How to Build a Journaling Habit

A common obstacle to journaling is simply finding the time. We’re very busy people and there often isn’t a convenient time to sit down and write something that isn’t worth any points in a class. But if you’re here reading this, then you’re probably already well on your way to being convinced that journaling is valuable. You’re just looking for guidance about how to do it and how to do it consistently.

The gold standard is to develop a consistent habit where you are writing on a regular basis. This is because many of the benefits to journaling (Why Journal) are inherently connected with consistency. Without refining your journaling into a habit, you’ll be significantly less likely to achieve the goals you set out for yourself.

How to Develop a Habit

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to develop good habits, and some of them are great and could work for you. Below you’ll find the techniques that have worked for me personally along with my reflection and analysis about what makes them effective.

Start Small

Similar to the advice outlined in how to design your journaling setup, habits should also start small. No runner starts out by running a 10k and no pianist starts with Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit. Starting too big raises the associated “cost” of the behavior and makes it more likely to be skipped.

But how small is too small? It’s probably not very effective to journal for one second. You probably wouldn’t even be able to finish writing a whole word in that time. When it comes to deciding the smallest unit to begin with, you want to go with the smallest cost that delivers noticeable value. In this case, cost is time and value is whatever your goal is for journaling. If you’re journaling to help you relax, then decide how long to write before your stress levels start to drop. If you’re not sure, I would recommend you start with one page. In most cases, one page is enough space to get into the writing while being sufficiently short enough to not be intimidating.

When I first started journaling, I also started by writing one single page in my plain Moleskine. It took around ten minutes and my hand was a bit sore afterwards. But looking at one full page was quite satisfying and that was enough to keep going.

Always Be Ready

To help you get started with your habit, you want to reduce the friction to act. The lower the friction, the more likely you are to act. This is similar to the technique of laying out your running clothes the night before.

When you don’t yet have a journaling routine, you might not know the optimal time or occasion for journaling. Until you figure it out, you should keep your journal with you at all times. This way you’ll be ready whenever the mood strikes you. You don’t want to be in a situation where you want to journal but you’re unable to because you don’t have the means to write. (This point is really driven home by the concept of the Commonplace Book in my own personal journaling setup.)

When I first started journaling, I was a second-year college student and my notebook stayed in my backpack and my backpack traveled with me wherever I went. I eventually had my favorite places to write, but sometimes ideas would come unexpectedly and it was enormously helpful to be able to journal wherever I happened to be.

Stack Them Up

You can use your existing habits to help build your new habit. Stanford Professor BJ Fogg calls it “habit stacking.” It’s where you connect a new habit with an existing habit and “stack” them together. This makes the new habit much more likely to stick because it becomes associated with a reliable trigger. Over time, this connection can become unnecessary because the new habit has solidified and can stand on its own.

Since you’re trying to build the habit of journaling, it’s best to stack it on top of an existing habit that is durable (happens without fail), stationary (you’re sitting down), and thought-provoking (opens your mind to thinking and reflecting). This means don’t stack journaling on top of your habit of occasionally going swimming after school because swimming is neither durable, stationary, nor thought-provoking.

For me, I eventually connected my journaling habit with my morning coffee routine. As I sit down and take my first sip of coffee, I automatically get my journal out and begin to write. I typically write about the day before, but sometimes I’d write about my hopes or fears about the day ahead.

Building on Top of Your Journaling Habit

Once you’ve developed some degree of habitual journaling, you can start to build on top of your existing foundation. At the start, you really just need to do more journaling and extend your writing stamina. Just as athletes train by setting speed or distance targets, you can also use a timer or page goal to help push you to write more than you otherwise would naturally. 

Once you find yourself writing more consistently, you can also start to think about how you can iteratively update your journaling tools and setup to even further optimize for your goals. Check out this other article on how to iteratively design your journaling setup. You can also expand on your journaling habit by writing about topics that are increasingly more personally significant. Check out this other article about how to progressively deepen your journaling.