A friend suggested it to me years ago, back when I was just starting out, and I remember thinking it sounded like a complete waste of time. Write down what’s already happened? What was I supposed to learn from that? I had a business to run.

But I gave it a go anyway, and it turned out to be one of the most useful habits I’ve ever picked up. Useful enough that it’s now a full lesson on my startup course, and useful enough that I still do it myself, most days, years later.

Here’s the thing about running your own business: it’s relentless. 

You’re moving so quickly from one task to the next that you rarely get the chance to actually look at what’s going on. Journaling forces that pause. It’s not a diary in the “dear diary” sense – you’re not writing about your day, you’re writing about your business day. What you achieved. What went wrong. What you want to try next.

And when you take that step back, even for ten minutes, you get a clarity that’s genuinely hard to find anywhere else.

It catches the ideas you’d otherwise lose

We all have good ideas. The trouble is, most of them are fleeting. You’re in the shower, or on the school run, or half-listening in a meeting, and suddenly there’s a flash of something brilliant. And then it’s gone, because life moves on and you never wrote it down.

I use my journal to catch those ideas before they disappear. Sometimes it’s a new angle for a marketing campaign. Sometimes it’s a tweak to a product I’m working on. It doesn’t matter how small or half-formed the idea is, if it goes in the journal, it’s there when I need it later.

It turns goals into something you can actually follow

Setting a goal is easy. Sticking to it is the hard part. What I’ve found is that journaling gives you somewhere to break a big, vague ambition down into steps you can actually track. Your short-term goals, your long-term goals, and the small bits of progress in between. It’s the difference between “I want to grow this business” and knowing exactly what you did this week to get there.

It’s a shortcut to creativity when you’re stuck

Some days the ideas just aren’t coming, and that’s fine, it happens to everyone. On those days, I’ll just free write. No worrying about grammar, no structure, just whatever’s in my head going straight onto the page. Half of it is nonsense – sometimes most of it. But every so often something genuinely useful falls out of it, and you’d never have found it if you were sitting there trying to force a “good” idea.

It’s where the stress goes

Running a business is stressful – there’s no getting around that. What I’ve learned is that writing out exactly what’s overwhelming me, in plain terms, helps me actually identify what the problem is, rather than just feeling generally awful about everything. Once it’s named on the page, it’s so much easier to work out what to do about it. It’s done wonders for how I process things emotionally too, not just practically.

It reminds you how far you’ve come

And then there are the days you feel like giving up entirely. This is where an old journal becomes genuinely powerful. Flick back a few months and read what you were dealing with then. You’ll see problems you’ve already solved, wins you’d completely forgotten about, and proof that you’ve moved further than it feels like some days. It’s one of the best ways I know to stay motivated and stay pointed at the bigger vision. I even highlight the best bits so that I can quickly flick through and see how epic it can be, and how far I’ve come.

Just start

So here’s my challenge to you, the same one I give everyone on my course: try it. Grab a notebook you already own, or go and buy a new one if that feels like more of a fresh start – it genuinely doesn’t matter which. 

Each day, write down what you worked on, what you’re thinking, and what you want to tackle next.

Give it a proper go, not just one entry, and see what it does for you. I promise it’s not the waste of time I once thought it was.

If you’re new to business and you’d like a fully-funded start-up course to show you the way you’re going to love what I’ve created. Save your space here.