How I journal

I’ve had a seemingly typical journaling experience over the years: try journaling because someone smart told me it’s good for me, white-knuckle my way through how I should be doing it, it doesn’t stick, I don’t journal for a while, and repeat that endlessly. Last year, I finally landed on a journaling system that works for me.

I’ve been out of the habit for over a month now¹ so I wanted to write about my system to get me excited about it again and restart the habit. Here we go.

Five points—Location, win, tension, gratitude, and values

I’ve tried physical notebooks, morning pages, stream-of-thought writing, bullet points, and basically everything else recommended by the journaling gurus. What finally stuck was a framework I learned from Sahil Bloom—the 1-1-1 method. I’ve adapted it for myself such that I write down five points each night (in a perfect world).

• Location. The more specific the better. It’s fun to read old entries and remember exactly what hotel room I was in or whose house I was staying at.
• One win. The highlight of the day. Something that made me smile or feel proud.
• One point of tension. Something that caused anxiety, stress, or anything else I struggled with or am dreading.
• One piece of gratitude. We all know by now that writing down things you’re grateful for is good for the soul.
• One behavior that connects to my values. This is an addition that I made to ensure that my values and behaviors are aligned. Did I do something today that I say is important to me?

Each of these is usually just a sentence but the door is open to expand where I want. If something really great happened that day, I’ll savor it by writing a paragraph or more. If I was feeling particularly anxious, I’ll explore that further.

Why this system works for me

The thing that made journaling hard to do consistently—like any habit—was that there was too much friction. I never really knew what was worth writing and what wasn’t, what future me was interested in remembering and what he didn’t care about. Journaling always became more of a chore than anything else, something I felt like I should be doing but didn’t want to. Like eating vegetables or going to the gym.

On the days when I can’t be bothered to do anything, I only need to write five things. Sometimes they aren’t even full sentences—it takes me about 30 seconds minimum. But this system is also flexible enough to give me space to dig down when I want to.

Besides being easier to write, it’s also more interesting to read back entries later on. When I was semi-consistent with just writing down what I did for the day, reading them back the next month was so dull. I journal partly to document my life and I don’t really care that I bought bread on May 8th, 2023. This system does a fantastic job of capturing the meaningful highs and lows of my life without cluttering my journal with the boring stuff.

What it looks like in practice

I’m on my computer quite a lot and typing has always been easier than handwriting for me. Not to mention my abysmal handwriting that can be hard to read sometimes. So, I do all of this in a digital journal.

Herman Martinus wrote about the many benefits that come from plain text journaling. When my journal is One Big Text File, it is easy to back up, move around, search, edit, and store. I use jrnl to add some “sugar” on top of it, though.

jrnl works through the command line and I can just type jrnl to create a new timestamped entry in my text editor of choice. Again, I really try to reduce friction when it comes to journaling and this is about as frictionless as it gets. It also allows templating, searching, tagging, and tools to view specific entries. My favorite feature is jrnl -today-in-history that returns all of my previous entries for the given day.

When I’m not at my computer, I usually handwrite my five points in my Moleskine notebook that I use for tasks and notes. When I’m back to my computer, I transcribe it into jrnl. In a pinch, I can also write myself a Signal message to copy and paste later.

With this journaling system, I am recording, analyzing, and remembering the important bits of my life in a way that is easy and sustainable for me. Now I just need to go out and get started—yet again.

Created: 2024-12-13

Last modified: 2024-12-13