Bad Time Log
This is a small, quite simple, yet powerful technique I love.
I encountered it as “bad time journal”, or negativity journal, from Arthur C. Brooks. Somehow I prefer calling this a log, but maybe that’s just my background.
I personally LOVE journaling, and it keeps me somewhat saner.
In the past, I spent some time with the prompt “what can’t I do without”, following the idea that
“perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Pen and paper” ended up in that list, meaning that I go somewhat weird if I cannot jot down ideas.1
For me, journaling is a way to:
- keep track of where I am and what I am doing and what needs to be done
- go deeper on some topics, explore, expand, get some clarity
- keeping track of something
probably much more, but for now...
This is a technique about keeping track.
Something bad happens
Generally when something bad happens, well, we feel bad.
Shocking, I know. Citation needed.
Some of us tend to have the tendency to catastrophize, and in any case, bad things are bad.
Only, we often don’t know for sure.
We do not really know for sure what happens next.
Photo by Christine Mendoza on Unsplash
There is a Taoist parable (Huainanzi, 2nd century BCE), often retold in English by Alan Watts, that goes more or less like this:
A Chinese farmer’s horse runs away. The neighbors say, “Terrible luck.” The farmer says, “Maybe.” The next day the horse returns, bringing several wild horses. The neighbors say, “Amazing luck!” The farmer says, “Maybe.” The farmer’s son tries to ride one of the wild horses, falls, and breaks his leg. The neighbors say, “Terrible luck.” The farmer says, “Maybe.” Soon after, conscription officers come to draft young men. They pass over the son because of his broken leg. The neighbors say, “Amazing luck!” The farmer says, “Maybe.”
Enter the bad time log.
The score is simple:
Photo by Andres Molina on Unsplash
when something bad happens, write it down with the date.
Write how you feel, what you think will happen, why it is bad, whatever comes up.
Then set 2 reminders: one after 1 month, one after 6 months.
after one month, revisit the event.
Write down what you learned, what happened then, how you feel about it now.
Is it its effect still present? Is it still bad?
revisit it after 6 months
Write down any good thing that came from it. Also what else you learned?
Does it still hurt? Is it still bad?
That’s it.
Like almost all simple practices (gratitude journal, noting meditation, any sort of Mindfulness, grounding practices, etc), you have to do it.
I mean, that is the point of it being a practice: you need to practically do it.
We have a tendency to forget how we felt about something, and how many things happened, felt bad... and just disappeared, or ended up being blessings in disguise.2 3
Give it a try.
If you are really impatient, like I was the first time I heard about it: go back in your calendar (or journal, if you keep one) and write down bad things that happened, that felt like a big deal at the time.
See if they still are 1 and 6 months later.
(It is not the same, but hey, it works like now)
Why this?
Because most bad things are not so bad.
Because most bad things disappear leaving very little trace. And lots of them either teach us a lesson, or end up being blessings in disguise.
(And some just suck, really, I get it)
It is easy to forget about it, and also think “this time is different”.
Keeping a log helps us remember it. If we do it for long enough, we end up almost getting curious when something bad happens. At least, we start looking forward writing it down, to see what happens.
It feels good re-reading it, after a while.
And it helps us developing some perspective.
I promise.
If you want to discuss this, or anything else, come to the Parts Work Unconference.
We are almost sure you will not have to add “attending the unconference” to your bad times log, but missing it could deserve an entry.
Just saying.
1 It is possible I am one of the few people that, when selecting a possible meditation retreat, will explicitly check “am I allowed to take notes and write?”. Let’s say that if I am not allowed to externalize my thoughts, they tend to circle and become ruminations, and leave it at that. It’s one of the reasons I started organizing peer to peer retreats. Also not waking up at 4am, and sleeping more than 6h per night.
2 Of course, you can probably think about plenty of stuff happened more than 6 months ago that are still bad, and still hurt. For sure. It is just that you do not need a practice to notice those, they happen on their own.
3 (it also makes me think about proposing to keep a gratitude practice to a family member going through a bad time. “Can I keep a grudge journal instead?”, at the time I asked her not to, and just thought “you do it already, all the time”. This is a form of a grudge journal, with a twist)