Why I journal

Sometime around 2010, I went to a Founders Alliance session in Stockholm. I had studied at university in the United States before coming back to Sweden in my mid-twenties, eventually taking a PR sales job on commission only. Everyone around me advised against it, but I met Fredrik Bage there, who told me I would be good at sales. We ended up co-founding Mediapilot. By 2010, I was in the thick of growing that company. We were hiring, and I was working too many hours, convinced that sheer force of will was a sustainable management strategy. At the session, I listened to a guy named Andreas Granstedt talk about how he structured his life. I had always assumed keeping a journal, or mapping out a life plan, was for people with too much free time. I preferred to just keep moving. But Andreas showed us a system that was so entirely practical I went home and copied it. I have used it ever since.

The system is completely unglamorous. It lives in a plain document I update once a year. I divide my life into five categories: family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. Next to each category, I write down a few lines about where I currently stand, where I want to be in twelve months, and what needs to change to get there. Then I give each one a score out of ten. That is the entire process. No leather-bound notebooks, no daily morning routines, no staring out of windows trying to summon profound thoughts. I sit down, look at the five buckets, and force myself to grade them.

The brutal honesty of a number

The scoring is where the actual work happens. When you write about your life in prose, it is very easy to lie to yourself. You can write paragraphs about how your new project at work is demanding but rewarding, or how you are going to get back to playing tennis next month once things quiet down. Words give you somewhere to hide. You can pad your own reality. A number out of ten does not let you do that. If I have to look at my health score and write down a four, I have to admit that I am failing in that area. It strips away the excuses. You cannot argue with your own terrible rating.

Words give you somewhere to hide, but a number out of ten strips away the excuses.

Over the years, I have noticed a distinct pattern in how I interact with this document. I naturally avoid thinking about the category with the lowest score. During the roughly seven years Mediapilot was growing and we were creating more than 100 jobs, my work and finance scores were usually solid. Personal time, however, was terrible. By forcing myself to put a number on it annually, I could see the deficit staring back at me. It usually takes a six or lower to make me actually change my behaviour, but seeing the trend line drop is a built-in warning sign. You want to feel capable. You cannot convince yourself you have a balanced life when three out of your five categories are sitting at a five.

A map of the last decade

In 2018, we packed up and moved the family from Sweden to Marbella. We only meant to stay for two years, but we are still here. The life plan document came with me, and while the five categories remained exactly the same, the scores shifted drastically. My personal time and family scores went up as we settled into life in Spain, but figuring out the next steps in my career meant work took a temporary hit. Later, when I was working on the commercial side at Happeo, the numbers moved again. Looking back at the document now, it reads like a map of my mid-thirties and forties. It tracks the exact periods I was burnt out, the years I spent too much time on planes, and the rare stretches where I actually got the balance close to right.

What I still get wrong

I'll be honest with you. I have never scored a ten across the board. I am not even sure what that would look like. Right now, I am building Anchor to help alienated fathers, laying down infrastructure for AI builders with Substrat, doing a small amount of angel investing, managing some property, and trying to improve my terrible tennis game. Some weeks, work gets a nine and personal time gets a three. Other weeks, I manage to spend real, focused time with my kids and the work score drops. The balance is in constant motion.

The goal of this document is not to achieve perfect scores in every category simultaneously. I got this wrong for years, thinking the aim was to eventually hit fifty out of fifty and win at life. The point is simply to stop lying to yourself about what you are avoiding. If you want to put all your energy into work for a year, fine. But score your health and personal time a three, and own the choice. I haven't got this figured out entirely. I doubt I ever will. But because of this annual habit, I know exactly where I am failing, and I cannot pretend otherwise.