Note: This is a guest post from Jonathan Beebe of Develop Minds

You may know all the reasons why you should keep a journal, but if you’ve never written in a journal before, or have limited experience with it, you may not exactly know how to get started. You’ve got your notebook out, and a blank page staring back at you… now what?

Of course, there’s no set rules to writing in a journal. You can write in it however you like and it’s effective either way; however, if you need just a little guidance to get you started on the right foot, I’ll show you an effective journal “template” that you can use day-to-day, and modify as you wish to suit your needs.

Remember, none of the “sections” listed below are required to be long. They can be as long as a few paragraphs, or as short as one sentence… it’s all up to you, after all, it’s your journal :-)

Gratitude

A good way to start any journal entry is to begin listing a few of the things you’re grateful for. If you do this on routine, it helps to write a few words as to why you’re grateful for each particular item, so you really feel grateful, rather than just writing from memorization.

Even if you only name one thing you’re truly grateful for, what this will do is help bring you into a positive mindset for not only your journal writing session, but for your entire day. Gratitude is one of the best ways to ignite positivity… and we all have something to be grateful for.

Personal Reflection

I then begin writing about where I’m at with the current goals that I’m working on, or touch on some of the things I mentioned in my previous entry (if applicable). For example, if I had planned on posting an article to my blog and also taking my wife and daughter to the park today, I’ll write whether or not I ended up following through and how it went (or why I didn’t end up doing it). If I see somewhere I need to improve as far as my goals go, I’ll recognize that as well.

This section of the journal entry is for making a “status check” of yourself to see where you’re at, evaluate your strengths, and assess your weaknesses. I recommend you also use this section to write down how you feel about certain things, and express your emotions.

Goal Focus

This is where you can make plans to fix the areas you’re weaker at, set goals for the next day, etc. The previous section was used for evaluating and assessing, and this section is for planning and thinking about the “next” step.

For example, let’s say my goal is to lose 25lbs and I took a nice walk the previous day to work towards my goal. In the “Personal Reflection” section, I can recognize the fact that I took some time to work on my fitness, but also take note that I should have probably ate less snacks during the day. Then, in the “Goal Focus” section, I could state that because the walk wasn’t very challenging, that I plan to go further the next day and cut back on my daily snacking.

What the above journaling template will do for you is:

• Get you started on the right track, with a mindset of gratitude.
• Allow you to assess your feelings, your strengths, and areas you could improve (whether it be goals or general personal growth areas).
• Ensure you are taking at least baby steps towards your goals each day.
• Allow you to have a clear “action plan” as to what you’re planning on doing next (whether it be later on that day, the next day, etc).

As I mentioned earlier, there is no “right” way to write in your journal, but if you’re unsure how to get started, following the above template will definitely give you an effective head start!

Jonathan Beebe is the author and creator of Develop Minds, a personal development blog dedicated to providing free content aimed at helping you improve you life by increasing your consciousness, intelligence, and teaching you to fully develop your mind in a positive way.

Photo by dailylifeofmojo

If you want to grow, one important thing you should do is keeping a journal. It may seem simple, but it can make a big difference in your life.

I myself have been journaling for years. Writing all the lessons I learn and all the ideas I get has become a habit for me. And to be honest, it’s difficult to imagine how my life would be without it.

Here are some benefits you will get by keeping a journal:

1. It trains you to be observant. Once you make journaling a habit, you will develop the habit of being observant in all your experiences. You will get way more ideas and lessons this way. Instead of paying attention to the negative side of things, you pay attention to the positive side to extract lessons from it. Instead of taking things for granted, you look for new ideas that you can implement.

2. It prevents you from losing an idea. Have you ever gotten an idea only to lose it later because you didn’t write it down? I often experienced that myself. But then I developed the habit of writing down every idea that comes into my mind as soon as possible. If I’m away from my computer, I usually write it down on a piece of paper that I bring wherever I go. I will then transfer the idea to the journal in my computer.

3. It helps you memorize an idea. Even if you do nothing else, the act of writing helps you memorize the idea better. I often remember the things I write down without looking back at my notes.

4. It trains you to express your thoughts. I often take lessons from my experiences and write them down in my journal. Since I want to write a concise statement that summarizes the lesson, I need to think for a while to make it concise. This is a good exercise for me because over time I can express my thoughts better.

5. It helps you expand your ideas. When you try to come up with a sentence to express an idea, you are thinking actively about it. Thinking actively helps you connect your idea to another idea. At the end, you will expand your ideas.

6. It helps you review all the lessons you’ve learned. Why should you repeat the same mistakes you’ve made? By reviewing your journal, you can quickly see the lessons you’ve learned and the ideas you’ve gotten. You can do whatever necessary to avoid repeating the same mistakes. You can use the ideas to propel yourself forward.

7. It allows you to see your progress over time. After keeping a journal for years, you can look back at it and see how far you’ve gone. Things that were big problems in the past might seem small today. The raw ideas you had in the past might have been realized today. Seeing your progress motivates you to move even further ahead.

Now that you have seen the benefits of keeping a journal, what tool should you use?

You don’t need anything complicated for your journal. If your prefer to use a computer, you can use a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. You can even use a text editor like Notepad. If you prefer not to use computer, you can use a notebook.

Just use whatever tool you feel comfortable with. The important thing is to make journaling a habit.

Photo by Crystl

Last month I wrote the post How to Live Your Books and Not Just Read Them. There I introduced the idea of “most important books” (MIBs) which says that you should treat some very important books differently to get maximum benefit. Reader Ann M. Mione took the idea and created a bookmark template based on it.

In her words:

I really liked the idea of MIBs in your recent blog post (I was backlogged and just caught up a day or so ago, that’s why I’m just reading it now.) My problem would be that I would forget exactly what I’m supposed to be looking for in the books. So I made up a bookmark to print out and put in my MIBs when they are active (I’m just starting with 2.) I made them into a .pdf template for anyone else who may be interested in using an MIB bookmark.

Ann also has a plan to expand the MIBs idea to non-fiction books (you can check her site for more information). The template is available here.

Thanks, Ann!

Reading books is one thing, but actually living them is another thing. Many people just read a book without ever living it. But as you know, you can never get full benefit from a book if you just read it without putting it into practice.

Of course, it is easier said than done. Most of us just read a book once to get some ideas, and that’s it. But do you believe that we can completely grasp and apply the principles in a book by reading it just once? I don’t think so. Of course we can get some ideas from the book, but to effectively grasp and especially to apply them, reading it just once is definitely not enough. We need to read and reread it until the principles are internalized and applied in our daily life.

Having “Most Important Books”

While not all books deserve such rereading, there are some very good books that deserve it. These are the kind of books that will make significant difference in your life if you apply the principles in them.

Do you know of such books? I do, and I call them “most important books” (MIBs). These are the books that can greatly improve the way I think, work, or live. So I give my MIBs special attention. I believe the habit of having MIBs can significantly help us in our personal growth. There are two reasons for this:

1. It helps us internalize important principles for our life, and
2. It helps us apply those principles

As you may know, application is what makes the difference between 1% people who experience what a book say and the other 99% who just read it without experiencing it. If you want to be in this top 1%, having MIBs – I believe – is a good way to help you.

Applying the MIBs Concept

So how do you put this MIBs concept into practice? Here are some tips:

1. Make a list of all the books which application you think can significantly improve your life. Do not limit yourself in this step. Just list whatever books that come into your mind.
2. From the list that you have made, choose at most three books which can make the most significant difference to your current needs.
3. Have these books handy. Put them in a place where you can easily reach and read them.
4. Every now and then, when you have spare time, grab one book and read the important parts in it. It will help you a lot if you have highlighted the book before. That way you can just read your highlights, and only read the details if you think they are necessary.
5. Whenever you read a part of the book, think about how to apply it to your life. Think of some concrete actions you can take. If you want to, you can put them into your to-do list.
6. Do the same thing with the other (at most) two books which are also your MIBs.
7. Keep a book as MIB until:
   • You are satisfied with your progress in applying the principles in the book, or
   • The book is no longer relevant to your current need.
8. When you remove a book from your MIBs, you can choose another book by going back to step 1.

Why do I believe that this MIBs concept works? Because, for really important ideas, the key to successful application is repetition. Without repetition, it’s far too easy for those ideas to be lost in our mental attic. Having MIBs is an effective way to make sure that the important ideas will always have the place they deserve in our mind.

Reading a (nonfiction) book is one thing, but getting the most out of it is another thing. Too many people only reach the surface of the book and never really get into the treasure that is hidden below it. Or maybe they get a portion of the treasure, but they lose the chance to get the whole treasure.

How do you know that you get the most out of a book? You get the most out of a book when it significantly improves your life to the greatest possible extent. Because of that, an important goal of reading books is getting actionable ideas. To get the most out of the books, you should then put those actionable ideas into action.

Here are some steps you can do to get the most out of your books:

1. Preview the book you want to read
   Before spending too much time on a book, you should know whether the book is worth reading. Preview the book by reading its cover, introduction, table of contents, and skimming through the chapters.
   Besides helping you decide whether a book is worth reading, previewing also helps you be familiar with the structure of the book. It helps you understand the big picture of the book so that whatever you read later can be put in the right context.
2. Decide your purpose and the depth of your reading
   If you think the book is worth reading, you should then decide your purpose of reading the book. Your purpose states the kind of actionable ideas you expect from the book. Is there a problem you expect to be solved? Is there an area in your life you expect to be improved?
   Next, you should decide how deep your reading will be. It deals with the amount of time you are willing to spend on the book. The more actionable ideas you think it has, the deeper your reading should be.
3. For each chapter you read:
   1. Preview the chapter
      Go through the titles, subtitles, and pictures in the chapter. Just like previewing the book, previewing the chapter builds your familiarity with it and helps you put the details you get later in the right context.
   2. Quick read the chapter
      Next, you can quick read the chapter. This step fills in the details of the context you build in the previous step while giving you a glimpse of which might be the important ideas.
   3. Reread to highlight important ideas in the chapter
      This time you reread the chapter to decide which are the important ideas of the chapter. I’d suggest highlighting the important ideas you find. I personally use two kinds of highlights, one for important ideas and another one for very important ideas.
4. Create the book map
   After reading the whole book, I’d suggest creating a book summary of your own. Creating a book summary helps you internalize the ideas you get.
   The first part of such summary is a book map. A book map maps the structure of the entire book. Normally you can just use the table of contents as the book map, but don’t use a very detailed table of contents. The purpose of a book map is to quickly give you a glimpse of the structure of the book. Too much details may distract you from the big picture.
5. Write the ideas you get from each chapter
   Next you can write the ideas you get from each chapter by simply looking at your highlights in that chapter. Remember, your goal is to get actionable ideas, so you should focus on them. Writing the ideas you get helps you further internalize those ideas.
6. Write the main ideas you get from the entire book
   A good books often contains a lot of actionable ideas, so the list of ideas in step 5 may be too long to act upon effectively. You should then have a separate list for the main ideas from the entire book. This list helps you focus on the most important ideas so that it will be easier for you to apply them.
   If you use two kinds of highlight I mention in step 3.3, you can get the main ideas of the book by simply looking at your ‘very important’ highlights.
7. Create next action list
   Application is what puts you ahead of 90% or more other people who just read the book but do not apply what they learn. In fact, application is key. Actionable ideas are useless if you do not put them into action.
   To help you apply what you learn, decide what actions you will do to apply it. Look at your list of main ideas (step 6) to decide what the most important actions are.
8. Integrate the next action list into you master next action list
   After creating your next action list of the book, you can then integrate it into your master next action list. If you use GTD, I’m sure you have a master next action list. By putting the actions for the book there, the application of the book is now integrated into your daily workflow.

Don’t forget to be flexible. You do not need to apply all these steps to every book you read. For not-so-important books you can eliminate some steps. The more important a book is, the more steps you should use. ‘Important’ books are those which have bigger potential of changing your life.

Using these steps, you dot not just read the book; you mine it.

Ideas are precious. Especially in this Internet age where many things quickly becomes commodity, ideas are what set you apart and keep you ahead of the pack. You need to always have good and fresh ideas.

Unfortunately, we often cannot anticipate when an idea will come. Suddenly, out of the blue, comes the idea. It doesn’t care whether you are at home, on the road, or in the office. It doesn’t care what you are doing. It just comes. Even worse, it will quickly go. And once it goes, chance is it will never come back. So the challenge is capturing those ideas during its short visit without ever letting it go.

How can you do that? Here are four ways:

1. Bring a piece of paper and a pen wherever you go
   This is my favorite method. When I go out, writing on paper is the fastest way to capture an idea. I used to write my ideas on PDA, but I now think it’s too slow because it may not be able to recognize my handwriting on the first try. I often need to repeat writing. By writing on paper, I can write just once and it’s done. I will later transfer the ideas from the paper to a more permanent place which acts as my “idea warehouse”. I use Microsoft OneNote for that (also check the post Using OneNote for Idea Management). 
2. Use Google Desktop’s Scratch Pad
   How do you quickly capture ideas while you are using a computer? Of course there are many ways to do that. You can open a word processor or create a text file. But I guess the fastest way is using Scratch Pad from Google Desktop. It’s always visible in the sidebar so you do not need to find and launch any program. And it automatically saves the text written in it, so you don’t even need to press a Save button. It’s a quick way to get the idea out of your mind and put it in a safe place.
3. Write a draft message in your cell phone
   Okay, sometimes you may forget to bring a piece of paper with you when you go out. But you won’t forget to bring your cell phone with you, will you? So in such case, you can write your ideas as a new text message in your cell phone and save it as draft. It is not as quick as writing on paper, but it’s still a safe and sure way to capture your ideas when you don’t have a piece of paper with you.
4. Tell someone about it
   Why should you bear all the burden yourself? Share it with someone else :). You can tell your friend about your idea and ask her to help remind you about it. You don’t even need to be physically in the same location as her. You can call or send her a text message.

There are many tools which can be used for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), but for me Microsoft OneNote is one of the main tools. Of course, I also use other tools such as Google Desktop (desktop search), Google Reader (RSS) and del.icio.us (social networking), but in term of idea management, OneNote is the tool for me.

There is a big difference between the way I use OneNote and the way I use other tools. Tools for technologies like RSS and social networking mainly deals with other people’s thoughts. For example, I can use an RSS reader to read other people’s blog entries and then use social networking to mark those which I find interesting. In most cases, I also use desktop search to search other people’s thoughts which are stored as files in my hard disk.

OneNote is different because I use it to manage my own ideas. While OneNote can be used to manage links to others’ blogs and web sites (like social networking), I find it most useful when dealing with my own thoughts and ideas.

There are several features of OneNote which make it useful for idea management:

1. The data is organized in sections and pages
   All data is organized neatly in sections and pages. The sections are displayed as a row of tabs in the upper part of the display, and within each section there are several pages displayed in the right side. This organization is convenient for me because I can put all my stuffs in one place (that is, inside OneNote) and then arrange them to be easily findable. Since everything is in one place, it is more difficult to miss any piece of thoughts I’ve written.
2. All typings are automatically saved
   This is a convenient feature which is not available in most other software. In OneNote, I never need to worry about pressing Ctrl-S because all typings are saved automatically. This way I can concentrate on just writing my ideas.
3. Writing can be done anywhere in the page
   Unlike word processor in which I can only write in certain areas of the pages (limited by paragraph format, margin, paper size, etc), I can write anywhere in the pages within OneNote. This is useful for developing ideas because I can easily place different thoughts in their appropriate places within the pages to interconnect them.
4. The content can be searched fast
   If I forget where I’ve written something, I can quickly find it by doing fast search across all sections and pages. For idea management, it is more useful than desktop search because desktop search will return results from the whole hard disk, most of which are other people’s writings. Using OneNote’s search, I can be sure that the search results are all my thoughts.
5. Flexible outlines can be made
   Outlining is the feature I like most from OneNote. Using it, I can easily write my thoughts and arrange them in hierarchies. I can then collapse or expand the outlines to see the big picture or the details. I can also move each item easily from one part of the list to another. This flexibility is important for me because it enables me to develop my ideas quickly and easily.

There are still other features of OneNote, but these are the most important ones which make me stick with it for idea management. I know that many people use mind maps to develop and maintain ideas. I’ve also tried them and find them useful, but frankly I use OneNote over mind maps almost every time. Aside from my browser (my beloved Firefox), OneNote is the software I spend most of my time with.

Technorati Tags: productivity, learning

Previously I’ve written why personal development is important and even more important nowadays. I believe that one area of it is personal knowledge management (PKM). There are two reasons for this:

1. This is the era of knowledge worker
   Which is why knowledge management is obviously very important.
2. This is the era where we need to compete individually more than ever before
   This is due to Globalization 3.0 which I’ve written about before.

So, since we are knowledge workers who need to advance and compete individually, PKM should be an integral part of our life. Done effectively, PKM would help us grow our knowledge to become more and more competitive.To introduce the concept of PKM, there is an excellent article in Wikipedia. Here are some ideas about PKM from that article:

• Personal KM is focused on helping an individual be more effective — to work better.
• PKM is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning.
• Skills associated with PKM include reflection, manage learning, information literacy, organizational skills, and networking with others.
• PKM tools include index/search (like desktop search), concept/mind-mapping, people/expert finding (through social networking), conversation management (like blogs and forums), RSS, etc.

As you can see, some popular technologies like desktop search, social networking, blogs, and RSS are used for PKM. In the future, I’d like to touch more on how to do PKM effectively using these tools and others.

Technorati Tags: learning, knowledge management