Here’s a weird but effective tip for handling bad days at work – write stuff down.

Let me explain.

In 2013 I downloaded an app called Day One – it is a journaling app that allowed me write a few lines about my day talking about what happened and what I did. Day One even let me add pictures to each entry which was a feature I didn’t know I needed at the time.

I wasn’t very serious with the app at the start. I missed weeks. Months, even. If something monumental happened, I’d write it down, but in those early years I mostly forgot about it.

But then one day a few years later, I got an “On This Day” notification, where the app showed me what I had been doing on that day a year ago.

It blew my mind.

It was like a window into the past, reading about some long forgotten event that had bothered me so much at the time. The hindsight was like a spotlight in my brain.

So, I started making entries everyday.

On some days I’d be too tired to do anything more than add a few pictures and put down some lines about work and meetings. Those were the okay posts.

But it’s the other entries that changed everything for me.

As the years passed, the app sketched out my life in vibrant detail. I saw my kids grow up. I saw my Dad pass on. I saw entries where I was really excited about a particular business opportunity and not so much another…only to find out that it was the one I didn’t care for that would turn out to be the profitable one.

But most helpful of all, I saw entries of myself at my lowest, dealing with self doubt and imposter syndrome wondering where my entire career was headed.

In one entry that still makes me smile to this day, I had written “Oje from the future, I hope you’re reading this and grinning because we beat this problem.”

Sometimes you have no idea how much you’ve learnt. It’s like staring at a plant. It looks like it’s just there, not changing, nothing happening. But when you mark its height and come back in a few weeks, you’ll see it’s growing faster than you can imagine.

Understanding your growth is important because you can acknowledge your value. – both to yourself and to potential business partners. If you think you don’t know a lot you will probably not bill a lot.

Sometimes, my partner in crime Idiare will send me a screenshot of his Day One app from a particularly dire day at the office. I will in response, send MY screenshot of the same day and we will both laugh at how different our approaches were to the same issue – and how it seemed so daunting at the time.

My current streak in the app is 1,978 days recorded back to back. It has given me perspective on dealing with bad days and perseverance.

If you don’t write, I encourage you to try. Let today be your day one.