Did someone present you a notebook? You probably felt insulted with such a useless present, didn’t you?
You shouldn’t feel like that. This present consists of empty pages full of promises. When taking a look at empty blank lists, one can be difficult to fight the wish to take a pen and start filling them.
It’s a pity (or not), but there is still no app that would come close to feelings that a physical notebook can give. It has numerous advantages: you can draw, write, stick into it whatever you want, cross out, write essay drafts, make tables and change the character of your writing. If to have a proper level of creative thinking, you can turn it into the art mastery. Here are some tips about using a notebook in your everyday life (except of making regular notes).
1. Eating and Training Journal
Many people have their goals connected to being fit and providing a healthy way of life. Two main pillars of any sports and physical activity are:
- What you eat;
- What exercises you do.
Create a template allowing you to keep an eye on meals you eat. Write next on top of the page: date, time, meal, size of a portion, calories.
Have another one to see physical exercises and burnt calories. Write down on top: activity, date, time, duration, burnt calories.
2. Track Your Time
Keep an eye on time. Know once and forever where it goes. Additionally, see next:
- What amount of your time was lost due to procrastination;
- How difficult is for you to deal with irritators and distractors;
- Do you finish one task, or you prefer working with multiple tasks simultaneously?
- How much time is devoted to the greatest life wishes and targets and to making something that is required to reach them?
- How much time is spent on doing things that do not really matter?
3. Track Your Exes
Controlling ways and numbers of your money spending is a correct strategy, and a wise one as well. Watch the following:
- Have you got a habit of making impulsive exes?
- Which exes should you refuse?
- Do you use your funds to make investments? For example, into your education, into things bringing you incomes, into new experience?
4. One-Phrase-Journal
If you have a real lack of time or you decide to give yourself a challenge, try providing a diary where you have to write only one phrase per day. Just one phrase, and nothing more at all. This will allow you to be more conscious about the world around, and will teach you to tell much sense with fewer words.
If you provide such a diary during a couple years, then after that time you will have a real time-capsule of your life with you.
5. Provide a Thanksgiving Diary
You hear and read about that again and again: a key to success is you having a skill of being thankful. So, once one begins providing a journal of thanksgiving, they are going to understand why they speak about this so often.
Researches provided by psychologists found many advantages which come from a regular thanksgiving practice: writing down the information about thinks you feel thankful for. The simplest way to provide your diary of that kind: write down words describing five things you thank the world for before going to bed.
6. Morning Pages
The point is about writing three pages of text right after you have awakened. Just write about everything that is in your mind. Use three full pages of a notebook pages, and then stop. Morning pages can help you deal with troubles worrying you, plan your day or see your real wishes.
7. Life Audit
For instance, you have noticed that you feel difficult to live till the evening for few past months: you are that much tired because you do not have enough energy. Watch levels of it during the day, and write down the results. Do you feel exhausted after certain persons interacted with you? Isn’t it worth to eat a fruit and see how your organism will react onto it? What are your feelings when working day ends?
8. Copy Leonardo da Vinci’s Habit
The greatest genius of all times used to take a book with empty lists with him all the time. He made drawings of birds, people or things he had seen during walking around in the city.
Having this habit developed, you can:
- Write down the contents of a conversation you have accidentally heard in a cafe;
- Think out character names for your novel;
- Catch up your accidental thoughts.
9. Write Down Favorite Quotes
Start writing down there quotes you like, and inspiring sayings that can help you get a good mood at any moment will always be with you in a notebook pretty soon.
10. Art Book
Art Book is for drawings, paintings, writings and decorations. There can be a list of your ideas: both those good and those not that good. Additionally, you can cut good pictures off somewhere and put them into a book, use photos etc.
11. List of Goals
Such a present is an excellent instrument helping you to move towards your goals. Its advantages are quite obvious:
- When your goals are written down on the paper, a first step towards making them true is already made;
- Having your goals listed is the excellent way to create a plan of achieving them. Additionally, you can see possible obstacles waiting on your way beforehand if to do that;
- Goal-journal allows tracking your progress;
- It helps you to see summaries.
12. Bucket List
Bucket List is a list of what you wish to get done during your life. That’s silly to keep all of them in your head, agreed? You just can’t remember them all. Using a notebook to systemize them, you are able to make plans and think detailly on them. Do you wish to visit a Disneyland? A map of that goal can be created with a notebook page.
13. Use Notebook for Writing Exercises
If you wish to be a writer or to somehow improve your mastery, writing as often as possible is essential for you.
14. Study a Language
When you study languages, tracking down everything you learn can’t be called something unnecessary. By using a notebook, you can create a learning diary, and track it all. Here are couple tips on what to do with a notebook:
- See every word you learn;
- Notate grammar rules;
- Watch approaches you use for learning and their effectiveness;
- Mark mistakes you regularly make.