How to Build Your Journaling Setup
The tools you use to journal have a big impact on how your journaling practice develops and how effective the experience can be for you. At the core, all you really need is something to write with. It can be a notebook and pen, a yellow legal pad, the back of an envelope, a laptop, or a smartphone. But every tool has its own pros and cons, its affordances, and its constraints.
Writing on your laptop is fast but can feel like English class (and you may find that your journal entries start to look and feel more and more like essays). Writing on your phone allows you to journal anywhere at almost any time, but the small screen real estate can cause your writing to be limited in scale and scope. Writing in a notebook is slow but lets you quickly doodle and draw alongside your writing. Clearly, there are many pros and cons to every tool, so what you choose should ultimately depend on 1) your goal for journaling (aka, your why) and 2) your personal style.
We’ve already explored the general reasons for journaling, but if you haven't already, you should come up with your own personal rationale. Armed with this understanding, you’ll be able to get much more out of reading the rest of this guide.
Because of the limitless combinations and permutations of different tools, it’s probably the most useful to keep things grounded and tangible by walking you through my own personal setup. Please keep in mind that this is a method that is well suited for my own purpose for journaling and my personal style. This is a process that I’ve been using and steadily refining for the better part of a decade, and I’ve gotten it to the point where it suits my needs. Bear in mind that I do more writing, thinking, and planning than the average person while living in slightly more chaos than the average person (I am the primary caregiver for two toddler boys), so this system might seem like overkill. But even if you’re not writing and processing so much information every day while juggling naps and doctor’s visits, you can still borrow or steal insights from my process if it suits your needs.
My recommendation is that as you finish this guide and start thinking about your own setup, you should start small and basic and gradually build up to something more complicated. Do not read this guide, and then just go out and buy everything described here. By starting small and testing out what works, you will not only save time and money, but you’ll end up with a system that is much better suited for your needs.
My Personal Purpose for Journaling
As mentioned above, Let’s begin with a rundown of my current purpose for journaling and what I want to get out of the experience. As my circumstances change, my purposes for journaling will change, and my tools will also need to change so that they can continue to serve my purpose.
Thinking, planning, and reflecting. I need space to process my jumble of thoughts into something more organized and tangible. Sometimes, my inaction is caused not by procrastination or distraction but by the idea of being still too messy for me to push on properly.
Task management. Once plans are made, I need a place to store and track the tasks that will drive my goals forward. I need a system to help me visualize the work that needs to be done and, in doing so, to keep me accountable.
Log for notes. I need a place to capture meeting notes and reading notes so I can process them later into tasks or future content. A lot of valuable information passes through my eyes and ears, and I need a way to capture them efficiently so I can process them into something even more valuable.
In terms of personal style, I am as much of a digital native as the next millennial, but I like to hold things. There’s a visceral quality to the feeling of a pen dragging against a page or the supple weight that only comes from high-quality paper. I even prefer the act of striking through my mistakes so that future-me can see where my thoughts went awry.
Because of all this, I prefer an analog setup.
It forces me to slow down. Like most people who grew up with computers, I can type significantly faster than I can write by hand, but part of the point of journaling for me is to slow down and reflect more intentionally. The quality of my writing significantly improves because I’m thinking more deeply about what I’m doing.
It affords me flexibility in form and function. Because of the design and thinking work that I spend a lot of time doing, I like the sprawling nature of analog writing because I am not limited to straight rows of text. I can sketch diagrams or draw doodles if the need or mood arises.
But what about the drawbacks? As you are deciding on your setup, you should also carefully consider the constraints and limitations because not everything is weighted equally. For me, there are some very real downsides to keeping everything analog. Since I keep my notebooks with me, I don’t have the issue of accessibility. For many people, digital is just more accessible because the smartphone has become a cybernetic essential organ for us now. The biggest problem I’ve encountered is that nothing that I write is easily searchable later. If I need to find something from a previous page or even from a previous insert, I need to read through the pages until I find what I am looking for. But what started off as a minus has slowly become more and more of a plus as I experience this method more deeply. I now find that searching by hand, although slow, leaves the door open for serendipity. Sometimes I am looking for something, but I stumble upon a whole set of other things that I didn’t even know I needed.
My Personal Journal Setup
So with all of my rationale and reasoning established, here is my actual setup. I maintain two notebooks, which I use in system with each other, and I always keep both on my person at all times. I really like Traveler’s Company because of their modularity, which lets me customize and adapt my notebook as I continue to refine my practice and can shift as my needs change. I also really like that the paper itself comes as smaller modular inserts, which can be swapped out as they fill up. This drastically reduces the perfectionist anxiety I would experience whenever I “messed up” a new notebook. With these thinner inserts, I don’t need to worry about mistakes or blemishes because I know that a new insert is just around the corner.
First Notebook: The Workhorse
My main notebook is the regular-size from the Traveler’s Company, and I use it with two inserts.
My first insert is my journal, habit tracker, sketchbook, bullet journal, design book, and client meeting notes log all in one. Because of this, I typically fill up one standard 64-page dot-grid insert every two weeks. This is why I call it my fortnightly spread. Everything that goes in here is chronologically sensitive, which means that the date is meaningful for the information to make more sense. For my tasks, I use a simple Bujo process with a daily quick journal to review and reflect. In between, I’ll have any number of ideas, designs, sketches, and brainstorms that I’m working on.
My second insert is my reading and course notes. I’m trying to build up a habit of reading, but I noticed that I’m not retaining very much of the information. Thinking back to my days as a student, I realize that the critical change is that I used to take notes. Now whenever I read, I jot down the most interesting ideas as I read so I can quickly reference them later.
Second Notebook: The Commonplace Book
My secondary notebook is the passport-size also from Traveler’s Company. I also keep two inserts here. A commonplace book originated from the philosophers of ancient Greece and has persisted to this day. At its core, it’s just a place to dump all of your thoughts that you’d like to store and access later. Tiago Forte based his popular Second Brain approach off of this very concept.
My first insert is the commonplace book which functions as an inbox for all of my thoughts and works in progress. I am free to jot things down, scribble, cross things out, and not worry about it being neat or tidy. To keep things from getting stale, I go through and process the items once every week or two. Processing simply means moving them to somewhere more permanent. By touching the item again, I can bring it into focus again, further expand or develop the idea, and then put it into a place where it can now be worked on directly, such as my content calendar or research log.
The second insert is an archive of collections. A collection is basically any kind of list that I want to save. These aren’t used every day but are helpful to keep on hand as a quick reference if needed.
Books that I want to read
Video games that I want to play
Gift ideas for each member of my family
Running / hiking routes and their distances
“Last day to grow” calendar for Stardew Valley
The Writing Tools
I use two kinds of pens because of the type of writing that I typically do.
First is my Lamy Safari fountain pen. I first started using fountain pens in my early twenties because I thought they were more environmentally friendly. I still use them because I like the writing experience. Sometimes I get ink on my hands, and I need to remember to refill the ink cartridge regularly, but I derive a lot of joy from the texture and feel of a fountain pen nib gliding across paper.
Second, is my Pilot Frixion Tri-color pen. I often have to design, sketch, or diagram, and there’s something very freeing about the ability to erase. I don’t need to worry about my initial ideas fitting perfectly because I know that I can always erase and move things around. It also helps that this erasable pen uses a dust-free heat-based mechanism, so I don’t need to worry about those pesky eraser frills getting all over the place.
Building Your Own System
Now it’s your turn. As mentioned above, don’t try to replicate my system exactly. Start small. If you’re not sure whether digital or analog is right for you, try using a free writing app on your computer or smartphone to start and get a feel for it. If that doesn’t work, spend a few dollars on a basic notebook to try out the alternative. If that works for you, then maybe your next notebook can be a bit fancier with a few more bells and whistles. Take it slow and gradually build up as you go. Do not increase complexity without a clear reason for it.
The most important thing to keep in mind about your setup is that it is temporary. Your journaling needs will change over time, so your process should also change to optimize for the outcomes you are looking for. So start by trying something, and don’t be afraid to change things up in the middle if you realize you want to do it differently. There’s no rule that says you need to finish a notebook the way you started it. Your notebook might start as a traditional daily journal, evolve into a Bujo (bullet journal), transition into a scrapbook, and then evolve back into a traditional journal. It’s all okay. The most important thing is that you are writing and thinking.