Journaling

Journaling isn't just something that you do in your little unicorn book to confide all your hopes and dreams. Oh no, not in the GMing hobby, no sir! Journaling is possibly one of the most useful things I've picked up in the last few years of gaming. It's a bit of work, but it's well worth your time. There's a few benefits to it: it gets the memories out of your head and makes them more objective, it helps focus the game, and it helps pull the group together.

The first benefit's pretty obvious: memory's a shaky thing at it's best. Any actual study into the nature of memory reveals just how quickly details shift around and get lost. Writing it down allows for you to not have to focus on remembering how things went all the time and frees you up for other things, like actually running your game! All your brain power can now be focused on making your players' lives hell just a little bit more... especially if you can get your players to help you journal on their downtime in-session.

Second, since you have it all written down, you can go and reread the whole thing, which has saved me from making making many a bad decision in the story department. All groups develop an overarching narrative and it can be kinda hard to see without being able to take a step back and read the whole thing, beginning to end. It helps the GM to realize what his campaign has actually been about the whole time, pulling him out of whatever fantasy world he's living in back to the reality of the situation he and the group have made.

Journalling helps pull your group together. It helps remind the group of where they've been and gives them a sense of scope of their own campaign. Too often campaigns become the source of people just letting off steam and they forget that they're actually making a story and that their actions have consequences in-story. I've watched as players' eyes go wide with comprehension at what they themselves did, only to go and do some incredible things in response to the recount of their own actions.

There's a lot more to it than that, but those are the basics coming from someone who's only just starting to get why journalling is such a good idea. If someone's got more experience on the subject and wishes to share, please comment below!