stopped journalling, my work has suffered.

I was journalling every morning, using the GetAhead Mindset app created by my former teammate and Nike wellness lead Adam Dehaty.

The app aimed to get me into positive self talk. Since leaving rugby a couple of years ago, I've tried a few things that I wouldn't have considered previously. I've found that if something's uncomfortable for me then as Ryan Holiday stoically says, The Obstacle Is the Way. Even if it's not something that works for you, the fact that you challenged your preconceived notions of yourself is a valuable exercise on its own.

I didn't journal every day - I'd often forget on the weekend, trying to avoid opening my laptop, but I certainly managed it most days. If you're struggling with what to write then you can ask the app for a spot which comes in a range of prompts designed to elicit different responses. I rarely needed these.

Given that most of my work involves writing, journalling as soon as I open my computer kicks me off with an immediate burst of creativity and allows me to explore how I'm feeling or set my intentions for the day ahead. It being only 100 words conforms to BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits method, using a very small and easily completable action to instil a positive behaviour. Think ‘do one press up’ for a physical corollary. I found that the GetAhead 100 words really worked well for me.

If it was a positive behaviour, then why did I stop?

Good question! Similarly to when I started publishing blog posts every day to get over my fear of 'shipping' work, I felt like I wanted to increase the behaviour. I'd managed to publish consistently for two months and wrote over 40 posts, figuring out at about one each weekday. I felt like I'd instilled a shipping habit and wanted to make my subject matter more consistent. With the journalling, i felt like I wanted to make it more complex and integrate some more structure into my day.

Both attempts at complexity failed. In fact, they barely even got off the ground and foolishly, rather than just retreat to the behaviour that I'd been successfully completing, I regressed to zero.

why was journalling useful?

As useful as it is in its own right, it was probably useful because it was actually another manifestation of my shipping habit. It just got me back into the habit of finishing posts. They were only 100 words but they were done, finished and posted before I'd done anything else. It meant that my morning felt like a small win, before taking anything else into account.

You can read about 17 of the benefits of journalling in this paper:

Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing

Or read this summary from Ness Labs:

Dear Diary: the science-based benefits of journaling

There's a decent amount of evidence for journalling out there and it's hardly a new idea. With GetAhead Mindset you rated yourself out of 10 as well as writing your entry. Then you could see your fluctuations throughout the month on a simple graph. It gave you an idea of where you thought you were with your mindset and saved each entry for you to reread if you so desired.

daily production

Anne Laure at Ness Labs was actually one of my inspirations for a daily shipping habit. She's grown a community around her writing in a pretty short space of time, posting consistently over a year or so. It was partly her focus around a subject matter that caused me to halt my own habit to think of something to focus my writing around. Turns out that I wasn't ready for this.

Another recent beneficiary of consistent production is Jack Butcher. He's grown his Visualise Value accounts and created an enormously profitable digital business over a similar time period to Ness Labs, focussed around simple and striking graphic representations of philosophy and self improvement content.

After finding his Daily Manifest product, a much more sophisticated version of a journal with integrated goal-setting and task planning, I felt like I could integrate some of it into my journalling habit. This is where I fell down.

Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Since stopping journalling I found oddly listless in the morning and have found myself far more easily distracted, reading reams of content before starting work. This is an awful habit as I'd put myself on the back foot before the day had even begun.

you do you

Now I've written this, I think I can see where I went wrong. Rather than persist with what was working for me, iterating and experimenting my way to some conclusions, I tried to skip some steps by copying people I've seen make a success of this. While they're both great examples of what consistent creation can do for you, I need to figure out my own systems rather than use theirs. As with weightlifting, a great way of framing any attempt at improvement, you're better off lifting your baseline when you hit a plateau rather than whacking the weight right up.

When scaling up a habit, either stack the existing one with another, or increase the volume.

Increasing the volume is obvious. Write more words. The app didn’t incentivise this and it’s probably not the most useful way of improving. Will more words in the journal make you feel better? It may be better off being concise.

Habit Stacking would be something like, after journalling in the app, I should have chained another positive behaviour. Perhaps I’d immediately work on a blog post, or write down a couple of major goals for the day. I never made the time to decide on this and my habit fell by the wayside.

Take what's useful and discard what's unnecessary. What you do needs to work for you. Not for someone else.

If you want to try Adam's app, you can find it here: