How to start journaling (and keep going)

To start journaling, decide what the journal is for, pick one format that suits that purpose, and set a minimum you can meet on your worst day: three sentences or five minutes. Attach the writing to something you already do daily, like the first coffee or getting into bed, and write the first entry today instead of waiting for Monday or a new notebook. Keeping it going comes down to what you do after you miss a day. Write one line and carry on.

Decide what the journal is for

Most new journals stall because they are trying to do four jobs at once. Before you buy a notebook or install anything, finish the sentence "I'm keeping this journal to…" The answer usually lands in one of these groups:

• Remember. A record of what happened: where you went, what people said, what your kids were like at four. Short, factual, same-day entries.
• Think. A place to work out a decision before you say it out loud. Longer, messier, read by nobody else.
• Practice. Writing more, and more easily. Page counts and timers beat questions here.
• Track a project. A book, a race, a kitchen renovation: what you did, what got stuck, what comes next.

A journal is also raw material. Memoirists go back to theirs for dates and dialogue they would otherwise misremember (see how to write a memoir), and Bram Stoker told most of Dracula through his characters' journals and letters, the form called the epistolary novel.

Choose a journaling format

Pick one format for the first month. You can change it later, but switching every week means you never learn whether any of them works for you.

Daily log and one line a day

The daily log needs no instructions: the date, what happened, and at least one sentence about what you think of it. That last sentence is what separates a journal from a calendar. One line a day cuts it to a single sentence. Printed five-year journals give each date one page with five short spaces, so every line sits above the same day last year.

Prompted entries and morning pages

A prompted journal asks the same few questions every day, so you never face a blank page. Three cover most days: What happened? What did I notice? What's next? Morning pages, from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, go the other way: three handwritten pages first thing in the morning, stream of consciousness, about anything. They are closer to a writing practice than a record. The guide to morning pages covers the method.

Bullet journal and work journal

The Bullet Journal, a method Ryder Carroll began sharing online in 2013, is built for planning. Each day is a log of short lines marked with symbols, and unfinished tasks migrate forward to a new list. It keeps track well and reflects little, so many people add a few lines of prose under the day's log.

Oct 14
•  Send chapter 9 to Priya
×  Renew library card
>  Book April flights (moved to Thursday)
○  Writing group, 7 pm
–  Priya: the opening drags until page 4

A work journal is the writer's version. While drafting East of Eden in 1951, John Steinbeck wrote a daily letter to his editor, Pascal Covici, on the left-hand pages of a notebook as a warm-up, and the novel on the right. The letters were never sent and came out after his death as Journal of a Novel. A few lines on where you stopped and what you'll do now is enough.

A commonplace book collects other people's sentences, grouped by subject instead of date. John Locke wrote a method for indexing one, published in English in 1706. For a journal with one subject, start from the reading journal, travel journal or dream journal.

Paper, app or plain files

The best medium is the one within reach at the moment you've chosen to write. Past that, the differences are search, privacy and how long the journal stays readable.

If you choose files, favor plain text or Markdown: a .txt or .md file written today will open in whatever editor exists in thirty years, which no single app can promise. Name files year first, as in 2026-10-14.md or one file per month like 2026-10.md, and they sort in date order in any folder.

Start this week, step by step

1. Write the purpose on the first page

   One line: "to remember this year with the kids" or "to log the novel." When the habit sags in March, it tells you whether to change the format or let the journal go.

2. Choose one format and one place

   If nothing in the table stands out, start a daily log in whatever you already carry: the notebook in your bag or one file on your desktop.

3. Attach it to something you already do

   "After I pour the first coffee" survives a late start, and "7:15 a.m." does not. Keep the journal where the trigger happens, open, with a pen on it. BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits method rests on the same idea: make the new behavior small and anchor it to a routine you already have.

4. Set a floor, not a goal

   Three sentences or five minutes, whichever comes first. Good days run longer on their own. The floor is for the days you're tired, traveling or sick of your own thoughts.

5. Write the first entry today

   Not on Monday, not on January 1, not when the nice notebook arrives. Answer the three questions and stop.

6. Book a review for day 30

   Put fifteen minutes in your calendar a month out. Reread, then keep the format, change it, or move the time.

If a first entry feels like it ought to be important, look at how Samuel Pepys opened the diary he kept through the 1660s. He took stock: his health, his home, his household, the politics of the moment and his money ("esteemed rich, but indeed very poor"). A status report gives every later entry something to be measured against.

Prompts for blank pages

For days the three questions feel stale, pick one of these, set a five-minute timer and stop when it rings. There are more in the journal prompts list and the gratitude journal prompts.

For an ordinary day

• What took longer than it should have, and why?
• What did someone say today that you're still turning over?
• Describe one room you were in today using only what you heard.
• What do you know tonight that you didn't know at breakfast?
• What are you putting off, and what is the smallest piece of it?

For the end of the week

• What would you do again, and what would you skip?
• Which plan changed, and was the new version better?
• What from this week do you want to remember in ten years?

For writers

• Write the scene you're avoiding as a bad five-sentence summary.
• Copy a sentence you read this week that you wish you'd written, then explain how it works.
• What does your main character want today that you haven't given them?
• What's the next fix in the draft, and what is actually stopping you?

For when nothing comes

• Begin with "I don't know what to write, but" and finish three sentences.
• List ten things within arm's reach, then write about the oldest one.

How to keep going

The first two weeks run on novelty. After that, it's the floor, the trigger and how you handle missed days.

A missed day resets nothing

In a study published in 2009, Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London followed 96 volunteers building a daily habit. The time until it felt automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days, and missing a single day did not meaningfully affect the process. So don't backfill: catch-up entries written from memory are thin, and the debt makes quitting tempting. Do try not to miss two days running, since two misses start to look like a routine. After a gap, write one line about it ("Nine days off. The move is done.") and go on.

Reread once a month

Rereading is where a journal pays you back, and most people skip it. Once a month, read the month in one sitting and write three lines at the top: what happened, what kept coming up, what to change. After a year you have a version of the year you can read in ten minutes.

Change the format, not the habit

When entries feel like homework, keep the trigger and swap the format for a week: prompts instead of a log, one line instead of a page. The habit is the slot in your day. The format is only what goes in it.

Mistakes that stall a new journal

• A target you can only hit on good days. Thirty minutes a day is a fine result and a bad requirement.
• Writing for an imagined reader. Picture someone reading over your shoulder and you start editing. Settle privacy (below) so you can write plainly.
• Only writing on bad days. The record ends up lopsided, and rereading it paints a grimmer year than you had.
• A new tool every month. Each switch strands part of the archive somewhere you'll never look again.

Keep your journal private

You'll write more honestly once you're sure nobody else will read it.

Paper. A notebook is as private as the place you leave it, and a drawer beats a bag that travels. If you share a house, use initials for people. Photograph filled pages now and then, so one spilled coffee can't take three years with it.

Apps. Before trusting a service with years of entries, look for end-to-end encryption (the company can't read them), a passcode, and a full export to ordinary files. Check the current terms, since they change.

Files on your computer. A folder of documents is as private as your computer account. Turn on disk encryption (FileVault on a Mac, under System Settings › Privacy & Security; Device Encryption or BitLocker on Windows), lock the screen when you step away, keep the journal out of shared folders, and back it up somewhere encrypted. This is the local-first approach: the file is yours and no service stands between you and it.

Journaling in Strokes

Strokes is a desktop editor for macOS and Windows that keeps every document as a file on your own machine, which suits a journal you want private and readable for years. Writing, saving and exporting work offline.

A setup that works: one project for the journal, a folder per year, and one document per month with a heading for each day, so the monthly review is a single scroll. To-do blocks hold a short habit list under the date. Version history saves versions automatically, so an entry you cut in a bad mood comes back in one click. Export a month to PDF to print, or to EPUB for an e-reader. The AI Assistant can suggest tomorrow's questions or summarize a month you add to a chat, but AI features need a connection and send what you share to the model you pick, so use them only with entries you'd be comfortable sharing. To begin, copy the daily journal template into a new document.