Last Friday I passed a milestone. I have a journal that I have been writing in for fourteen years. It is something that I do periodically often weekly, occasionally there were 6 month gaps like last summer when I was busy sun up to sun down. I guess what it has become is kind of a log of what I have done and what I am planning to do with some thoughts and feeling mixed in.

If we go back in the time machine and put myself where I was fourteen years ago, my second son had yet to be born. I was working three jobs ago and I wasn’t happy then either (see a theme here). This was the pre-podcast era for me as well so I was listening to talk radio on AM and I was reading several books on the Dave Ramsey reading list. You can see my references to Dan Miller’s “40 Days to the Work you Love”.

I was going to use this journal to document my thoughts about what I was reading, develop my goals and work on progress as it relates to those goals. This is sort of how it devolved into documenting my work over the years. I will say that it has sometimes been useful. I have been able to figure out when I did the last oil change or a general time frame of events.

One interesting use that I had was to look back on trends. 6-16-14. As predicted, not much has changed. I did move wood out of the garage last weekend. That means that things are pretty much prepped to finish the garage re-org. Vacation was pretty awesome and did the trick of relaxing the mind. I need to do an oil change on the pick-up within the the next few weekends. Serious travel is about to begin and summer will be over. It is a bit disappointing and I am seriously reconsidering my career choice.

When I was in the diminishing days of my last job, I was reading what I wrote through the years. I realized that my first mention of job unhappiness was in 2012. I started wondering why I was still working somewhere seven years later where I was still unhappy and that is what ultimately made me pull the trigger on putting in my notice. I figured it was just as insane to quit without a plan as it was to continue to work in misery.

Most things that I write are not really private, but they are personal. I have noted births, deaths, projects and statuses in story form. In some ways, this blog is a continuation or expansion of that. My last entry in this book was going to summarize my journey over the last fourteen years. That was of course interrupted with the passing of my father-in-law so I needed to get that documented instead.

My son gave me a new journal for Christmas so I am about to get started in this one. I don’t think that I will do anything differently. I will probably keep doing it the way that it has been going. I suppose it is another form of therapy for me. I don’t really plan on what I am going to say, I just say things about where I am at at the moment.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not saying that this is for everyone. I think that it helps me keep perspective on life and a record of what I have done. It is part of that self reflection kind of time that I spend. Once I have sorted out where I am at, I can make plans to move forward.