This article is part of a series on journaling.

In part 1, we explore The Power of Writing Things Down – what are reasons for keeping a journal, what happens when journaling, who are the people who do it and what keeps you back from trying it yourself.

In part 2, we introduce The Journaling Framework & Toolbox – examining the different elements of journaling and possible options to choose from to create your own journaling practice.

In part 3, we put it all into use to Creating Future You. We consider several ways how you can use your journal as a tool for personal development, providing the space for deep reflection and playful creation of Future You.

Before we continue, let’s squeeze in a brief definition of “journaling”. I will try to make it very simple.

Journaling is the act of writing things down for the sake of unlocking internal mental and emotional processes that would not happen if you didn’t sit and write.

Make it simple for yourself too. Don’t overthink. Don’t get distracted by the question whether it is journaling, note taking, or mind sweeping – call it as you like, as long as you sit down and write.

If you are happily journaling and have found your very own way of daily (or is it weekly or occasional?) practice, or if you have enough input to be inspired to just get started, you probably don’t need to read on. Go use your time to actually DO the journaling instead of procrastinating further through reading blog posts about the matter.

But if you have tried and kind of failed – if you have abandoned, half-empty journals, journaling apps you pay for but don’t use, some lists of tasks for ambitious projects you never really worked on, a log of completed lessons which you dumped along the way (together with the learning practice itself), if you have a glossy book with gratitude entries that stopped after you did not find anything to be grateful for in five consecutive days – then you may want to read on.

How can you find the journaling practice that supports your personal development?

The simple option: Choose what is available.

Which journaling “system” could be right for you? Which kind of practice would best support your personal development? You guessed it… it depends.

If you are looking for “a proven system” – there are plenty out there in the internet. People nerd out on the matter, producing templates, planners, systems, tutorials, lessons, courses, forming communities around journaling methods (or products, for that matter), intertwined with philosophies around productivity or mindfulness or both. It’s a tangled mess.

If you are lucky, you can choose from the abundance of options that are described by passionate people and published in books or online articles. You tweak it a little and are ready to go. This will work fine if your objectives, your preferences, your personality have a high overlap with what the existing system supports. If you want to increase your mood and well-being, you can start keeping a Gratitude Journal. If you need a systematic way to organize your life, Bullet Journaling might be the right method for you. There are plenty of options for all sorts of personal goals.

You can study a role model, an inspiring person who has achieved their goals with the help of a journal. Adopting a system that works is a good option. It could take long to find one that attracts you, though.

As many people who journal, as many methods are out there. There are teenagers chewing on their pens, reflecting on their emotions of the day, there are creatives capturing ideas on the go, there are professionals writing down plans and ambitions, there are athletes recording their preparation for an upcoming race. All this is journaling. The diverse the people, the different their methods.

Journaling is a multifunction tool which you would use based on your personality, needs, and circumstance.

You need to do some experimenting to find your own way to journaling so that you benefit from the practice. The following provides a comprehensive framework about the topic so that you can accelerate the process of finding your very own, tailor-made, custom method.

If you find out that no available method really fits your goals, that you need something else, you might go for a D.I.Y. version, creating your very personal practice.

This is what I needed when trying to get unstuck in some creative endeavors which I had procrastinated for a significant amount of time.

I went down the rabbit hole of research about what other people do – be it historical figures or contemporaries.

If you start researching about journaling as a practice to increase productivity and as a creative outlet, you find a ton of information online and in print media. Journaling is obviously useful for all kinds of purposes and all kinds of people.

If you ask yourself the WHAT-HOW-WHERE-WHY questions to figure out whether it works for you, there are a thousand answers out there.

Most material I found was approaching the topic from one specific angle or another, with personal accounts of how people use journaling for their specific objective or problem. When diving deeper, the research got kind of saturated – there was a point when reading more did not really get me any further.

Among all the “systems” promoted by their authors, there seemed to be none promising enough so that I was motivated trying them out. I had tried and tested some options before, but found them either too broad or too specific, too structured or too loose, too limiting or lacking guidance, too complicated or too “trivial”, too rigid or too free-form, too cognitive or too emotional. Some too boring, some too demanding. Some too precious, some too shabby.

I could not really find what I needed. Nothing out of the box would really fit me.

I realized that the more “complete and comprehensive” a journaling practice was, the less likely it fit my needs. This stuff is very specific, and no two people are the same.

A fact which I found frustrating at first, but then more and more fascinating. What is it about journaling that makes it a successful practice? What are the ingredients of journaling that make the difference between an abandoned practice and a life-long habit?

With this question in mind, I emerged from a state of analysis paralysis about my own journaling practice to nerd-ing out on journaling as a principle in general, curious to understand the matter more than motivated to actually practice any given system. I wanted to understand what’s the point.

Many journaling practices had some attractive element to them that struck a chord and gave me an idea of how it could probably help.

I figured out that I needed to find my own way of doing this, create my own version of a journaling practice which I could maintain over time, that gave me sufficient freedom and independence yet provided some motivation to stick to the routines.

So I set out to create my own recipe from the ingredients I had found.

In order to not waste what I learned I want to support those who want to take the short cut to their very personal journaling system.

In an attempt to support your thinking about the matter of journaling – without going down the same rabbit hole – and your decision how the practice could help you to achieve your goals, I wrote down what I learned in “a system about systems”. I call this The Journaling Playbook.

First, we deconstruct the matter into its ingredients, reverse-engineering some practices I found interesting. Second (in part 3 of the series), we explore how you could combine those practices to create your very own journaling practice.

You can consider this a guide to experimenting.

You can use this as a toolbox, a DIY kit to pick-choose-combine some elements to find your tailored, custom solution for your very personal journaling practice based on your reasons and purpose for journaling, your personal preferences, writing habits, and available time.

Or you can take it as a thinking guide, to accelerate your search for what could be useful for you.

You can use it for first-time creation of your journaling system.
Or you can also use it to evolve your existing system over time.

If you have a practice that helps you achieve your objectives, then you will evolve as a person and most probably outgrow your system someday. Some elements you won’t need any longer, others might be missing. Hence, you can use the Journaling Playbook as guidance for regular reflection of whether your journaling system still works as your objectives evolve.

In short: You can (and should) play around with the matter of journaling. As there is no one-size-fits-all way of journaling, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to find you personal system.

Hence, this is a playbook – a loose guide to do your own experimentation, based on your needs and taste.

Read on to see what I found.

What are the ingredients of Journaling? When diving deeper, I found some dimensions of journaling that – in a specific, very individual combination – are the foundations for successful journaling practices.

In a nutshell, there are major ingredients like timeline, mental state, purpose, effect and the topics or themes you are writing about.

Based on your needs and preferences, you would mix in structure, output format, writing context, level of openness, product or process orientation, intended disposal, level of realism, physical writing mode, and medium.

Some of those ingredients have heavier impact than others. You will not need them all – which leads to an overarching principle:

Let it be easy.

The simpler you can make your journaling approach, the easier it will be to maintain as a daily or regular practice.

And there is another overarching principle that cannot be stressed enough:

Only YOU-rnaling is effective and sustainable journaling.

Journaling is highly individual, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will suit everybody. Hence, be patient and confident that there will be your very own solution that might look very different from what the influencers do.

I found that the time dimension of journaling is the most important one to understand the power of writing a journal.
You could think of time in terms of time-in-the-day when you will find some quiet moments to sit down and write. This is not what I mean.

What I’m referring to is the time – in your life or even beyond – that you are writing about.
Let’s unpack this further.

Consider the timeline.

With the present, the now, in the center, this timeline expands towards the past on one side, and to the future on the other.
You will have the shorter-term past, like yesterday or last week, and the longer-term past, like your childhood or even a time before you were born.
On the other side, you have the shorter-term future, like tomorrow or next months, and there is the longer-term future like the end of your life or the time after you are gone from this earth.

Depending on the purpose and goals you want to support through journaling, considering all those timeframes may be relevant and useful to explore through writing.

How does the timeline connect to the purpose of journaling?
Before we answer this question, let us add a second dimension to the framework – the mental state

There is a cognitive bias in today’s world. To manage day-to-day and global complexity, you need technology, algorithms, data, standardization, workflows. I call this the cognification of the world.

On the other hand, humans are not machines, even though it could feel like it sometimes. The trend is reversing from going more online towards going more offline – be it in retreats, through digital detox, by sitting still in a meditation, being away in nature. There is even a trend to get away from digital photography back to analogue put-celluloid-film-in-camera products being newly launched. Let’s call this the emotification of the world.

How does this apply to journaling? Both sides are valuable.

Cognitive writing will give you data.
Emotional writing will give you meaning.

Cognitive journals: You write about your thoughts. Very likely you think while you write. Any logging or tracking has a high chance of being a cognitive way of journaling.

Emotional journals: You write about your feelings. Very likely you feel while you write. Related practices can be stream of consciousness, automated writing, or trance writing.
James W. Pennebaker has done extensive scientific work on the use of language and in particular on the positive effects that expressive writing – writing about traumatic experiences over a number of consecutive days – has on long-term physical and mental health.

Now, with this foundation, let’s unpack how journaling can support your personal growth.

Let’s start with the cognitive side first.

Past x cognitive: Writing down cognitive information (i.e., facts) about the past is an act of RECORDING. It will help your memory and provide a basis for making connections, observing trends.

Present x cognitive: Let’s call it a brain dump or a mind sweep – writing down all thoughts of the moment. It is an act of UNLOADING.

Future x cognitive: Finally, you can write about the future which will lead to MANIFESTING.

Now, have a look at the emotional side of journaling:

Past x emotional: Writing about your past in the emotional realm will support PROCESSING past experience.

Present x emotional: Journaling about your inner state with a very focus on the present will lead to CENTERING your attention and grounding yourself into a state of awareness.

Future x emotional: Finally, you can write about your emotional future, about how you will feel as your future self. This will support MANIFESTING as “energy flows where attention goes”.

Of course, there are blurry lines between the cognitive and emotional focus in journaling. This is one of its powers. From analyzing yesterday’s behaviors in an attempt to alter it you might shift back into your earlier childhood and remember how this behavior served you well at that time.

You can just let this happen and go with the flow of your writing, but you can also consciously use the different time frames when you develop your journaling practice.

Let’s roll up from the past to the future and explore this timeline further – now adding some desired effects of journaling into the equation.

Journaling can enable inner processes supporting your goals. Let’s look at the far past first and then make our way towards the future.

You would like to write about the far past – e.g., your childhood or adolescence – for the purpose of remembering events and facts. This can help in interpreting experiences and making connections to more recent times. Think in terms of a memoir or autobiography as outputs supporting this purpose.
Even more power lies in using your journaling practice to reframe the past and re-narrate your life story. You can use your journaling practice for the purpose of healing and forgiving. This would happen through forms of therapeutic free writing, guided by some prompts or intention.

You could write about the nearer past for the purpose of documenting and collecting facts, events, or behaviors. Supporting formats are trackers and logs where you record what happened. You will receive data which help you to analyze and recognize patterns, which is useful for controlling your progress on objectives you set. If you rather write some diary type of journal, this will support you in processing your emotions and celebrating your successes.

You could also write about the present – in and about the here and now. This could take the form of a brain dump or mind map, which help you think and ideate. Or this could also be a practice of creating – for instance if you keep an art journal and dedicate a time slot each day to habitually produce art in the moment. An uncensored stream of consciousness session can be a useful way of unloading what is on your mind and in your soul at the present moment.

Let’s move on to the near future. Here, you would make plans and create strategies to help objective setting and micro planning. You could write a to-do-List to support organizing. Or you could draft project outlines to help framing your next endeavor or set intentions to ensure you focus and create awareness.

Journaling about the far future is a powerful practice to goal setting and macro planning. A bucket list, or a vision or your life goals would support this purpose. You can also benefit from a mood board or manifesto for the purpose of manifesting, dreaming or envisioning. Journaling affirmations will result in priming yourself for a state of “future you” which you aspire to achieve. You can journal about the eulogy you wish to receive when you depart from this world which helps you commit to live your life to the fullest potential.

With all that said – what to write ABOUT?

People journal about all kinds of topics. This can be a narrow or broader scope and can shift over time, can be exclusive or connected across several topics. Find here a collection of topics I have seen and can imagine being helpful.

People: It’s worth journaling about relationships and social connections, like parenting, dating, marriage, friends, family or work relationships. Not to forget: The relationship with self.

Physical health: Related journaling topics could be anything you do with your body (sports, fitness, exercise, training), you put into your body (nutrition, calories, micro/macro nutrients, hydration, medication, supplements) or you observe about your body (weight, energy, allergies, menstrual cycle, sleep, dreams).

Mental health: Useful journaling topics in this space are what you do for mental health (meditation, prayer, mindfulness practices, gratitude, affirmations, self-care, surprises, serendipity) and what you notice (mood, emotions). You could also journal about your ambitions in this context, like minimalism or simplification.

Financials: A journal can help to achieve your financial goals and find patterns in your behaviors related to spending or even reveal limiting values and beliefs related to money. You could write about earning, budgets, saving, spending, donating, or investing to help you improve your financial situation and your mindset related to money.

Career: A journal can be a powerful tool to help you achieve your career ambitions. Be it your attempts to develop in your role or make progress into higher leadership levels. Or be it your reflections about your behaviors and related successes in an already achieved leadership position – you could journal about objectives, decisions, leadership aspirations and actions, accomplishments, successes, tasks, or projects.

Learning: Your path to building skills and reaching your target levels of mastery in a certain field will probably benefit from journaling about lessons, courses, skill improvements, practice, research, academic achievements and certifications.

Hobbies: People find value in writing about all sorts of hobbies and leisure activities, for example food, cooking, restaurants, wine – nature, gardening, pets – travel, countries, adventure, outdoor activities – consumed art like books, movies, performances, museums, concerts, theatre, opera – creative endeavors like art, sketches, photography, crafting and DIY, poetry, journaling – sports.

Nerd alert: Did you know that you could journal about your emotions while playing golf and keep an ink journal as one particular facet of your geeky love of fountain pens, ink, and stationery? I know a free water swimmer who records his exploration of lakes in a tiny notebook.

Future: The aspect I find most interesting is journaling about the future, to explore the opportunity space and utilize the law of attraction. This could take the form of an idea, dream or freedom journal, exploring passions, visions, and aspirations. You could use a bucket list, a Future Me manifesto, a mood board or vision board to create the future you want as a blueprint to guide your day-to-day decisions.
Or you could use your journal as a storage container for the raw materials of future creations – writing down ideas, random thoughts, phrases and beautiful words, observations, sketches or found objects, people portraits that may lead to fiction characters.

Using your journal to create the future can be very motivating and inspiring.

There lies power in freedom, and there lies power in restriction. This shows in differing degrees of structure that people chose for their journaling practice. Lots has been invented over time – let’s put the options on a spectrum.

More structure: I would describe the more structured versions of a journal as “modular grids” and would see any kind of habit trackers in this category, but also the very prominent “bullet journal” that even made it into Wikipedia and has inspired people to create a journaling cult based on this method. I would also count a structured mind map into this category as it follows some set rules in its design.

Some structure: I would describe those types of journals as “dedicated spaces”, inspiring the writer to fill them consistently. Examples are 5-year journals, 5-minute journals, one-sentence journals, or the more creative art journals, inspiring one sketch a day.

Less structure: I count any way of free-form writing based on “prompts” into this category. A prompt can be simple, like a topic or a question or the start of a sentence which put you on a track and guide your writing. Prompts could also come in form of larger or integrated journaling programs, naming “The Artist’s Way” from Julia Cameron as a prominent example. This book provides a comprehensive program to unlock any blocked creative potential in 12 weeks by practicing some mental exercises and thinking experiments, including the famous tool of morning pages.

No structure: While being embedded into the more comprehensive method described by Julia Cameron, morning pages are not following a particular structure but are a free writing practice that just happens, well, in the morning. You could choose any other point of time, to free-write, of course. Any unstructured brain dump or mind sweep would fall in here as well.

There are pros & cons for more or less structure in journaling. More structure might help focus or direct your attention to certain aspects of your life. Prompts may help if you feel uninspired and want some guidance. They also help to get out of a rut or divert your thoughts from an area of attention you want to stop ruminating about. Less or no structure, on the other hand, helps your mind to roam freely, without boundaries and restriction, creating the space to explore some deeper layers of your subconscious while you write in your journal.

There are other dimensions you could use in order to decide which journaling practice you want to apply for your own objectives.

Medium: There is a big split into the two camps of analogue or digital media for journaling.
Analogue media come with all benefits of the haptic experience of pen on paper. Based on the medium you choose, there can be some ritualistic element embedded in this choice as such.

For instance, if you choose a precious leather-bound book or a particular paper planner, and a precious fountain pen to write with, if you even fill it with some special ink, this can create some meaning for the process of journaling as such. It can frame your mind to put precious thinking into precious words on precious paper. This can be a useful act of self-care. But it can also become a hindrance if your paper is finally too precious to put dirty words on it.

You could also opt for a cheaper book or just scrap paper, which sets you free to mess around and rip it apart and throw it away, which can be incredibly freeing. Your writing becomes an unpretentious tool, meant to be used instead of treasured.

You can remain flexible with a ring binder, able to extend and mix-and-match different formats and templates. Be aware – some fall into the trap of nerd-ing around with the object too much, making their ring binder the center of attention – an over-precious object that consumes a lot of time and energy to maintain. Journaling can become an obsession in itself; decorating your journal can become a method of creative procrastination.

You can decide to D.I.Y. your analogue journal or buy one. There are many products in the market that are designed for a certain focus and journaling goal, be it gratitude or mastery.

Digital media, on the other hand, could be any way to digitally capture inputs, be it some app, a blog, a vlog or voice recording. Digital media are easy to store, can be indexed and searched and would save some time in overall media management.

Life context: You could write a journal about your personal context, involving friends, family, or you could focus on the professional context and journal about career ambitions and leadership experiences.

Level of openness: Your journal could be very private, just for your own use, or you could decide to share entries, for instance to create some level of accountability.

Shallow vs. deep writing: You could decide to scribble some notes on the surface of the matter, or you can go deep in your writing. Describing a tiny episode might unfold into revelation of a defining moment from your childhood where you discover a distant memory of how your belief system shifted the moment somebody said a certain sentence. On the other hand, one quick sentence might be sufficient to capture a visceral moment by connecting it to a phrase that will remind you of your experience.

Product vs. process orientation: Your journaling practice could aim at an output, a kind of product, for instance in case you create an art journal or you aim at creating an especially beautiful journal. Or you could focus on the process, i.e., the practice of journaling itself is creating the outcome you want, like a shift in your mental state or the relief you feel after processing a troublesome experience.

Degree of realism: You could journal about reality – writing about facts or things that happened – or you could allow yourself to write a fictional journal, exercising your imagination.

Intended disposal: Some people keep their journals for later reference (or just because), others burn or trash it because the moment it is created, its purpose has already been served.

Writing mode: Whether you hand-write or type does make a difference. Hand-writing is a way to connect emotion with the kinesthetic process of moving your hand. Like traveling by bike is the optimal speed to process your existence in your travel destination, hand-writing is the optimal speed for synching different threads of processing your thoughts and emotions. Typing, on the other hand, may be faster – and enable some benefits of digital media as described further above. Both ways have pros and cons – you need to find your preference. If you prefer working on your auditive channel, you could choose to record your voice while you speak to yourself. And – in case you are in doubt – yes, speaking to yourself is a perfectly acceptable behavior.

Finally, find some examples of journaling formats here:

Plain text: Just write in full sentences and paragraphs. It clears the mental mess by putting a sequential structure in place, forcing you to sort through bits and pieces and putting them in a context.

True and past stories: Adding an element of suspense, focusing your mind on a so-what in a memory.

Fictious and future stories: Allowing yourself to imagine scenarios and stretch your mind towards possibilities and opportunities.

Letters: A way of writing that is directed to a certain person – be it from the past or from the future, be it someone else or self. It is an interesting way of having a dialogue, even if it is not happening in real life.

Bullet points or simple lists: Short paragraphs of coherent text, each comprehensive in itself, hence less ambitious than a longer text. Or just a series of short and even random notes of some kind with even less ambition of coherence.

Logs: a format for recording any kind of facts and data that helps putting “stories” in context, like date, time, place, weather

Trackers: A special form of log for recording behaviors and habits which you want to analyze and change.

Visuals: Any visual representation of your journaling needs, for example as image, sketch, graph or chart.

Although some people might claim otherwise, I think the ingredients listed above are more than sufficient to create the core of a successful journaling practice. Understanding the purpose of your journaling practice will unlock the potential benefits. All ingredients that follow in above collection have a much lesser impact than the purpose. It does not really matter whether you write a short list or a long text, you choose a precious book with glossy paper or write on a scrap envelope from the mail as long as you do write.

To continue, read part 3 of the series here.

Some of the resources used in doing the research for this post might as well help you to get started with your journaling practice.

Disclaimer: The links provided below were active and valid at the time this blog post was written. Things change. Responsibility and ownership of the content lies with the respective owners of the websites.

James W. Peenebaker: Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process: Psychological Science, Vol. 8, No. 3 (May 1997), pp. 162-166. Link.
The Farnam Street blog on keeping a Decision Journal. Link.
Tom Oddo, The Ink Journal. Link.
Wikipedia on Bullet Journaling. Link.
John Lee Dumas, Entrepreneurs on Fire, Mastery Journal. Link.