After a long pause, I’m finally making my return to journalling.
I was quite intrigued by an idea I read from the Harvard Business Review. The article was entitled, “The More Senior Your Job Title, The More You Need to Keep a Journal” by Dan Ciampa. In that article, Ciampa wrote about how the pace of work increases the higher one rises in one’s career. This means having less time to process information, and less time and space to reflect about our actions and to learn from these events.
It is only when we slow things down to reflect that we can approach problems with greater clarity that puts things in perspective, but also a chance to approach them with greater creativity. It can be very difficult to be creative or even effective when we are not given enough time to think and strategise.
This article resonated a lot with me. In many ways, a career feels a lot like a game of Tetris. The better you are at the game, the more challenging the game gets – pieces fly down at a much faster rate. Work too is like this. The better you are, the more work comes flying at you at a faster pace. (And the name of the game is to clear those blocks of work before you get drowned in them)
Just as how I enjoy the challenge of Tetris, I enjoy the challenge of work. But the pace has been increasing and the days just fly past me like a blur. And just as how it’s hard to put down the controller when one is at a really high level of Tetris, I realise it’s been hard to take a pause with work as well.
Nonetheless, this article has been bugging me at the back of my mind for months. It made me quite painfully aware of how little time I have been giving myself to breathe and think about things, or to recollect and learn from my many actions – whether they are successes or failures, both of which I have accumulated many in the past year alone.
To be clear, it’s not that I have not been learning at all. Rather, I have not had the chance to really digest many of the insights I’ve gained in the past months in ways that should impact me more than they should.
I think one of the negative consequences of not having enough time for myself to think is that I forget things more easily. It’s funny how stress makes one forgetful, and discovering that my memory is not as strong as before is even more distressing.
Nonetheless, I definitely do not want to lose any of the valuable life lessons and insights I have accumulated over the course of my work as an educator and philosopher. If anything, my interactions with students has been the greatest source of learning for me – especially to the question of what it means to be human and humane.
Well, the academic year has ended, so at least I now have some time to recover and breathe. So I’m hoping that I can instil this exercise of journalling as a regular habit.
Jonathan Y. H. Sim 