What makes a journal a journal?
The perfect one is one you use
I love designing journals, now a new idea for a potential journal is firing up brain cells.
When I stop and look around, however, there are thousands, if not millions, of journals already out there … beautiful, hand-tooled leather journals, artsy journals with delightful imagery, student-affordable plain blue book journals, and an unending assortment of sizes, shapes, materials on the outside and, inside, an even greater variety of internal prompts, quotes, questions, exercises, stories and wisdom arranged on dotted, lined, or grid pages of varying qualities for writing, drawing or making art. And, that’s before we’ve even determined if it’s hand written, typed into a journal app or website, or a hybrid paper tablet like reMarkable.
Most of us have journals in our lives and some of us have stacks of them. Yopandtom.com offers us a list of 20 types of journals and recommends that we keep multiple journals.
Bullet journal - to keep everything in one place
Business planner - to grow your side hustle or career
Creative ideas notebook - to jot down ideas as they come to you
Daily to-do list - to maximise your productivity
Dream journal - to detect patterns in your dreams
Financial planner - to monitor your finances
Fitness journal- to keep you on track with your fitness goals
Habit tracker - to make those goals a daily habit
Memory journal - to log those precious moments for years to come
Moon journal- to bring more harmony into your day
Morning Pages journal - to keep your practice someplace safe
Parenting journal- to help those little moments last a lifetime
Personal journal - to journal out your daily thoughts
Personal planner - to manage your downtime
Project planner - to help organize big events, like weddings, renovations and holidays
Study notebook- to remember what your teacher told you each lesson
Study planner - to keep student life organized
Travel journal - to document your big adventures
Work notebook - to keep track of meeting notes and other important to-dos
Work planner - to plan out your work schedule
The conclusion is that the perfect journal is the one you use. Would love to hear your thoughts on choosing and using a journal … or journals. What makes you buy one? What keeps you using it?
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In good times and challenging ones, practicing gratitude helps us recognize the good things in our lives and build resilience for the challenges that come our way. Gratitude journaling is one of the best ways to better understand yourself and deepen your practice of gratitude.
Any journal will do … however, here are two we are biased toward:
Gratitude Miracles, a 52-week journal filled with inspiring quotes and the science behind 13 amazing benefits of gratitude. Available from amazon.com:
Or, Gratitude Mojo, a 26-week, workbook format, which comes to you free with your annual paid subscription … including one copy for a friend because having a Gratitude Buddy makes the journey better.
We want to help everyone develop a deeper practice of gratitude, therefore, all posts are always free. … However, it is paid subscriptions that help support this work.
Aye yi yi, such much! My morning journal captures most of the information suggested by all of the options you list. The page on the right captures my daily gratitude, dreams, and task-related issues.
The page on the left I call My Book Report. It is covered with my writing/scene/research in progress for my next novel in script form and sometimes in cartoons.
Both pages are marked with starred items that get transferred into my old, old, old Franklin Planner that sits on my desk next to my computer. It holds my ongoing task lists.
Those two books, the morning journal and the Franklin Planner put me on overdrive according to some of my friends. I didn't even mention that I make frequent use of the calendar on my phone for daily reminders of everything from grocery needs, irregular expenditures, and notes about you JWs Substack posts!! That does it for me.
I don't have a journal but do have a diary which I write in each day