Team Journaling
By Doreene Clement

www.the5yearjournal.com
info@the5yearjournall.com

The very effective tool of keeping a journal, diary, or diaries, could be used in your workplace as well as at home. It is a powerful tool that might enhance our lives and support our personal and work well-being. Whether you journal your personal work experiences and goals, or use team journaling, journaling may easily be applied to your work environment.

The idea of team journaling is to include journaling as a means to assess and track past, current, or future projects and goals. To get started, pick a team moderator, the person(s) who all journaled understanding will pass through. They will coordinate and monitor the journaling process to keep it on track, and moving in the teams designated direction and purpose.

As a group decide the purpose and goals of the team journal. Then date and write those down. Next decide what vehicle you will utilize to record your journaling in. You may use a blank book, and pass it from person to person or keep it in a designated place. You might journal on the Internet via a group list, at http://www.yahoo.com, or on a web log, called a blog, see http://www.blogger.com. You can also create a private message board on your companys web page . Any of these systems allow an exchange of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and experiences of the goals and directions you have already determined.

You will want to set some boundaries that will absolutely need to be respected and adhered to during this process. Date these and write them right under your purpose and goals. For example, there should be no personal attacks regarding ideas or personalities. Keep what is a fact separate from what is a feeling. Having feelings is OK, just dont confuse what is a fact and what is a feeling. At all times agree that respectful expression and disagreement is adhered to. You might want to limit the amount of content anyone may journal at any one time, say a paragraph, or a page. Set any other project guidelines that the team decides to incorporate.

As you start your team journaling project you may find that the original purpose and desire changes or evolves. You can also find your guidelines positive need to be added to or modified. In your journaling process meeting in human or via conference might be added to update and relate how the journaling process is working or being workable toward the team wants.

Creating a series of questions related to the team target and purpose can be an efficient way to initial the journal process. These questions may focus and motivate individuals, and inspire the creative writing and thinking process. Or generating statements and asking if these are agreed to or not is another way to initial the process.

The team journal can become an integral part of any businesses process to achieve greater clarity and focus about purpose, goals and intentions. The process of team journaling also may create new relationships with the all the people involved.