Recollection vs Reconstruction: Keeping a Journal During Times of Crisis

"The first casualty in a crisis is perspective."

-Aswath Damodoran

There has never been a better -and more important – time to actively and consistently keep a journal.

In the future, you will look back on this pandemic and make assessments, derive conclusions, and build new strategies for both your personal and professional life. Prudent as this may be your thoughts will betray you.

This is because your ideas will not be accurate recollections, but rather a reconstruction of your experiences, tainted by hindsight. We tend to look back on experiences like this and justify, explain, and rationalize decisions with the added benefit of what we know in the moment.

Do yourself and your career a favor: take the time to jot down daily notes about what’s going on, your thoughts about it, and the course of action you decided upon. What challenges were you faced with? What was expected vs what caught you by surprise? How did your responses play out? What methods worked and what failed? The real time assessment of these questions and answers will provide an exceptional, once in a lifetime value in the future.

This applies not just to your personal life and decisions in the workplace, but your career development as well. Businesses will want to prepare for future pandemics and in doing so, will seek out leaders who successfully led their teams and positively impacted their organizations during this one. Such a leader will be in high demand -journaling now will provide you the tools and knowledge to accurately project yourself as the kind of team member who is ready to tackle the next pandemic.

P.S. Don’t Overthink It!

The idea of journaling often intimidates people. Or they perceive it as silly, conjuring up images of a child writing in a diary with a locket on the front, opening each page with ‘Dear Journal.’ This doesn’t have to be the case for you. Here is one strategy that is both effective and efficient.

• Set aside 10 minutes to journal at the end of each workday.
• Look at your calendar and write a quick outline of the meetings, calls, relevant readings and conversations you participated in.
• For each of these, list and answer some of the following writing prompts:
• Why was this important?
• What influenced my thoughts and decision making?
• What decisions did I and/or my organization decide upon?
• As the days go by, go back to previous entries and annotate updates.

I would suggest doing this on a digital platform so you can easily search in the future by date, keyword, idea, etc. Collaboration is an added benefit as well, as you can share with other contributors.

This article originally appeared on my blog, The Reflection Bank