Product-cloud journaling
Like a lot of people I know, I don’t keep a regular journal. I used to pretend I was the journaling type—after all, I’m a therapist. Aren’t we supposed to be the kind of people who keep long and profound journals?? So I’d buy a journal in the new year, find it collecting dust months later, and feel frustrated. Now I’ve just accepted it: I don’t keep a journal. But I do do product-cloud journaling from time to time.
Product clouds look like this. They’re simply a list of things or products, organized in the rough shape of a cloud. The font size of each object in the cloud depends on the popularity or importance of the object. A product cloud of 2008 presidential candidates, for example, would have ‘Obama’ and ‘McCain’ in large font sizes (Obama would be somewhat larger than McCain), and ‘Kucinich’ much smaller. ‘Clinton’ would be nearly as large as McCain. You get the idea. And for a non-journaling person like me, this is a great way to get things off my mind and onto paper.
Normally, if I can just get all the things on my mind disgorged onto a notepad, I can think, feel, and act with clarity. I don’t need to reflect at length on my life, or my career, or my relationships. I just need to clear out all the little things going on in my head. Here’s an example of a cloud I wrote this morning (click on the image for a larger view):
You can see, then, that laundry just needs to happen tonight, and that I’ll be doing something about my checkbook and paperwork today, even if I don’t make it to the grocery store. After doing this cloud, I felt a lot more organized, and the “sluggish Monday feeling” was almost gone. (Almost. It’s still a little early in the day.)
Oh, and here’s one more rule about this journaling technique: you are free to do it whenever you like. You don’t have to do it daily, or at all. If the spirit moves you, give it a try. I say this because a lot of my clients are like I used to be: they think they’re “supposed to” do these kinds of self-help things, and the “supposed-to” obligation short-circuits the whole thing, making it just another task, another product in the cloud. Give it a try if you like, or…don’t! Either way, I wish you a non-sluggish Monday.
