Journal Writing for Businesses

This morning, a former stranger emailed me asking if I knew of any books on journaling for business purposes. I didn’t. Although I did mention my own book, The Many Faces of Journaling: topics & Techniques for Personal Journal Writing, which is a great resource for writing more interesting entries.

But the idea of business journaling began playing through my brain (which adores brainstorming!). It’s easy to see how one might keep a “goals” journal, entering both effective and disastrous steps toward specific goals. Keeping a record of what worked and what bombed, both large and small efforts, could be invaluable in almost any business, including mine.

That former stranger and I are now batting emails back and forth, developing starter sentences to get the business user on the right track for recording the appropriate stories in depth. And perhaps depth is the key to the ultimate usefulness of such journals.

Recording the cold, sparse essentials will reveal nothing of how close the effort may have come to success or of how even the failures sparked ideas for future tactics. Business journal entries need to be 3-dimensional, including the who, where, why, what and how. It may be that changing just one aspect would dramatically alter the outcome. But if those points aren’t down on paper (or computer file), later analysis will suffer for lack of information.

So today I learned (am still learning) that journaling has a powerful place in business, both the profit and non-profit kind. Who knew ...