How Keeping a Diary Can Improve Your Life

Many current and historical people keep diaries as a way of remembering the mark they left on this earth. Most UK prime ministers and US presidents have kept diaries that have helped journal the day-to-day lives of people in the most powerful positions on the planet.

President Harry Truman had to make a very difficult decision against an aggressor that openly showed it would throw every last man, woman and child at the allied forces during World War 2, and it showed how he was wracked with guilt with the decision he had to shoulder alone. Virginia Woolf kept a diary, as did Kurt Cobain, and even Josef Goebbels.

How Will It Help You?

There are the obvious reasons, such as how it helps to chronicle your life so you may look back in years and see how you lived in the past. There is also the element of future fame where your diaries as a young person would become valuable. However, one of the biggest ways it may help you is through its ability to allow you to reflect.

Our perception is often blurred by many things, especially emotion, and that may skew the way we look at things in the future. Keeping a diary allows you to reassess what you think you experienced and the reasons behind it. For example, the sudden outburst of a friend against you may have seemed unwarranted, until later when you write your diary and realize you had been goading her all day and that she was actually reacting after a great deal of provocation from yourself.

Tips To Help You Write Your Diary

Stop writing it as if somebody is going to read it. That is one of the biggest problems with a diary. People write it as if somebody will one day read it other than themselves. As a result, they tend to smooth over the rough edges, sanitize their actions, and even outright lie to make themselves seem better or not as bad. If you want to enjoy the full therapeutic value of diary writing, you need to be brutally honest about what happened during your day.

It is easier to write your diary if you have taken notes during the day. If you have taken a few bullet-point notes during the day, you will better be able to recall what happened. Otherwise, you will find yourself trying your best to think of what happened during the day, and then the next day you will remember stuff that you wished you had added into your diary.

Many people have a tendency to over-write within their diary. Some people will have days where they will fill up pages of their diary and other days when they cannot be bothered to write much at all. On your heavy days, it is good to write as much as you do because it does have therapeutic value, but when you are finished, go through and cut out the wordage that doesn’t really add value. Also, get into the habit of writing every day because if you miss one day, then you will probably miss others and will end up abandoning your diary all together.

Five Tools You Can Use To Help You

1 – Evernote

This is a note writing and keeping tool that now has a series of other functions. It allows you to take written notes, to save videos, audio and images. It also has a filing system that allows you to catalog your entries and put them into sections so you may find your notes more easily in the future. With a note-taking app, you are able to quickly jot down things that are warrant entry into your diary. It helps you write memory notes you can refer to when writing your diary, which is especially helpful if you get writer’s block whilst writing your diary.

2 – AssignmentMasters

You may usually expect to have your essays written, but you can have them do hundreds of written tasks. You can even have them write a professional diary for you. This is especially good if you want to have your diary published at some point. You can hand them a series of notes and have them write your diary, or you can write the content yourself and then have them smarten it up with their editing and proofreading services.

3 – GoogleKeep

The GoogleKeep system allows you to make and keep notes for your diary a little like Evernote. With GoogleKeep, you are able to make voice notes and memos, and it is free to use. Plus, you can integrate it with other Google products. You can share your thoughts too so that you may get other people’s opinions on your diary entries.

4 – Paper Rater

If you are planning to have your diaries published some day, then it is a good idea to check and proofread your work as you go. If you save the proofreading until the day 20 years in the future when you want your work published, you will have a very big job on your hands. This tool will help you check your work a little more thoroughly. Plus, this tool not only helps you find your spelling and grammar errors, it also tells you how easy your text is to read, which may come in handy in years to come when you want to skim through your diary to pull out important bits.

5 – Private Diary or Diary+

These two apps, one for Android and one for iPhone, are pretty much the same thing but for different operating systems. They allow you to write your diary using your Smartphone, which means you can make full entries whilst waiting for a bus or during times of the day when you are not doing much. It takes a lot longer to write on your mobile device than it does with a PC or laptop, but if you have the time spare, then it cannot hurt to add a few lines to your diary. You are able to lock the app so that other people cannot see and/or find your most private writings.

Written by Laura Jonson

Laura Jonson is a passionate freelance writer. Her sphere of interests is social media marketing and content creation. During last time she combines it with her hobby.
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