Daily Journalling with Pen and Paper in 2025
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Since mid-2024, I have been actively using journals and doing note taking physically more and more. Over a year and a half later, I feel that I've settled on a system that works relatively okay for me.
Main Setup
It mainly starts with the pocket sized Field Notes as my standard everyday notebook for writing stuff down. I don't write in them absolutely every single day, but when I do I tend to do use it in two ways.
- Short-form notes: Anything from a single sentence or something to remind myself to look at something in the future to a page or so about a particular topic in a fairly low barrier format.
- Todo list: if I have something I want to do / get done, I draw a empty checkbox, write the task and then check it off when it is completed. With this, if something has been sitting unchecked for awhile it is a good indicator if I actually need / want to do that task and if I just want to drop it, I put an X in the box instead.
I also have an A5 sized journal I picked up at Barnes and Noble for days I want to write more stream of conciousness or longer form content. Similarly I feel it comes and goes when I wish to write long-form so I may go weeks without writing a new entry in the A5 journal or I may write multiple within a week.
Finally I also have a 5-year journal that I write a sentence or two daily to preserve either some wins of what I did that day. This I started in January of 2025 so it is going to be interesting to go into 2026, 2027, etc up till the end of December 2029 and see what things I was up to on a given day.
Highlights
One thing I would say that is a benefit is what I would call taking distraction out of the process. Journalling physically has been beneficial and let me go write something down and let my mind wander without the forever consumption distractions of social media, notifications, among other things. This feels similar to when I read books either physically or on my Kindle of I want to be intentional with the hobby and not be half thinking about one thing while I have a YouTube video open on another screen.
Also another small thing is being able to go back and re-read the content. Flipping through my past notes in my Field Notes to get a sense of where I was through a given week and over time I will start collecting more and more notebooks and be able to go through them and see what I was up to at any given point.
Not a Full Detox
Digital tools though still do have their uses in my life. For scheduling with my friends, family, and work, I still heavily rely on Google Calendar to keep track of events. As well, I do still use apps such as Apple Notes or Obsidian for digital notetaking where I may want to keep things for longer stretches of time like lists of content I've watched over a given year or stuff that I want to have on hand when I may not have all of my journals with me somewhere.
Conclusion
Overall it's been shaped into a fairly small system and I think that it being small is a good mindset. Rather than having an extremely strict system, I can let it slowly evolve over time and in general I want the least amount of barriers to be able to write and jot down things whether for a small blurb of something I want to go back to or musings about stuff in my life at a given time. As I said previously, I may not use all of these tools every day, but having them there when I want to use them has been beneficial.