Journaling Just Works

It's almost the end of June and that means it's time for your mid-year review/reset. Regular reviews are important in planning, because it helps you keep track of what's still important and how you're getting on in approaching your goals.

There are a few steps to consider.

1. Flip through your past pages looking for tasks that are not yet done. For each task, ask yourself three questions. Is it vital? Does it matter? Are there any negative consequences of not doing it? If the answer to any of these three questions is "yes". migrate the task forward into July. If all three answers are "no", then this task probably isn;t important enough to bother with any more, so bin it.

2. Take a look at your goals. Are you making progress towards them? If not, why not? What needs to change so that you can? Do you have too many goals? You can also apply the same three questions to your goals too, and maybe shelve the ones that don't matter. On the other hand if you've made good progress and have cleared your goals with ease, you can consider some new ones to add in.

3. If you're tracking habits, take a look at those and see where your successes and failures are. If you find you're blasting through with ease, drinking 8 cups of water or doing your 30 minute daily workout without even needing to think about it, you can probably stop tracking those habits. You got them. For ones you're never achieving, consider again whether they really matter, and if they don't, consider dropping them.

4. If you have an end-of-year review from December 2022, take a look at it now and see if there are any insights there into what was important for you at that time, and whether anything has changed 6 months later.

5. If you're working in a bullet journal or customised planner, consider your spreads too. Are the ones you have working for you? Do you want to make any changes for July? Uncompleted spreads are a sign that they're not working for you so try to figure out what you dislike about the spread and why it's not useful, then decide whether to either dump the spread altogether, or re-design it. Also consider if something was missing, and whether you want to add anything new.

6. Finally (and this one applies equally to long-form journalling as well as planning and bullet-journalling) think about the past six months and how it's gone overall for you. What were your great successes so far this year? What have you learned? What memories do you particularly cherish? What didn't go so well and how could you have handled it better? If you're working in a planner or BuJo you can answer these questions in a mid-year review spread. If you're journalling long-form, you can write a page or two to answer them. Either way, don't forget to put the page number into your index, because you'll want to refer to it at your end-of-year review too.