I’ve been journaling every morning for the last several weeks and have found it to be a great way to organize my thoughts and process some of the many loose threads in my head.

In This column will change your life: Morning Pages, Oliver Burkeman explains why he finds daily journaling so helpful.

You can write about whatever’s on your mind: petty worries, soaring plans, angry tirades…I wish I’d started long ago.

He recommends producing three sides of a page each day but I don’t like the length requirement because some mornings I have a lot to say, others not so much. I prefer to use a short time requirement (10 minutes). If this is going to be a daily activity, it’s important to make it as painless as possible. Often I get into an entry and I exceed the allotted ten minutes, but I consider optional anything beyond the minimum.

So far, ten minutes a day has been easy to do. One thing that often suprises me is I’ll start out writing about subject X and the entry will organically transform itself into subject Y. It’s like my subconsicous mind knows what it really wants to talk about.

A few tips I recommend if you try this:

  1. Don’t overplan. Let the writing flow as freely as possible. Don’t worry about whether it makes sense or is well written. This is by you and for you only.

  2. Write in longhand. It’s now been scientifically shown that writing with your hand activates a different part of your brain versus using a keyboard, resulting in more creativity and better retention. I swear by my Remarkable tablet, which faithfully preserves the age old handwriting experience in the digital age.

  3. Try to do your writing in the morning when you have a fresh outlook. I also like to get this task out of the way early, so it’s not hanging over my head for the rest of the day.

  4. Start every new session by reading what you wrote the day before. This gives a sort of continuity of thought that we often miss in our everyday busy lies.

In short, I find this process to be enjoyable and it helps improve my mood. It requires just a tiny slice of my morning and it’s a lot cheaper than therapy. Why not give it a try?