How to start a journal (and still be keeping it in March)

Start tonight with a single word about your day. Write it at the same moment every day, one that already exists in your routine: getting into bed, on the bus home, while the coffee brews. And don’t count streaks: on a day you don’t write, you don’t write, and the next day you carry on.

That’s the whole method. The rest of this guide is about why it works, and what to do when it stops working.

Almost everyone has started a journal. Very few are still writing in it by March. And it’s rarely for lack of things to say: it’s because the journal asks for more than the day gives.

There are three traps, and they tend to come together:

• The blank page. A new notebook asks to be filled. The first few nights you fill it gladly; by the third week a page is a mountain, and closing the notebook without writing is easier than writing a little.
• Emotional homework. Much of what you read about journaling asks you to write about your feelings, your goals, three things you’re grateful for. That’s fine if it comes naturally. If it doesn’t, it becomes a daily test of how you are, and nobody passes every day.
• Streaks. Counting days in a row works until it breaks. The day you miss, the counter goes back to zero, and what was a habit becomes a debt. Plenty of journals die the day after the first broken streak.

If you’ve struggled to keep a journal before, it probably wasn’t you. The journal was set up to fail.

Before you write anything, decide on the minimum. Not the ideal: the minimum you could manage on the worst day of the month, tired and unwilling.

From most to least, the ladder looks like this:

1. A page.
2. A paragraph.
3. A line.
4. A photo with a word.
5. Thirty seconds of voice.
6. One word.

Pick the lowest rung you’d be embarrassed not to manage. For most people it’s a word or a line. “Rain.” is a day. “Dinner with Mom.” is a day. On days you feel like writing more, write more: the minimum is a floor, not a ceiling.

This is what people call micro journaling, or a one-line-a-day journal: a journal where the shortest entry counts as much as the longest.

“At 10 pm” gets forgotten. “Getting into bed” doesn’t, because it already happens every day. Tie the journal to something you already do:

• going to bed, with the notebook or phone on the nightstand;
• the commute home;
• the first coffee of the morning, writing about yesterday;
• closing the laptop at the end of the workday.

Night is usually best, because the day is whole and you still remember all of it. But the best moment is the one you already have.

This is the rule that changes the most. Instead of asking yourself how you are, ask what happened. Where you were, who with, what you ate, what was playing, what made you laugh.

What happened writes itself; there’s nothing to work out. And it’s what you’ll most want to read in a few years: the feelings of one ordinary Tuesday look a lot like another’s, but the name of the place where you had lunch with your sister never comes round again.

That doesn’t mean you can’t write about how you feel. If it comes, write it. Just don’t make it the condition for the day to count.

Ten days in one line

To show the scale, here are ten sample entries (made up, but they could be anyone’s):

1. Rain. Caught at the bus stop with no umbrella, carrying bread.
2. Lunch at Elena’s. Figs with cheese.
3. Dad: “your mother was the better dancer.”
4. First sweater of the year.
5. Luis’s dog stole a sock and would not give it back.
6. Pablo moved out. The last thing to leave was the plant.
7. Gig at the small venue. They closed with an old Tom Waits song.
8. Nothing. Couch.
9. Granada at last. Cold, and an enormous piece of toast.
10. Carmen is moving to Oaxaca in January.

On nights when you don’t know what to put, a concrete question solves it. Not “how was your day?”, which gets “fine”, but “who did you have lunch with?”, “what was the last thing you read?”, “where were you at six?”.

Good journal questions have the same shape: they’re about something concrete, they can be answered in a word or a line, and they never start with “why”. We’ve put together 120 journal prompts that follow those rules, sorted by moment: for today, for tonight, for this day a year ago.

One a night is enough. If one has no answer, move to the next.

Nothing.

Don’t make up for it with two entries the next day, don’t go back to fill gaps, and don’t scold yourself. The day you didn’t write stays where it is, empty, and the journal carries on. A journal with gaps is still a journal; one abandoned over a gap isn’t.

If it’s been a week, come back with a word. If it’s been a month, the same.

A journal becomes precious the first time you reread it. Make that happen early:

• At the end of the week, read the seven days and write one line for all of them: “A week of rain and Pablo’s move.”
• At the end of the month, look at the whole month at once. You’ll see which days were full and which were quiet.
• On this day, look up what you wrote a year ago. It’s the most addictive part of keeping a journal for a long time: every year, the same date gets another layer.

Rereading is what turns a habit into something you don’t want to drop.

As long as it comes out, with a minimum of one word. There’s no right length. Long entries are good on days with a lot to tell; short ones are what keep the journal alive the rest of the year.

If you struggle to write little, set a cap: one line, or whatever fits on the screen without scrolling. If you struggle to write anything, set the opposite: one word, done.

Both work. Pick whichever is closest to hand at your moment from step 2.

• Paper has no notifications, is slower to write and has something physical the screen can’t match. Methods like Julia Cameron’s morning pages and Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal were born on paper. The downsides: it can’t search, it can’t keep photos or voice, and you have to carry it.
• A phone is always with you, keeps photos and voice notes, adds the date and place by itself and lets you search “Elena” and find every time you had lunch with her. The downside: it’s full of other things. Apple has its Journal app, and there are others, such as Day One.

If you’re not sure, try a month of each. The right one is the one you’re still using in March.