Make journaling useful

Lots of people resolve to keep a journal. There are good reasons for this. Having a place to record thoughts can help you process them and feel more calm about life in general.

However, as a fairly lapsed journal keeper myself, I can report that there are better and worse ways to keep a journal.

Many people simply record the details of their days. That’s fine, but when I began tracking my time on weekly spreadsheets, I found I had much less reason to bother writing about all this in a pretty little notebook. In any case, many people’s lives aren’t all that different, day-to-day. Recording the details can just get tedious (“Went to work. Put kids to bed. Repeat.”). A journal is more useful if you use it to help you work through problems, or rethink stories you’re telling yourself, or to remind yourself of the good things in your life, or to think about things you’re hoping for.

Most of us won’t randomly have these deep thoughts occur to us when we sit down with those pretty little notebooks. That’s why you need prompts.

Yep, just like your 7th grade teacher wrote a prompt on the board for your free writing exercise, you might find that journaling prompts make this practice more useful. There are lots of prompts available online, so if you’d like to journal more regularly, take a few minutes to hunt for some. Be warned. Many are terrible (seriously, I found one about “are you actively trying to learn to use AI to complement your work?”). But some are not. So it’s worth taking a little time to browse and make a list of those that sound appealing.

For instance, I have no desire to write about my deepest regrets (a common prompt I’ve found). But I do find it more interesting to ponder what goals I had five years ago, and whether I still want the same things (mostly, with some tweaks). “What does happiness mean to you?” is a bit much to bite off when I’ve got 10 minutes before bed. But I am intrigued by “Do you feel like you’re missing something in your social life?”

So make a list and put it somewhere accessible. Then, when you do pull up your journal, you can choose a prompt and write about it. You might write more about it the next time, and then try another prompt, and then come back to the first. And, once you get going, you might just throw in something about your previous day (maybe it wasn’t just working and putting kids to bed!). But you won’t sit there feeling totally stumped, which is what makes many people abandon the journaling habit.

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