Have you ever wanted to document your life?

Have you ever written down your thoughts and felt rewarded or even productive afterwards? Or both?

Have you ever dreamed of keeping up a daily journaling practice?

If so, knowing the following four keys to developing a consistent daily journaling practice may help you start writing and keep the ball rolling once and for all.

The day-in and day-out of journaling is just that: it’s writing out your thoughts, ideas and feelings on paper (or electronically) every day, and even multiple times a day (that’s me).

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot more that goes into it than just that.

As with any creative practice, journaling takes a degree of planning and preparation, especially if your goal is to make it a daily habit that produces something you can look back to in the future, whether that’s after a few months or even after several years.

With that in mind, here’s a few tips to help you plan for success and build a consistent daily journaling practice:

Find a comfortable place to write daily.

You can write just about anywhere, especially with access to not only the traditional pen and paper method, but also electronic journaling apps that help you take your writing practice along with you wherever you go.

Even so, at the beginning, you’ll want to decide on a place to do your daily journaling so that you can create an association between the place where you write and doing the writing itself.

I didn’t have a desk in my apartment when I started my daily journaling practice, so I wrote from the comfort (and sometimes discomfort) of my bed and, when I woke up too late to get any writing done before heading out to work, I wrote using the Journal app on iPhone while riding the bus.

If this is your situation, you can do the same or consider writing at a local café, at the library, in your car on your work break, or even at the park.

Just make sure that the place you choose is somewhere you can reliably write on a daily basis that’s comfortable and where you can do your writing with minimal distraction.

Decide on a journaling medium.

This was covered only very briefly above in the previous point, but it’s worth discussing at greater length.

While this point can be boiled down to a decision between the classic pen and paper approach and a modern electronic approach, how much you enjoy interacting with the elements of your journaling practice can significantly impact the consistency with which you show up on the page.

If you’re on a budget and pressed for time, the Journal app on iPhone or similar apps on Android can be handy tools for starting your daily journaling practice and they have the added bonus of being accessible to you everywhere you go.

On the Journal app, entries are automatically dated and, if you aren’t sure what to write about, it also offers prompts to help you get started.

On the other hand, the traditional approach of writing in a physical journal is just as rewarding and, if you enjoy the tactile nature of this approach, it may encourage you to come back to writing again and again.

Regardless of which you choose, the point is to develop a consistent practice, so consider the amount of time you have and the resources available to you to decide on how you want to start.

As I mentioned, I write in a physical journal daily, but have also used the iPhone Journal app during my commutes to work and found that I was able to remain consistent with writing daily entries using both mediums, although what I enjoy about each one is different. When I can take my time, I prefer to write in my physical journal. When I’m on the go and get an idea that I’d like to jot down, I appreciate the accessibility of the Journal app on my phone.

Alternatively, you may opt to post your journal entries as blogposts or keep a private, offline journal on your computer.

There’s really no wrong answer. Choose what works for you!

Be honest.

There’s nothing more exhausting than masking in public and then coming home and masking some more in private.

Trust me, I’ve done it!

When I first started journaling for a brief period in 2021, I wrote my journal entries from the perspective of leaving behind an impressive posthumous legacy.

I wanted to produce a fancy, verbose primary resource that I thought someone would read and think to themselves, “Wow, she was really smart!”

Ugh. It was contrived and what I got was pretentious and tiresome. And eventually I stopped writing altogether.

Once I started opening up about my feelings in a genuine way through my writing, I was able to get so much more out of it and, to my surprise and delight, was able to overcome a number of difficult situations, heal a lot of my triggers and get to know myself in an authentic and genuine way.

Recognizing the fruit of these efforts, I was encouraged to keep going.

The more honest you are in your writing from the beginning, the more you’ll want to come back and write daily and, as a result, you’ll have a much better shot at experiencing the rewarding aspects that develop as you continue your practice.

Don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day or two.

Being gracious with yourself if you miss an entry or two is just as critical to producing a consistent daily journaling practice as it is to be honest.

If you miss a day or two, be gentle with yourself and take any negative feelings you have about having been away from the page as a sign that you actually really just want to get back to writing.

The sooner you do – and you can talk about how you felt about being away for as long as you were – the sooner you’ll feel better and the sooner you can get back to writing consistently.

Besides, we all need to take a break every now and again, even from things we enjoy doing.

One of the worst things you can do is take the desire to be consistent as a weapon you use to punish yourself if you happen to miss a journal entry.

If you do, you’ll associate those negative feelings with the practice of journaling itself and that won’t help you create consistency.

If anything, it’ll just keep you away for longer assuming you come back at all.

So take it easy and have fun journaling!