As we saw from Dylan’s blog last week, journaling can provide you with many benefits and allows you space to contemplate your life and the things around you. Journaling can help you think about or work through the things on your mind, unexamined feelings, the events of your life, and ideals and goals that you strive for. You can also use the space journaling provides to jot down and explore ideas, find possible solutions to problems, streamline scheduling, or hold brainstorming sessions. 

So for this week’s blog, I’d like to further outline different ideas on how to journal. Naturally, journaling is a very subjective thing and how you go about it is as unique as you are.There is no right or wrong way to journal. You just have to find what works best for you. Even so, sometimes people are hesitant to start journaling. Maybe they don’t know what to write or feel like they’re feelings aren’t worth writing down. Others might feel like journaling is pointless because it doesn’t seem to be doing anything for them in their daily lives. But, if you’re interested in journaling, are looking to be more consistent with it, or are looking to get more out of it, then here are some possible journaling ideas to incorporate into your routine.

20 Ways to Journal

1)      Diary – journaling can be used to keep a record of what’s going on in your life. This style usually follows regular writing conventions. Write about your day, how you’re feeling, and what you’re planning in a narrative structure.

2)      Free-form Journaling– like the name suggests, this style can be whatever you want it to be. You don’t need to follow classic writing conventions or have a subject to write about beforehand, you just need to write what comes to mind. A well-known example of this kind of writing is the “morning pages” exercise as popularized in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Using this style can help you to bring forth creative ideas that you might normally overlook and help you to identify things that you might be holding onto subconsciously.

3)      Contextual Journaling – as described by Jared Henderson, this type of journaling consists of 4 paragraphs: one for writing about the events of the day, one about something that went well that day, one for something that went poorly that day, and, lastly, a fourth paragraph acting as a place to try to reflect on how these events fit into the larger narrative of your life. Following the structure can help you to reflect on your day while also helping you to remain accountable to the larger themes and goals of your life. Following the simple structure of this method can help those who might not be confident with journaling yet.

4)      Gratitude Journaling – keeping a journal of things you are grateful for can help you to acknowledge and appreciate life by bringing attention to the things that make it worth living.  Working to notice these things can also help to inspire you to grow to be the person that you want to be and bring more of those things into the world. This type of journaling can also be used for other virtues you want to work on, appreciate, acknowledge, and confirm and can help you be more mindful.

5)      Line a Day Journaling – a short-form format popular for use in planners with limited writing space that helps you to record the events of the day. Typically, it is recommended that entries are half what you did and half how you felt.

6)      Inspirational Journaling – a record of things that you find inspiring. From quotes to inspiring stories or conversations, having a record of and frequently referring to what you find inspiring can be helpful for motivation and guidance.

7)      Goal Setting Journaling – a place to write down your hopes, goals, and dreams and then plan out how to achieve them. Taking time to do concrete goal setting where you identify what is most important to you and create a map of how to get there can help to make goals more achievable. Regularly checking in with your progress and reflecting on your methods are also a must!

8)      5 Year Journaling – a unique type of journal where you write a short journal entry for every day of the year before looping back through and adding a new entry the next year until you have 5 entries for every day, completing 5 years of journaling. Journaling like this not only allows you to reflect on your adventures and growth over the 5 years but also helps you to see themes and recurring habits, thoughts, and ideas that you’ve had.

9)   Morning/Evening Reflection – a twice-a-day journal format where you take time to make space for yourself. The morning reflection offers a good time to set intentions for the day while the evening reflection gives time to reflect on how the day went before preparing for the next.

10)   Bullet Journaling – a more intensive form of journaling mainly used for organizational purposes. It is infinitely customizable and can include a variety of tools, pages, and sections to suit how you work such as calendars, habit trackers, and organizational tables. Often includes artistic elements.

11)   Commonplace Book – a historic form of journaling where interesting quotes, song lyrics, stray observations, facts, and ideas are written. Helpful in creative thinking as it brings together disparate ideas and concepts all into one place.

12)   Media/Reading Reflections Journaling – reflect on anything and everything you read, watch, or listen to. Journaling about the ideas that you come across while reading can help to better understand and remember ideas and even help to translate them into your personal life (if you so wish).

13)   Prompted or Guided Journaling – good for beginners, buying a prompted journal can help to generate a starting point of ideas for you to reflect on and write about. Not only does this help to expose you to new ideas, but it can lead to making connections with things in your own life. Some popular guided journals include The Daily Stoic and The Five Minute Journal.

14)   Daily Log – a work and progress-oriented way of journaling, this type of journaling focuses on work tasks, events surrounding them, and reflection with brief journal entries meant to boost productivity through planning and method-oriented reflection. Writing about good and poor outcomes can be used to better systems to optimize work environments and methods. Other things to incorporate might be time tracking and mood tracking graphs to see how these might affect efficiency.

15)   Brain Dump – a literal white void where you can write, draw, sketch, make a mess, and make connections. This method doesn’t even need words or complete sentences to organize your thoughts. Make each page your own to work through ideas in whatever way works best for you.

16)   Write to Your Past and Future Selves – Writing to your past and future selves can help you to reflect on growth, see resiliency, find themes in your life, and discover what’s most important to you. By writing and reflecting on your hopes and dreams from the past and the ones you hold for the future, you can better hold yourself accountable, and get excited about what you’re working on now to see how it pays off in the future.

17)   Lifestyle Journaling – a more extensive journaling method where you document events and feelings you have throughout the day. By looking at how you are feeling when, you can see what is going on and how it is affecting you. What were you doing when you were feeling your best this week? What about your worst? Looking back, you may be able to see trends and discover what’s the underlying cause to certain feelings like how eating unhealthy food makes you feel sleepy or how too much time on your phone at night leads to you waking up late. Journaling like this can help to establish better habits, get rid of things that are hurting you, and help you to keep on track for goals.

18)   Writing Letters to Others – While you don’t have to actually send these letters, taking time to examine and explain your feelings about someone in a letter can allow you to organize your thoughts and have the hard, joyous, or meaningful conversations you’ve always meant to have with them. This can help to make you feel better and possibly allow you to have the real ones someday.

19)   Journaling in Different Mediums – Journaling doesn’t have to always be in writing. It can sometimes be hard to write at the pace you think or you might feel so emotionally charged that sitting down and writing is difficult. Audio recordings and video journaling are also viable methods to get the same benefits as journaling while potentially also allowing you to express yourself in other ways that are missed in writing, such as with body language and the tone of your voice, which can express things maybe you’re not aware of as you focus on writing.

20)   Multi-purpose journaling – and of course, any of these ideas can be combined into whatever style you like. Usually, a journal will consist of several different sections for different kinds of journaling. Your journal is for you and should reflect what matters to you – you and your purpose.

We offer this list as an exploration into some (hopefully) new ideas so that you can make the most out of your practice. If there is something that interests you, try to find some more information on it! Consider trying out several forms to find out what works best for you and your aspirations. While all of them are beneficial and serve a wide range of interests, I also want to mention that journaling needs to have meaning to be effective. Sometimes it can feel easy to get lost in the habit and do it just to check a box or to feel productive. But without true reflection there can’t be real growth. Hopefully this serves as a good introductory guide to some new journaling formats whether you’re just getting interested in journaling or are looking to get more out of what you’re doing already. Hopefully this helps!