Lets talk about journaling, and how I write mine. For me, writing a journal is more about noting down things as they happened, so that I could refer back and recall them in the future. For that reason, I keep my formatting simple and plain.

My journal format is simple, it composes of:

  • A general summary of the day that consist of a few lines but sometimes omitted. I write this at the end of the day to reflect on anything noteworthy.
  • Followed by time and time and event entries for things that happens through the day.

This is mostly an event journal format, so I simply log things that happens in the day as it goes. Every day get it’s own entry dedicated. The summary is inserted at the top of the entry because my journaling app shows the first few lines for each days.

An example can be seen below:

Gone out and ate dinner with XXX. Played some games with XXX.
//this summarizes the highlight of the day, optional
x:xxpm wake up
x:xxpm x:xxpm went out for dinner with xxx at yyy
//the format consist of time + note, or time+time+note for event with spanning duration
...

For the summary, sometimes it’s omitted for boring days, but on eventful days, it might be two or three lines recapping events that happen, or sometimes more personal I might leave a note about how something made me felt if any.

For the event, it’s generally “anything I did” boring or otherwise, from when I woke up, what I ate to when I sleep, it’s basically nothing more then an event log for the day. Sometimes if I couldn’t get the time, I would just leave the event entry by itself without a timestamp.

Personally I don’t like the fluff(dear diary for example), so I kept my journal entry in the format of “note to self”, there’s no opening lines, everything is supposed to be functional to writing down the moment and the current day.

I started journaling long time ago I don’t even remember when it all started, but ever since it has become a habit of mine to journal regularly. Honestly, it’s probably to obsessive level that I log down ever single minute event that happened thru the day.

I don’t know why I started it… it has been a long time ago. But I am glad I started journaling, it allows me to record the day and give myself a place to write a reflection of the current day. I feel like it also helps with my bad memory, keeping things written down so I can refer back at a later date about precisely what happens and when. And having some sort of event list makes it easier to jog my memory and recall things that happen through the day.

Author Notes:

Hiii once again, yeah this time it’s a brief post :( Had a some ideas in my draft but wasn’t sure what i want to refine on and publish…

Personally without a journal i wouldn’t be able to recall what I did X days ago, it’s probably normal, my life is mundane at best and brain does not like to remember mundane things anyways ;-; so it’s probably fine… i hope so at least lol