Why a Formatted Journal is Better than a Blank Journal

There are many different ways of work journaling. Work journaling is an effective form of reflection that supports career growth. It acts as a record containing all your experiences with detail, and these details help you gain self-awareness. When you have self-awareness, you have a better understanding of your career and yourself, which means you will make better and more reasonable career decisions. Work journaling can also help you achieve your goals more easily because you can prioritize or modify your goals according to what you know about yourself and your career. It can also help guide you towards your goals because work journaling is also a process of improving in your career. 

Ready to get started with a work journaling practice? First, you need to figure out which journal to purchase.

If you're creating a journal for work on your own, using blank notebooks, here are some things to consider: creating a list of attainable goals, planning how you will achieve those goals, reflecting on your progress, keeping a record of ideas from each day, writing down feedback from people at your workplace, and many more. You can spend some time figuring how best to format your journal, but a more effective way to do this would be through using a formatted work journal. 

Below are 3 reasons why a formatted work journal is more beneficial than a blank one. We're biased to our own product, of course, but we're an advocate that a formatted journal is better than a blank one in general. 

1. It guides you through a clear process with straightforward exercises

Because there are so many ways of journaling, it’s hard to get started. It’s even harder to know which journaling prompts to start with. Formatted journals are designed to take you step by step, so it’s not as daunting. Though there isn’t a specific order of how you should journal in, it’s less effective if you choose randomly because there are so many prompts, and it might take some time to get used to it. Sure, it would still work that way, but your journal will probably end up quite disorganized if you’re just trying to start out.

A formatted journal puts everything in logical order, and contains all the things you need for gaining self-awareness. If a journal has the same layout on each left and right page, you’ll be trained to know this after a short while of getting used to it. Our Daily Work Journals have Daily Notes sections on the left, and Daily Lookback pages on the right, training your brain to do both of these every day. Getting used to journaling is quite important, and it’s something you’ll want to continue if you want to achieve better results. So a formatted journal makes everything easier for you! 

2. Let’s face it, a formatted journal is way less time consuming than a blank one

Journaling could be more challenging with a blank one because you have to plan everything out after you search up different prompts each time you journal. This is especially annoying after a long day of work, and it’ll probably feel like doing extra work. That’s not what journaling is supposed to be! Journaling is chill, and it’s about reflecting about your day. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg is known to only wear gray t-shirts because that can save more time and energy since that’s one less decision he has to make in a day.

Get a formatted journal and save more brain power for making more important decisions because journaling isn’t supposed to be like work, it should support you in your career. In addition, we are bombarded with 70,000 sensory stimuli every day. That’s a lot of thought isn’t it? So you probably wouldn’t want to use more brain power if you don’t have to. With a formatted journal, you can mitigate feeling overwhelmed, and you can get around using more time and brain power, while still achieving your goals. 

3. It’s like having a career coach, except you only have to pay for a one-time purchase

Have you been thinking about career coaching, but then realize that you don’t have enough time? Well, you can get a formatted work journal. A lot of work journals are designed by career coaches, so having a work journal is basically the same as having a career coach, except you can save yourself some extra by doing a short reflection rather than going to a one hour long coaching session at the end of a long work day. Though you spend less time with journaling, you are still working towards your career goals because like mentioned earlier, a formatted journal provides you with clear strategies to support you in the process of gaining self-awareness. That’s exactly like what a career coach does, it’s worth it! And each time you reflect, it adds up to your record of experiences, and that’s what gets you closer to your goals. 

Now that you're intrigued about a formatted journal, here's how you can start figuring out which to get: do some research, look for journal companies, and find the work journals they have. Ideally, they would have a few pages of electronic preview, so you can get a glimpse of what to expect.