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Starstruck

Starstruck
Creative Writing for health, well-being and fun!

Wednesday 28 October 2009

Quality and your journal - how to maintain it.

Controlling the quality of your journal may seem a strange concept. After all, writing it in the first place is supposed to be a freeing experience. You can do what you like on these pages, can’t you?

Well, of course, you can. But some people like to review their journals, checking - weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually – what the writing has achieved. These reviews are optional for some, crucial for others.

For you, wanting to ensure quality may be a central plank in your personal and working style. In Transactional Analysis terms, you are the ‘Be perfect’ journallers. Your motto will be probably be: ‘If I’m going to keep a journal, I’m going to do it well.’

And how will this display itself?
Well, you’ll check your facts and annotate. And you won’t be scribbling on your knee on a bus. You’ll have a designated place for journaling and for keeping your journal. You may also be inclined to give up journaling because your journal doesn’t seem to you to be ‘perfect’.

Take action to avoid this last pitfall by accepting certain general principles:
• Be realistic about how accurate and beautifully presented a journal needs to be.
• Ask yourself whether a spelling mistake matters more than what you’ve written about.
• Tell yourself mistakes are not serious, content is all.
• And review your journaling entries as you do them.

Some people go for the Q&A approach developing a system of personal performance questions to ensure clarity and balance. Your purpose in keeping your journal may be to maintain a record of your feelings, keep an account of the minutiae of your daily life, produce a progress report on your personal development, whatever. And, if you are a perfectionist, you can frame a number of questions to produce what you want from each entry.

If for example your goal for journaling is to produce a progress report on your career, your list of questions may include:

• Has your working day contributed to your progress? In what ways?
• Did you enjoy your day? If not, why not?
• Did you receive a reward for good performance – Money? Praise? Promotion? How do you feel about this?
• Are your relationships good at work? How could you improve the bad ones? Do you want to? What’s good about the good ones? Do you want more of these?
• Have you noticed any areas where you’d like further training? How can you access this? What is the first step? When will you take it?
• How could your employer improve your working life?
• Does the company share your values?

This is a detailed clutch of questions. You may prefer something broader and freer such as:

• Am I any further forward today towards my promotion?
• If not, why not?
• What am I going to do about it?
• If nothing, why nothing?

You may on the other hand prefer ‘free-writing’. At the other end of the quality control continuum is the option of writing without pause for ten minutes each day and checking in at regular periods – weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly - to find out what your sub-conscious contributes to the burning issues of your life. But your favoured quality control measures will always, always depend on your personal style.

©Lizzie Gates 2009

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