Keeping a daily diary doesn’t come easily to most people, but it takes less effort than you might imagine. It could also become a meaningful way to reflect and grow as a person.
For more than 10 years, I’ve written a few words every morning, and what I’ve learned from this practice has changed my life. My only regret is not starting sooner.
If you’re interested in adding a daily journaling practice to your life, these tips and tools can help you not only get started, but also stick with it.
Why Keep a Journal or Diary?
My diary is a tool for clearing out my thoughts, recording details of my life that are sometimes useful to know later, and reflecting. The value in reflecting, however, only became apparent after I’d been writing for several years and could look back on my life to see it from a different perspective.
I’ve always been very hard on myself. I don’t make excuses, and I look upon my failures with consternation. Whenever I’ve gone back and read a series of diary entries from low points in my life, I’ve been able to view them with an outsider’s perspective. I can see more clearly just how tough things were, or how many things went wrong at once, or the gravity of a single event that I might have downplayed in the moment. This reflection has led me to be more compassionate toward myself—and toward others. I have learned to cut myself some slack.
You might discover something else, whether a pattern of behavior or something you want to change. Or maybe with hindsight you realize the things you thought you wanted to change don’t need changing at all. Journaling sheds light on all these things.
Memory is fickle. The personal self-reflection that we do entirely in our heads differs wildly from what we can do with notes. In short, that’s why I’ve kept up my daily writing for more than 10 years.
What Should You Write in Your Journal?
Start every diary entry with the date and your location. Why bother if your computer or phone can add them automatically? A few reasons. First, you will never stare at a blank page, and you will always know how to start. Second, metadata can get bungled over time or during file transfers, so it’s more reliable to add them manually. Third, typing the date and location into the diary entry itself ensures that those very important pieces of information are searchable.
What else should you write? A diary entry can be a simple brain dump. That’s what I do. Other things worth mentioning are major events, strong emotions, and hopes and dreams.
If following a method helps, you could try gratitude journaling. Some parents I know ask their kids at the end of the day to reflect on their “rose, thorn, bud“—one highlight from the day, one difficulty, and something they’re looking forward to—which is an equally good diary formula.
How to Make It a Habit
The best trick I have for forming a new habit is to tie it to an existing one. Find a habit that you already have and combine it with a few minutes of daily writing.
I journal every morning as soon as I have coffee in front of me. My coffee-making routine is non-negotiable, immovable, set in stone, seven days a week. Even when I stay in a hotel, I bring a travel coffee maker with me, and I write in my diary while drinking the coffee.
As a backstop, I also have a recurring task in my to-do list for 8:45 every morning that tells me to journal. In the event that I got distracted while I was drinking my coffee, a notification appears on my phone to remind me to write.
App or Paper?
Should you use an app or paper? It’s a matter of personal preference. The most important thing is you choose something that you will use. If you love paper notebooks, use them.
That said, digital journals have several benefits. For one, you can back up your writing so it will be safe in the event of a fire, flood, or other catastrophe. Paper gets destroyed easily. Another benefit is you can type on a keyboard or on your phone, dictate with your voice, and add multimedia, like photos and links. Password-protection and encryption options prevent snoops from reading your digital diaries. You can choose to keep them locked forever after you die or hand over the password after death. Finally, digital diaries are searchable. If you want to revisit something from your past, all you need to do is type in a few keywords or jump to a date.
If you’re convinced of the superiority of electronic files but prefer writing by hand, use a digital notebook.
Which Journaling Apps Are Best?
Although I’m enthusiastic about keeping a diary, I don’t recommend journaling apps. Their prompts and suggestions make journaling needlessly complicated and get in the way of you writing.
What I recommend instead is using a note-taking app that works on all your devices. Note-taking apps typically have options to save to simple formats, such as .txt, .rtf, .md, which helps future-proof your files. In other words, if the app you use is discontinued, you can export your journals to one of these tried-and-true file types and import them elsewhere without much hassle.
I use an open-source app called Joplin, and I bring my own storage. Formerly, I used Evernote, but I didn’t like the direction it was taking and transferred all my files to Joplin easily enough. Other perfectly good note-taking apps are Microsoft OneNote, Simplenote, Obsidian, among others.
If journaling apps work for you, by all means use them! Apple’s Journal app certainly is convenient, and so is Google’s Journal, though it’s only available on select devices. For my taste, however, they’re too much like scrapbooks, always asking if you want to add photos or recorded activities (like a run), or answer a writing prompt. You don’t need all that. It’s clutter. Just write what’s on your mind or what you did yesterday, even if it’s only a few sentences. Pretty soon, you’ll get the hang of it. It might even change your life.
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