How Journaling Can Help You Succeed at Work

From sg.news.yahoo.com

When was the last time you thought about how you can challenge yourself? Or took inventory of your accomplishments? Or even checked in with whether you’re happy at work?

Sometimes, you’re so busy crossing tasks off a constantly growing to-do list that you’re inadvertently neglecting your career performance and goals.

You can reclaim that focus in as little as 15 minutes. How? By journaling at the end of every workday.

“A typical day at the office in 2017 involves a lot of professionals constantly moving from one task to another, one device to another,” says Jill Jacinto, a millennial career expert based in New York City. “Journaling is a great tool that can help you reflect on your workplace and the work you are doing.”

We spoke with experts to explore benefits of writing “Dear Diary” daily and provided some journal ideas to help get you started.

Identify your long-term career vision

Take some time to think about what you want to accomplish throughout your career and the type of career you want to have. Introspective questions can help you delineate between what you actually want and what you think you should want.

“Journaling can help you gain clarity on your career vision and keep you accountable,” says Rachel Andujar, founder of the Maryland-based career-coaching firm Rethink Nine to Five. “I remember journaling while still working as a CPA and trying to figure out my next step. By writing it all down, I was able to feel more confident about what I wanted to achieve and who I wanted to impact.”

Journaling prompts: What type of job would I want to do if salary weren’t a factor? What type of company culture is best for me? How do I define a successful career? What are my work values?

Track your progress and future goals

Use journaling to reflect on the past—and focus on your future. Todd Cherches, an adjunct professor at New York University, asks his clients to keep a journal “so that they can capture their thoughts and challenges, reflect back, and track their progress.”

Cherches also notes that journaling allows you to be proactive about planning for the future. (So maybe you’ll have an answer next time someone asks you about your five-year plan.) “Journaling allows you to plan your time better, prioritize, systemize, organize, and strategize,” he says. Identify your goals and create an actionable plan for making it happen.

Journaling prompts: What are some accomplishments I’ve achieved, and how can I continue to build upon them? What are my short-term and long-term goals? What progress have I made toward accomplishing my goals? What are challenges that are making it harder for me to reach my goals?

Create productive strategies for handling work stress

Let’s face it: Sometimes work can be stressful. Use your journal as a safe space to vent without having to worry about your comments getting back to your boss. And that’s not the only benefit; journaling allows you to be reflective and thoughtful before you react.

“Journaling can help you process challenging times, experiences, and events at work in a more effective and productive way,” says Kathy Caprino, founder of Amazing Career Project. “It allows you to take more productive action and have more balanced conversations and interactions going forward.”

Journaling prompts: How did this situation make me feel? What can I do to make the situation better? Is there anything I did that contributed to the situation? What can I do differently next time? Is there anything I can do to reduce my stress?

Evaluate your career happiness

It’s a simple question: “Do you like your job?” But the answer can be, well, complicated. Journaling can help you home in on certain emotions that might otherwise go unnoticed. When you go back and read entries, you might realize that most of them are about feeling stressed, dealing with toxic co-workers, or trying (and failing) to work well with your horrible boss.

“A career is a journey and it can be easy to get stuck in a mindset that how you are feeling today equals a permanent state,” says Alyssa Krane, chief talent strategist at the Toronto-based talent acquisition firm Powerhouse Talent Inc. “Once you start to see concerns appear in more of a chronic state, it may be time to consider a change.”

If you’ve been putting off searching for a new job on Monster, journaling can be just the springboard you need.

Journaling prompts: What tasks energized me or drained me this month? What do I like or dislike about my colleagues? What are some positive and negative things about my work environment? Is there anything I can do to be happier at work? What are some pros and cons about my current job? Would I be happier at another company? Would switching jobs make a difference or would I need to make a career change?

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/finance/news/journaling-help-succeed-230035614.html 

Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning

From opb.org 

If you're like many digitally savvy Americans, it has likely been a while since you've spent much time writing by hand.

The laborious process of tracing out our thoughts, letter by letter, on the page is becoming a relic of the past in our screen-dominated world, where text messages and thumb-typed grocery lists have replaced handwritten letters and sticky notes. Electronic keyboards offer obvious efficiency benefits that have undoubtedly boosted our productivity — imagine having to write all your emails longhand.

To keep up, many schools are introducing computers as early as preschool, meaning some kids may learn the basics of typing before writing by hand.

But giving up this slower, more tactile way of expressing ourselves may come at a significant cost, according to a growing body of research that's uncovering the surprising cognitive benefits of taking pen to paper, or even stylus to iPad — for both children and adults.

In kids, studies show that tracing out ABCs, as opposed to typing them, leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall of words, laying down the foundations of literacy and learning. In adults, taking notes by hand during a lecture, instead of typing, can lead to better conceptual understanding of material.

"There's actually some very important things going on during the embodied experience of writing by hand," says Ramesh Balasubramaniam, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Merced. "It has important cognitive benefits."

While those benefits have long been recognized by some (for instance, many authors, including Jennifer Egan and Neil Gaiman, draft their stories by hand to stoke creativity), scientists have only recently started investigating why writing by hand has these effects.

A slew of recent brain imaging research suggests handwriting's power stems from the relative complexity of the process and how it forces different brain systems to work together to reproduce the shapes of letters in our heads onto the page.

                                                                                                      Ivan-balvan / Getty Images/iStockphoto

Your brain on handwriting

Both handwriting and typing involve moving our hands and fingers to create words on a page. But handwriting, it turns out, requires a lot more fine-tuned coordination between the motor and visual systems. This seems to more deeply engage the brain in ways that support learning.

"Handwriting is probably among the most complex motor skills that the brain is capable of," says Marieke Longcamp, a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille Université.

Gripping a pen nimbly enough to write is a complicated task, as it requires your brain to continuously monitor the pressure that each finger exerts on the pen. Then, your motor system has to delicately modify that pressure to re-create each letter of the words in your head on the page.

"Your fingers have to each do something different to produce a recognizable letter," says Sophia Vinci-Booher, an educational neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University. Adding to the complexity, your visual system must continuously process that letter as it's formed. With each stroke, your brain compares the unfolding script with mental models of the letters and words, making adjustments to fingers in real time to create the letters' shapes, says Vinci-Booher.

That's not true for typing.

To type "tap" your fingers don't have to trace out the form of the letters — they just make three relatively simple and uniform movements. In comparison, it takes a lot more brainpower, as well as cross-talk between brain areas, to write than type.

Recent brain imaging studies bolster this idea. A study published in January found that when students write by hand, brain areas involved in motor and visual information processing "sync up" with areas crucial to memory formation, firing at frequencies associated with learning.

"We don't see that [synchronized activity] in typewriting at all," says Audrey van der Meer, a psychologist and study co-author at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She suggests that writing by hand is a neurobiologically richer process and that this richness may confer some cognitive benefits.

Other experts agree. "There seems to be something fundamental about engaging your body to produce these shapes," says Robert Wiley, a cognitive psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "It lets you make associations between your body and what you're seeing and hearing," he says, which might give the mind more footholds for accessing a given concept or idea.

Those extra footholds are especially important for learning in kids, but they may give adults a leg up too. Wiley and others worry that ditching handwriting for typing could have serious consequences for how we all learn and think.

What might be lost as handwriting wanes

The clearest consequence of screens and keyboards replacing pen and paper might be on kids' ability to learn the building blocks of literacy — letters.

"Letter recognition in early childhood is actually one of the best predictors of later reading and math attainment," says Vinci-Booher. Her work suggests the process of learning to write letters by hand is crucial for learning to read them.

"When kids write letters, they're just messy," she says. As kids practice writing "A," each iteration is different, and that variability helps solidify their conceptual understanding of the letter.

Research suggests kids learn to recognize letters better when seeing variable handwritten examples, compared with uniform typed examples.

This helps develop areas of the brain used during reading in older children and adults, Vinci-Booher found.

"This could be one of the ways that early experiences actually translate to long-term life outcomes," she says. "These visually demanding, fine motor actions bake in neural communication patterns that are really important for learning later on."

Ditching handwriting instruction could mean that those skills don't get developed as well, which could impair kids' ability to learn down the road.

"If young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won't reach their full potential," says van der Meer. "It's scary to think of the potential consequences."

Many states are trying to avoid these risks by mandating cursive instruction. This year, California started requiring elementary school students to learn cursive, and similar bills are moving through state legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin. (So far, evidence suggests that it's the writing by hand that matters, not whether it's print or cursive.)

Slowing down and processing information

For adults, one of the main benefits of writing by hand is that it simply forces us to slow down.

During a meeting or lecture, it's possible to type what you're hearing verbatim. But often, "you're not actually processing that information — you're just typing in the blind," says van der Meer. "If you take notes by hand, you can't write everything down," she says.

The relative slowness of the medium forces you to process the information, writing key words or phrases and using drawing or arrows to work through ideas, she says. "You make the information your own," she says, which helps it stick in the brain.

Such connections and integration are still possible when typing, but they need to be made more intentionally. And sometimes, efficiency wins out. "When you're writing a long essay, it's obviously much more practical to use a keyboard," says van der Meer.

Still, given our long history of using our hands to mark meaning in the world, some scientists worry about the more diffuse consequences of offloading our thinking to computers.

"We're foisting a lot of our knowledge, extending our cognition, to other devices, so it's only natural that we've started using these other agents to do our writing for us," says Balasubramaniam.

It's possible that this might free up our minds to do other kinds of hard thinking, he says. Or we might be sacrificing a fundamental process that's crucial for the kinds of immersive cognitive experiences that enable us to learn and think at our full potential.

Balasubramaniam stresses, however, that we don't have to ditch digital tools to harness the power of handwriting. So far, research suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as etching ink on paper. It's the movement that counts, he says, not its final form.

Jonathan Lambert is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist who covers science, health and policy.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/05/11/why-writing-by-hand-beats-typing-for-thinking-and-learning/

Nicola Sturgeon to write ‘deeply personal and revealing’ memoir of her political career

From msn.com

Nicola Sturgeon is writing a “deeply personal” memoir which she says will cover her career in politics, detailing her proudest moment and her biggest regrets.

Pan Macmillan said it has secured the British and Commonwealth rights to the former Scottish first minister’s memoirs following a “hotly contested” nine-publisher auction.

The as-yet-untitled book “will chart how she went from being a shy child from a working-class family in Ayrshire to the steps of Bute House”, the publisher said.

It will touch on many important political events, including the Scottish independence referendum, Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic.

Pan Macmillan’s announcement said: “The result will be a deeply personal and revealing memoir from one of Britain’s most significant political leaders of recent times.”

The book is expected to be published in 2025 and will be available in hardback, ebook and as an audiobook.

                                                                                            (Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty)

Ms Sturgeon said: “I have loved my life in politics but ever since I was a child, I have harboured an ambition to write. Embarking on this book is therefore exciting, if also daunting.

“I aim to chronicle key events of the past three decades of Scottish and British politics and take the reader behind the scenes to describe how it felt to be ‘in the room’, who else was there, the relationships involved and how decisions were arrived at.

“I will talk about what I am proud of and be frank about my regrets. I will reflect on the challenges of being a woman in politics and reveal more about the person behind the politician.

“I will also draw on my 35 years of experience to offer some thoughts on the future of Scotland, the UK and democracy in general.”

Mike Harpley, Pan Macmillan’s non-fiction publishing director, added: “As well as spending her career in frontline politics, Nicola is a lifelong avid reader, lover of literature and a keen supporter of bookshops and the wider book trade.

“As a result, it is no surprise that the extracts she has already written are notable for their wit, honesty, and excellent writing. We are very much looking forward to working with her on this book.”

Ms Sturgeon is an avid reader who has often spoken of her desire to write something herself. During an appearance at a book festival in 2018, she revealed she had started keeping a diary of her time as first minister.

She said at the time she tried to make an entry “every day” and hinted that they could form the basis of a book later. She also said she would “love” to write a novel, but added: “I’m not sure I’ve got it in me.”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/nicola-sturgeon-to-write-deeply-personal-and-revealing-memoir-of-her-political-career/ar-AA1f0izL?apiversion=v2&noservercache=1&domshim=1&renderwebcomponents=1&wcseo=1&batchservertelemetry=1&noservertelemetry=1 

What we learn about Kafka from his uncensored diaries

From theguardian.com

On the centenary of his death, a new English translation of the great writer’s journals reveals some surprising details 

After his death on 3 June 1924, a letter was found in Franz Kafka’s office in Prague addressed to Max Brod. “Dear Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.”

His friend did not honour Kafka’s wishes. “Brod was unshakably convinced of their immeasurable value to contemporary and future humanity, and he was right,” says Ross Benjamin, whose new translation of the Czech writer’s diaries is published in this centenary year of Kafka’s death.

Two months after Kafka died, Brod signed an agreement to publish his friend’s novels. The Trial came out in in April 1925, The Castle in 1926 and Amerika in 1927. The title of the last of these was Brod’s not Kafka’s: in a 1915 diary entry, Kafka had called the novel Der Verschollene (The Missing Person).

Brod later edited a bowdlerised edition of Kafka’s diaries that, for the best part of a century, has been the basis of German editions and the English translation which, overseen by Hannah Arendt, appeared in 1949. Brod removed passages with homoerotic undertones, put a blue pencil through passages about brothel visits, excised unkind descriptions of Kafka’s fiancee, and elided sslurs on those still living, not least Brod himself.

“Kafka’s worldwide reception was shaped by a misrepresentation of what he had actually written,” writes Benjamin in his translator’s preface.

Instead, he reveals Kafka warts and all – as a sexual, troubled, sometimes self-loathing, literary experimenter – and a man more knowingly compromised than Brod thought it proper for his readers to meet.

Here are some of the fresh details that can add to our understanding of the author of Metamorphosis.

Dabbling in nudism

During a stay at a nudist sanatorium, Kafka notes that he stands out among the naked men by keeping his swimming trunks on. “I’m known as the man with the swimming trunks”. Finally, he ditched even those in order to be sketched, writing an entry that Brod trimmed: “Served as a model for Dr Schiller. Without swimming trunks. Exhibitionist experience.” Such modesty, Benjamin surmises, might have been because of shyness, or to do with being circumcised, but not because of the thesis advanced in Alan Bennett’s play Kafka’s Dick, that he had a small penis. Benjamin says: “He writes a lot about his body and his discomfort with his body (unusually tall for the time period, not an ounce of fat, etc) but not about his penis.”

Homoerotic observations

At the same nudist sanatorium, Kafka described “2 beautiful Swedish boys with long legs, which are so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them”. Brod rendered the passage thus: “Two handsome Swedish boys with long legs.” And then there is this, Kafka’s description of a fellow train passenger, that Brod saw fit to delete: “His apparently sizeable member makes a large bulge in his pants [ie trousers].” For all that, it’s not yet the moment to dust off those “Uncensored diaries reveal gay Kafka” headlines, counsels Benjamin: “Perhaps the most that such passages tell us is that Kafka was capable of admiring and – at least imaginatively – desiring male bodies.”

          Photo of Franz Kafka on his grave at the New Jewish Cemetery, Prague. Photograph: Radim Beznoska/Alamy

Brothel talk

During one visit, Kafka noted a girl by the door, “whose scowling face is Spanish, whose putting her hands on her hips is Spanish and who stretches in a bodice-like dress of prophylactic silk. Hair runs thickly from her navel to her private parts.” Brod omitted the last sentence, which perhaps says more about his than Kafka’s erotic compunctions.

In a later entry, Kafka is among congregants at Prague’s Altneu synagogue on the evening of Yom Kippur when he notices the family of the owner of the brothel he visited a few days earlier. Brod’s editing of this entry – losing the name of the brothel – distorts Kafka’s meaning. “Where Kafka unflinchingly implicated himself in the impurity and false piety he found in the synagogue, “ says Benjamin, “the retouched text portrays Kafka was judging the other congregants from a loftier, less compromised position.”

Internalised antisemitism

Between 1911 and 1912, Kafka attended more than 20 performances by a travelling Yiddish theatre troupe, befriending one of the actors, Jizchak Löwy. In this, Kafka stood out against the prejudice of assimilated German-speaking Jewish bourgeoisie like his father towards impoverished, Yiddish-speaking Jews from the east. One diary entry Brod excised reads: “Löwy – My father about him: He who lies down in bed with dogs gets up with bugs.” Benjamin points out that such antisemitic tropes to do with hygiene, insect infection not to mention comparisons with animals, resurface in Kafka’s fiction. Hence Gregor Samsa waking up as a giant insect in Metamorphosis.

Brod cut another entry in which Kafka implicates himself in his father’s prejudices “L. confessed his gonorrhoea to me; then my hair touched his when I leaned toward his head, I grew frightened due to at least the possibility of lice.”

Contempt for his fiancee

“If F. has the same repugnance for me as I do, then a marriage is impossible,” wrote Kafka in an entry Benjamin has reinstated. The woman in question, Felice Bauer was twice engaged to Kafka before he, suffering symptoms from the tuberculosis that would kill him, broke it off with her in 1917. Brod kept many disobliging diary entries about Bauer, such as this one: “Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Bare throat. A blouse thrown on. Looked very domestic in her dress although, as it turned out, she by no means was. (I alienate myself from her a little by inspecting her so closely ...) Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin.” However, he cut one passage in which Kafka said she looked like a maid.

Workplace ennui

One day while working at the Accident Insurance Institute, Kafka found himself struggling to find a word for a bureaucratic report. In the diary he wrote: “At last I have the word ‘stigmatise’ and the sentence that goes with it, but still hold everything in my mouth with a feeling of disgust and shame as if it were raw meat, cut out of my own flesh (so much effort has it cost me). At last I say it, but retain the great horror that everything in me is ready for a literary work and such a work would be a heavenly dissolution and a real coming alive for me, while here in the office for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body capable of such happiness of a piece of its flesh as being like robbing his body of a piece of its flesh.”

What is Kafka up to in this suppressed passage? “He’s self-dramatising, perhaps with some degree of comic hyperbole,” says Benjamin, “and at the same time elaborating on an image that becomes part of his literary repertoire, the poetics of (often tortured and butchered) corporeality we find throughout his work.”

The literary process

Brod removed Kafka’s first great short story, The Judgment, from the diaries. This tale reverses the natural order by having a toothless, decrepit father throwing off his bedclothes and sentencing his son to death. Benjamin reinstates the story, which now sits alongside an entry expressing Kafka’s elation at writing it in a single sitting on 22 September 1912. It represented for him “the total opening of body and soul,” in which “the story evolved as a true birth, covered with filth and slime.”

Where Brod was convinced the function of a diary was therapeutic, involving the expulsion of the intolerable on to paper (“When you keep a diary you usually put down only what is oppressive or irritating,” he wrote in his postscript). Benjamin reckons Kafka was doing something more literary. It was “one of the places where he transformed what he called “the tremendous world I have in my head” into literature.

Brod’s vanity

“Although I have used the blue pencil in the case of attacks on people still alive, I have not considered this sort of censorship necessary in the little that Kafka has to say against myself,” wrote Brod in his postscript to his edition of the diaries. But a passage reinstated by Benjamin reveals otherwise. Kafka noted that a Berlin reviewer called the novelist Franz Werfel “far more significant” than Brod, and that Brod “had to strike out this sentence before he brought the review to the Prager Tagblatt [a Prague daily newspaper] to have it reprinted.” None of this appears in Brod’s edition.

Finally, I asked Ross Benjamin what he would have done if he had been Max Brod. He says he wouldn’t have burned anything either, and adds that Kafka had put his great friend in “a terrible bind”. “He knew the friend he was instructing to do this was the person least likely to be able to bring himself to do it,” says Benjamin. “From the time they met as university students, Brod had recognised his genius, championed his work, prodded him to publish against his own resistance, and been instrumental in the publication and promotion of his work while he was alive. And so giving Brod this task could be seen as a crowning act of ambivalence by the genius of ambivalence we know Kafka to have been.” Just possibly, Kafka made his request knowing it would go unhonoured.

 The Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin, is published by Penguin Classics (£24).

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/may/01/what-we-learn-about-kafka-from-his-uncensored-diaries