P365 – Day 124 milestone journal

I mentioned Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project earlier this year. It’s a great book and I’ve been following Gretchen’s blog for a while, but have to admit that I haven’t been putting a lot of the strategies into practice.

One idea I recently came across on the Happiness Project blog was the ‘milestone journal’. The idea is basically that you get a nice book, have a page for each day of the year, and then every time something significant or really important happens in your life, you note it down, and the year, on the page with the corresponding date.

That way you have a record of all the really big moments of your life.  

According to Gretchen, there are studies that show that one way to increase your happiness now is to reflect on happy memories of the past. She suggests this as a way to keep that information all in one place so that you can easily remember what happened ‘on this day’.

I rather liked this idea, so I’ve decided to try it out.

Being the lazy creature I am, I didn’t fancy writing the date on the top of 366 pages in a notebook, so I looked for an ‘Any Year Diary’, which has done all that work for me. (It’s a pretty unattractive book, so I’m planning on making a nice arty looking cover for it, and will possibly use some of my scrapbooking stash to make the pages look pretty. However, this is apparently the only one of its kind available. It’s obviously not a particularly sought-after item.) 

It brings back memories of the little lockable diary I used to have when I was a kid – without the lock.

Now my only decision is whether to start it from now, or go back through my old journals (which I’ve been keeping since I was about ten) and fill it up with significant moments from my whole life.

I think that would be kind of fun to do.