Whether you are a student, businessman, or a professional, keeping a journal can help you to save time, make better decisions and improve the quality of your life.

Its interesting to note that one of America’s greatest motivational speaker Jim Rohn always suggested people to keep a journal. He credits his habit of keeping a journal as one of the major reasons for his success.

Here’s a list of ten reasons to keep a journal

Serves as a personal record
A journal serves as a personal record of what you are doing in your life. It can be a ready reference to see what you have done on a particular day.

Improves your Focus
It lets you see where you are focusing your time and energy and helps you to improve focus on things that are essential to your success

Identify Time Leaks
Its ok to mindlessly spend some time on a day, but its not ok to do it everyday. By keeping a journal you will be able to identify the time leaks and remove the time wasters from your routine.

Improves Self-esteem
Keeping a journal is an indirect way of improving self-esteem. Imagine, 2 years from now you are looking at your journal and you find hundreds of valuable nuggets recorded inside. How will it make you feel? Wouldn’t you feel more valuable? Wouldn’t you feel that you have some valuable information to offer to the world?

Key to Better Health
By recording information about nutrition and exercises you will have a collection of tips that will help you to lead a healthy life style.

Better Financial Decisions
By looking at a past financial decision you made you can figure out how its affecting your life now. which will help you to take better financial decisions in future.

Yardstick for progress
If you are like most people you are going through life without stopping to think where you are going. A journal can help you to see whether you are making progress or not. As you reflect more on where you are going, you can make better decisions in future.

Key Takeaways
Jim Rohn used to say “Most people get through the day but Instead we should try to get from the day” A journal can help you to record the lessons you learned during the day.

Improves Self-awareness
Recording important events can help you spot new opportunities and to act on them quickly. You will be more aware of what is going on in the world and how its affecting your life.

A gift for the next generation
Just like a good book a journal can be a great thing to pass on to the next generation. In fact, a journal of an individual can teach more valuable lessons than any best selling self-help book.

I hope you found this information valuable and if you haven’t started already its time to start your own journal.

Here’s a tip if you are concerned about privacy issues, you can write your journal in Microsoft Word and have it password-protected or if you are on Mac try Google Docs.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 1st, 2010 at 4:20 am and is filed under Self improvement Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.