The 8 Journals I Keep and Why I’m Obsessed With Them
I’ve developed a new book-shopping habit. When I enter a bookstore, I’ll linger around the front a bit longer than usual. But I’m not looking at the new releases or the magazine rack next to the cafe. At the Barnes & Noble minutes away from my office, I’ll hang a hard right. And at the wall separating the checkout aisle and the children’s books, there are journals.
In recent months, I’ve become obsessed with writing and, more specifically, journaling. It is at this intersection that my creativity and love for holding a book in my hands merge. There’s something liberating about having a written practice as your means of expression. You gain clarity about yourself and the world around you when you write your thoughts down on the page.
Many of the world’s most durable literary texts began as journals. Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is an account of his life as the emperor of Rome. Through his journals, we see that the problems we face now are the same ones humanity faced centuries ago. Even the most powerful man in the world still struggled to get out of bed, same as you and me!
Aurelius’s fellow stoic, Epictetus writes:
“Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand — write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.”
Today, I will share the eight journals in my collection that see the most frequent use and how I use them. Some of these entries are based on regular prompts and exercises. Others were given purpose only through what I began to write in them. Journaling has helped me discover myself and explore my values more deeply. I hope that it does the same for you.
The Journals
1. The General Journal/Diary
Let’s begin with a simple hardcover lined journal. In this journal, I record whatever happens in my day-to-day life. Sometimes, you may want to write about one specific moment that happened. Other times, you may want to tell the story of an entire day.
These journals are very freeform, a space for you to get your thoughts down without having to edit. This is a blessing for those who know what they want to write. But, those with a lack of direction for their writing may feel intimidated at first. If you’re in this latter group, I have recommendations for you later in this article.
Each page of my journal has the date written in the top right on the first line. Every date gets at least one page. On the next line, I write the time that I’m writing down this entry on the left side of the page. After that is the material, what I plan to write. Sometimes this material is a single line. Other times, it spans many pages. It varies from moment to moment, from day to day.
I will sometimes end these entries with a song. Sometimes it’s whatever is playing in the background as I write the entry. It could also be a song that fits the theme of the entry I wrote.
A few rules I put in place for these general journals:
Never put entries from different dates on the same page. Even if yesterday’s entry contains just the date, time, and one word of material, today gets its own page.
Entries that span more than one page need to have the date at the top right of each page. I write a new time down after a certain amount of time passes since the completion of the previous entry. If you need a benchmark, after 10–15 minutes, you can write down the time for a new entry. Otherwise, append your thoughts to the last entry you made for that day.
These are the rules I have in place for myself. They are not hard policies on how to journal, but they provide an effective formula for getting started.
The purpose of writing a journal is to understand your life over many years. For this reason, I always buy hardcover journals. Hardcover journals have a longer life span than paperback journals. Spending more for more durable journals is an investment in your history.
I am currently using a Moleskine Classic Expanded Notebook as my primary journal. With 400 pages, this contains over two years of my life history. Moleskine’s 240-page notebooks can contain, on average, one and a half years’ worth of entries. These notebooks have a ribbon bookmark to hold your place. They also have an elastic closure to keep them secure. Add on their high-page quality and durable covers, you get a high return on your investment.
2. The Logbook
The logbook is a bit different from the standard journal. A journal or diary, tells the story of what happened each day, in the form of a narrative. The logbook is more of a bullet-point list of each completed task you finished throughout the day. These can be mundane tasks or they can be significant events. Whether it’s making your bed or nailing a presentation, what you accomplish has a place here.
At times it can feel like we never get enough out of our days. Like we’ve wasted our time and didn’t do everything we thought we could. By writing down what you did each day, you often realize that you’ve achieved more than you thought.
Logbooks follow a similar format to the general journal: the date on the first line, each date gets its own page, etc.
I also put the day of the week in parentheses on the left side of the date. This is a newer practice I’ve adopted beginning with the logbook. Including the day of the week is important when contextualizing my productivity. It lets me know how well I work in specific environments. If it’s during the weekday, then I spent the majority of my time at the office. If it’s the weekend, I’m more likely to be home, but also more likely to be traveling as well. How productive am I when I’m on the road? How productive am I at work? I’ve found these contextual questions to be very valuable.
Unlike the journal, I don’t put down the times for these logs. I sometimes repeat the same tasks at different times throughout the day. I often multitask as well, starting and stopping tasks as my momentum moves me. It makes my life easier to not write out the start and end times for each task, but you may prefer otherwise.
I prefer my logs in a small or pocket-sized notebook. Because these logbooks are smaller and have fewer pages, you may want to buy these journals in bulk.
The logbook is an effective companion when creating daily recaps. You will find it useful when using the other journals on this list.
3. The Book Log
If you are anything like me, you consume a large number of books on a weekly basis. I tend to cycle between books, depending on my mood. 10:00 am may be a book on stoicism. 10:27 am might be a drastic jump to personal finance.
I categorize my books by my reading progress: ready to start, reading, paused, and finished. In recent months, I decided to dive deeper by logging how much of each book I read in a given session.
Having an intuition about your performance is nice, but nothing beats having the data to back it up. Until I started keeping deliberate track of my reading, I had no idea how fast of a reader I was. In school, I had a general sense that I read slower than my peers. And when you add on the practice of annotation, I read even slower! But I never had a sense of HOW MUCH slower (or faster) I read than I thought. Enter the book log.
The book log follows the same conventions as the logbook. The key difference is the sub-bullets, which I use to track how many pages I read in a specific session. If I read from pages 41–47, those would get their own sub-bullet. If I pick up the book later, I’ll mark, for example, pages 48–64 on another sub-bullet. You can also use a comma to separate your sessions if you’re working with a smaller notebook.
Book logs are especially helpful when you read certain pages out of order as well. I could read pages 1–80 of Tim Ferriss’ Tools of Titans in a few sessions. Then, I’ll jump to some of the insights on page 449 because they’re more relevant to me at that moment. I’ll have a record of what I read so that I know what not to reread.
Since the book logs are likely to have the least content per page, I prefer to use pocket-sized notebooks. The journals I recommended for the logbooks work well here.
Why have a separate logbook and book log? As mentioned with the logbooks, I generally do not like to repeat listings of tasks for the log. If I read a book multiple times a day, it’ll only have one listing in my logbook. That same book could have multiple listings in my book log. My logbooks are very general in both their writing and their purpose. With my book logs, I try to get more specific.
When I compile book lists from my library, I often have to rely on my annotations to determine when I read a book. If I don’t leave a date in my margin comments, I have to guess. Sometimes I pick up a book and then put it down for YEARS before finishing it. Detailed book logs tell my future self when I read a book and give context on why I read that specific book at the time. Also, adding personal comments in your book logs helps guide future referral efforts.
You can argue this separate log is arbitrary and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that. I find the degree of separation valuable as someone who reads a lot and has to refer to what they learned.
I wish I did this years ago.
4. The Gratitude Journal
Being a pessimist in today’s environment is easy. Look no further than news media outlets and social media. In today’s polarized attention economy, we’re overwhelmed with negative stimuli.
According to a psychology study from Boston College, “negative information often is remembered with a greater sense of vividness than positive information.” We’re wired to see the negatives more than the positives. This takes a monumental toll on our mental and emotional health. Seeking positivity requires frequent, conscious action.
To combat my negativity, in late 2022, I adopted a daily gratitude journaling practice. This is the first prompt-based journal I introduced into my daily routine.
Gratitude journals come in many formats. The gratitude journal I use consists of five sections: three for the morning, and two for the evening. Every morning, I write:
Three things am I grateful for
Three things (that if everything else went wrong) would make today great
A daily affirmation of who I am and what I am setting out to do.
The following evening, I am asked similar prompts:
What three amazing things happened to me today?
How could I have made today better?
For each of these prompts, I try not to tread in the same area of life more than once. For example, if I write one line about my job, I can’t write another work-related one. Your answers could be about whatever you are grateful for having in your life: relationships, work, vacations, hobbies, etc.
A logbook is a valuable asset for the evening section of your gratitude journal. Maybe something spectacular happened during your day. Maybe, you found a $20 bill on the ground. Maybe your co-worker gave you a gift. Maybe your best friend from high school called you for the first time in years. By the time you get to the evening, you might be too tired to remember even the best things that happened to you. Writing down key moments as they happen allows you to easily find those things that really made your day. This is another argument for why I recommend writing the logbooks in list form. The critical items stand out faster.
It would do us wonders to learn to find a positive spin on our day-to-day lives. The world isn’t all that bad. You just have to know where to look.
5. The One-Line Journal
Do you remember what you were doing on December 7th of 2022? If you’re reading this article around Christmas 2022, there’s a decent chance you might. Now, how about December 7th of 2017? Not so easy now, huh?
Memory journals are powerful. Each page offers you a glimpse into what each day looked like for you across the span of multiple years. Chronicle Books’ memory journal, which I currently use, is straightforward. On each day of each month, write down the current year and one single line you would use to summarize that day. That’s it.
One-line entries can be event summaries, random thoughts, or quotes that you discovered.
Each page of my current memory journal has space for five years. That’s one reflection, every day, for half a decade of your life.
A lot can change in five years. Five years ago before 2022, I was graduating from high school in my hometown in western PA. Go back five years further and I was halfway through middle school (in a year of public education that feels like I blacked out for 9 months).
Journaling allows us to review our thoughts and mindsets at earlier stages of our lives. And if reflecting on how you were a year ago feels good, imagine two years. Five years. A decade!
If you are looking for a way to start journaling, a one-line memory journal is an excellent place to get started.
6. Principles: Your Guided Journal by Ray Dalio
For my 22nd birthday, I asked for an annual Audible subscription. One of the books I read during that year was Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio.
Dalio’s book outlines the principles that have shaped his career at Bridgewater Associates. He also emphasizes the importance of ongoing learning and data-backed decision-making.
Recently, Dalio released an accompanying journal to his best-selling book. Principles: Your Guided Journal helps you define your life principles. The journal contains actionable exercises, constructed from Dalio’s best practices and methodologies. The journal also contains optional virtual components, via QR codes and an app.
The presentation of this journal is stellar. The pages are well laid out and the cover is comfortable to hold and touch. But, my favorite detail is hidden on most digital storefront listings: it’s the front cover. Remove the dustcover sleeve and you’ll see that the journal is titled, “My Principles.” Not “Ray Dalio’s Principles.” Your Principles, plain and simple. This gives the owner of this journal a greater sense of ownership over the content. Although the exercises aren’t yours, your answers to them are.
Seneca once said:
“the life we receive is not short but we make it so; we are not ill-provided but use what we have wastefully”.
Having a guiding set of principles allows you to go through life with intent. They allow you to identify who you are and what you are willing to devote your time and energy to.
One suggestion I have for you is to fill out this journal in pencil. As your life and circumstances change, your values and principles may change as well. Be open to change. Be willing to take whatever lessons that life has to provide you. Let those lessons help guide you to the values you want to uphold.
7. I Will Teach You to Be Rich: The Journal by Ramit Sethi
Following your core values and principles are your beliefs and behaviors around money.
Finance industry personality, Dave Ramsey says:
“personal finance is 80 percent behavior and only 20 percent head knowledge.”
Earlier this year, I read Ramit Sethi’s best-selling classic, I Will Teach You to Be Rich. This book is a roadmap to making smart financial decisions. Sethi uses his humor to provide practical tips and strategies for building wealth. Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich: The Journal helps you construct a path to your dream financial life.
The exercises help you deconstruct your pre-existing beliefs and biases about money. The aim is to eliminate any barriers keeping you from achieving your financial goals. The result is a system to better manage your finances.
As of writing, I have used Sethi’s system to set up my investing and savings plans for my full-time job. This journal provides a place for you to write down your financial plan where it is easy for you to refer to it.
8. The Prompt Journal(s)
If it wasn’t obvious, I have been on a writing kick as of late. Writing offers you a chance to flex your creativity. It doesn’t require as many trips to the nearest Michaels for materials. Nor does it need us to own a powerful computer for editing our work. Sometimes all you need to get started writing is for someone to simply tell you what to write. That is what prompt-based journals are for.
This is an honorable mention of the creative writing journals I’ve acquired recently. These journals ask about everything, from specific life events to simple “would you rather” challenges.
I’ve started to keep a different prompt journal in my favorite reading and writing spaces. The one that currently resides in my office is 642 Things to Write About Me by The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. The Things to Write/Draw series covers a lot of categories, from tiny things to draw to things you love about your spouse. Pick up any one of those, keep it around you, and flip to a random page until you find a prompt that catches your interest. Who knows where that inspiration may lead you?
Other Best Practices for Journaling
The title page of my primary journal says, “In case of loss, please return to: …,” followed by my name and address. These journals contain years worth of memories and archives of your life history. It would be devastating to lose these volumes and never see them again. I’ve opted to repeat this practice with every journal I have, whether they have a dedicated section for it or not.
Also on these title pages, I include the monetary reward for returning these journals to me. The amount is arbitrary, but it provides an incentive for people to return your lost journals to you. For my logs, I usually prescribe a standard value of $25 — $40 for a complete return. I value my primary journals anywhere from $100 — $175 per year archived in the journal.
Also, on the title page, I will specify the timespan archived in that journal. This begins with the starting month and year and ends with the ending month and year. This makes it much easier to skim through older volumes when I’m trying to find my thoughts on a specific event.
On the backmost pages, I leave either an index for key events or a log of achievements that occurred. My 2022 journal has a list of the books that I finished during that year, as well as the date when I finished them.
Conclusion
Think of a now-deceased family member, friend, or mentor that you looked up to. What would you give to learn from them again? What lessons do you think they had left to share with you?
Literature is beautiful for its ability to immortalize the knowledge of mortal beings. Those of us gifted with the skill to write, to put words down on paper, have more power than you can even imagine. Imagine if that mentor wrote down their guiding principles for navigating the workplace. How might that direct your career? Imagine if your grandmother shared how she met your grandfather. What could we learn about family relationships from how she navigated the world, both with and without him? Journaling gets us into the habit of documenting our biggest life lessons. There is wisdom to be gained from each of us, regardless of our current place in life.
A majority of our works won’t be published after we’re gone, like Marcus Aurelius (and for some of us that’s a good thing). Even so, our journals can empower those closest to us with the strength to handle life’s stresses. Through the process of writing, we learn to process life’s events, so that they can be understood. This allows us to be better mentors and leaders, who can guide those who need our help the most.
Journaling is not a selfish act. It has the power to give in ways you cannot even imagine. And it starts, when you pick up the pen.
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