One of the original motivations of this blog is to record my graduate school study and everyday life in Japan. For example, I had tried to use this site to keep my private research notes two years ago when working on my Master’s research project. However, later I felt the blog is not the right tool for keeping private diary or notes. As a result, this idea was put off.
Decide to keep a diary when doing the self-authoring project
My recent failure in a close relationship makes me think a lot about what goes wrong with me. I happened to know a good way to help me find the answer to this question. That is the homework project of a psychology course, Maps of Meaning, by Prof. Jordan Peterson. Actually, when starting my doctoral course, I planned to write down my personal story and to make a plan for 3 to 5 years. The turbulence and instability of my life last year didn’t make this plan happen. Anyway, after a year and the ending of a relationship, I feel like it is now the time.
My current fault of having too many strange ideas that interrupt my work flow
When analyzing my current faults in that project, I realized my problem of not being able to focus on my daily job and getting the work down. This is very terrible. The main source interrupting my working flow is my constant burst of interesting ideas, which might be totally irrelevant to my research work. I always tend to think it is a pity to throw away these interesting ideas and just let them interrupt my work.
How to solve this difficult? First, I should make a good plan and stick to my plan. Do what I should do for a given time period during a day in a week. But, what about those uncontrolled bursts of interesting ideas? I think it would be better to save them for a later time when they should be thought of. How to save? Keep a diary!! I can jog down the thought in the iPhone’s Notes App right after it appears, and write them down in my diary at night.
Other two important reasons
I also realized that keeping a diary is also aligned with my two basic goals or principles of life. The first is well put by Nietzsche:
Writing about my daily life is a good way to reflect whether I live up to this motto or not.
Another goal I want to achieve is to further improve my critical think ability. Peterson believes that the best way to train one’s ability to think is through writing. He has a very strong argument in the introduction part of his essay writing guide. I will quote him here:
Only by writing the ideas down can we start to work on them, detecting the stupidity aspect and extracting the truth out.
