Organic overstuffed journal | The importance of journaling

Our new Pinterest Board 'Overstuffed Journal chronicles' 

Keeping a journal helps you create order when your world feels like it's in chaos. You get to know yourself by revealing your most private fears, thoughts, and feelings. Look at your writing time as personal relaxation time. It's a time when you can de-stress and wind down. 

Journaling is a fantastic way to record information on paper, mapping an emotional growth and future goals in one place. Lately I've been quite inspired by the recent Filo-Fax fever that promoted the overstuffed journal aesthetic over a minimalist and organised bullet journal concept. Ultimately the purpose is to create something organic, a room filled with ideas - a mix between a common place book, sketchbook and bujo. 

Journaling is a method frequently discussed in nursing literature and educational literature as an active learning technique that is meant to enhance reflective practice. Reflective practice is a means of self-examination that involves looking back over what has happened in practice in an effort to improve, or encourage professional growth. Some of the benefits of reflective practice include discovering meaning, making connections between experiences and the classroom, instilling values of the profession, gaining the perspective of others, reflection on professional roles, and development of critical thinking. 

According to the ACM Digital Library (in this article), Journaling is a "Personal informatics systems that help people both collect and reflect on various kinds of personal information are growing rapidly. Despite the importance of journaling and the main role it has in tracking one's personal growth, a limited number of studies have examined journaling in the area of personal informatics in detail. We must critically examine the process of reflection on experiences, thoughts and evolving insights through a qualitative research study. We must also present the design research process we conducted to develop the Wandering Mind as a support tool to help individuals record and reflect on their experiences."