Daniel Wentsch

Although he initially found ‘the cult of journaling’ to be ‘a bit wallowingly self-absorbed’, Burkeman tried Morning Pages, liked it, and has since filled stacks of Moleskine and Leuchtturm notebooks with an unsystematic yet productive stream of thoughts, plans, emotions and ideas.

This is because you can type faster than you can handwrite. When it’s possible to keep up with a speaker and type verbatim notes, that’s what students do: but when using a ponderous pen or pencil, they have to develop alternative strategies to prioritise, organise, abbreviate and structure what they hear. This in turn leads to much better learning.

You don’t need interesting material. You’re not performing for an audience. You can write about why you chose the lunch you chose, or what you noticed on the walk to the store, or a single, unmarked moment in a conversation that stuck with you. The point isn’t to produce great content. The point is to practice putting thoughts into words.

My daily writing is usually mundane. I’ll work through why I’m annoyed about something in my work or home life, or try to figure out whether I actually need to move to a new note taking app or just want to want to move note taking apps for the sake of it. The topic matters less than the act of forcing vague feelings into specific words. Once

I’ve been writing 1000 words every day for about 10 years now, and I’m still not always sure what I’m doing. Arguably, most of that output is terrible. Some days I manage maybe two hundred words before I run out of things to say and end up describing what I had for breakfast.

But those three years have changed how my brain works more than any other