Daily journal template with morning and evening prompts

When to use it

• A daily log you can keep up on busy days, in ten minutes or less
• Planning the day in the morning and looking back on it at night, on one page
• Tracking a writing habit alongside reading, movement and sleep
• A private journal kept as files on your own computer instead of in an app
• Building a record of the year you can reread one month at a time

How to use this template

1. Set up one file per day or one per month

   Name files year first, as in 2026-10-14.md for a day or 2026-10.md for a month, and they sort by date in any folder. A file per month makes rereading a single scroll and leaves you twelve files a year instead of 365. A file per day keeps each entry small and easy to find by date.

2. Fill in the morning half in two minutes

   Rate your mood, note your sleep and write down what's on your mind, ideally before you open email. Then choose today's three. Put the one that matters most first, so a day where only the first box gets ticked still counts.

3. Write the evening half before bed

   Facts first, then one thing you noticed, then three good things. Fill in the tracker with numbers rather than ticks, and move anything unfinished to Tomorrow. On a bad night, a sentence under What happened is enough.

4. Cut what you skip after a week

   Delete any line you left blank all week and add the one you kept writing in the margin. A page trimmed to fit your days is the one you will still be filling in by spring.

A filled-in day

Here is the template on an ordinary Tuesday. It took about two minutes at breakfast and eight before bed.

Morning plan, evening review

The two-part page is an old design. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography reproduces a page from the little book he used to work on his virtues: a schedule for the hours of the day, with a question at each end.

Between the two questions sit work, reading, meals and, last thing, "examination of the day." This template keeps that shape. Today's three is the morning question in practical form, and the evening half is the examination, written down so you can read it again in a year.

What good entries have in common

The entries worth rereading are specific. "Grateful for friends" is true on every page, so it tells you nothing about this one.

• Fix the mood scale once. Write it on the first page: 1 is a day you would rather forget, 3 is ordinary, 5 is one of the best of the year. Without anchors, a 4 in March and a 4 in July mean different things.
• Use numbers in the tracker. "1,100 words" tells you more in December than a tick does, and a month of numbers shows the pattern a month of ticks hides.
• Don't backfill missed days. Entries written from memory three days later are thin. Leave the gap, write today's and carry on.

Prompts for "What I noticed"

On days when nothing stands out, answer the prompt for the day of the week. For more, see the journal prompts list, and the gratitude journal prompts when the three good things won't come.

• Monday. What are you avoiding this week, and what is the smallest piece of it?
• Tuesday. Whose words from today are still in your head, and why those?
• Wednesday. Where did today's time actually go? Compare it with this morning's three.
• Thursday. What did you see today that you would describe to someone who wasn't there?
• Friday. What would you do differently if you got today back?
• Saturday. What did you do today only because you wanted to?
• Sunday. Reread the week. What came up more than once?

Keep your journal private

You write more plainly when you're sure nobody else will read it. Kept as files, a journal is as private as the computer it lives on. Save entries as Markdown or plain text, which any editor will open decades from now, turn on disk encryption (FileVault on a Mac, BitLocker or Device Encryption on Windows), keep the journal folder out of folders shared with other people, and back it up to an encrypted drive. That is the local-first idea in practice: no company stands between you and your own entries.

Strokes, a desktop editor for macOS and Windows, works the same way: each document is a file on your own disk, and writing and saving work offline. Paste the template into a new document for each day or month, use to-do blocks for today's three, and version history will bring back an entry you cut in a bad mood. For a gentler start with the habit itself, read how to start journaling.