---
aliases: ["Morning Journaling Habit"]
Is A: Experiment
Belongs to: "[[24q3]]"
Status: Done
Owner: "[[person-luca-rossi]]"
---
# Morning Journaling Habit

Ran an 8-week experiment with daily morning journaling to evaluate its impact on focus, decision-making clarity, and overall stress management. This ties into the broader theme of personal operating systems: if running a content business and training for cycling events simultaneously, mental bandwidth becomes the bottleneck, and journaling is often cited as a way to decompress and prioritize.

## Hypothesis

Writing 10-15 minutes each morning (freeform, no template) would reduce decision fatigue and improve weekly [[measure-task-completion-rate]] by at least 10%, while also providing a subjective sense of reduced stress.

## Setup

- Journaled every morning for 8 weeks using a plain markdown file in the vault.
- No rigid template: some days were gratitude lists, some were brain dumps, some were planning sessions.
- Tracked adherence (did I journal today? yes/no), subjective stress rating (1-5), and weekly task completion rate.
- Weeks 1-4 were during a high-stress period (podcast launch prep for [[24q3-podcast-season-2]] and newsletter deadlines). Weeks 5-8 were calmer.

## Results

- Adherence: 85% in weeks 1-4 (high stress), dropped to 55% in weeks 5-8 (low stress).
- Subjective stress rating improved by ~0.8 points on average during weeks 1-4.
- Task completion rate showed no statistically meaningful change (too many confounding variables).
- The most useful entries were "decision journals" where a specific choice was weighed explicitly.

## Takeaways

- Morning journaling is most valuable during high-stress, high-decision-load periods. It acts as a pressure valve.
- During calm stretches, the habit felt forced and adherence dropped naturally. This is fine; it does not need to be daily forever.
- Decision journals (structured: "What am I deciding? What are the options? What do I fear?") were the highest-signal format.
- Will keep journaling as a situational tool rather than a rigid daily habit. Likely to resurface during intense project sprints like [[25q1-laputa-v1]].
- No direct impact on [[measure-task-completion-rate]], but the qualitative clarity benefit is real.
