How I use Notion as a Daily Journal
I don’t recommend journaling to anyone because I myself don’t do it. The process has always been seen as a mindfulness activity, yet, I think the biggest benefit of journaling is documentation.
I was sold on the idea of intentional documentation by Nathaniel Drew. I find myself not remembering my previous days and work, so keeping a record of my daily activities helps me reflect. It also feels good to be able to see concrete events that have happened in my life.
In the book How to Decide by Annie Duke, she mentions that life documentation can help prevent hindsight bias because we keep an accurate record of our knowledge at all times.
and if you create content (write articles, produce videos, etc), documenting your life can help you uncover many stories. Matthew Dicks is a strong advocate for writing a daily “story of the day” to keep a record of your daily activities. When you are in need of a story, simply browsing through your previous daily stories, will help uncover some.
So, my version of “journaling” is aimed at documenting my life. To keep an accurate log of my daily activities and habits and less mindfulness. Although, there is nothing stopping you from combining the two.
Like every repeatable activity, I like to systemize the process. It makes it smoother and easier to pull the data out later.
If I had written down my “story of the day” in a physical notebook. To view those stories later, I would have to flip through pages of the notebook to find them. On Notion, I could simply change the view and be able to view all of my stories at once.
So, I think there is a lot of benefit in systemizing the journaling process which is the main focus of this article.
Let’s first start with defining what I want to keep track of in life.
Create Trackable Metrics
This is the main motivation for me to systemize the process because when I did this in a notebook, I found it hard to see all of my data at once. But because Notion pages are more structured than regular paper, I first have to get clear on what it is I want to track.
For me, that is my habits, sleep hours, and various daily summaries (like story of the day ). I put them in as properties of my daily journal pages, like so.
But having all these properties on the top of the page makes it tedious and seems like a lot of work. Can you imagine waking up and having to enter all that information?
In truth, I enter information into this journal at different times of the day, in the morning, throughout the day, and before bed. So, I like for my journal page to reflect this too.
The first I do is to hide all the properties I don’t want to see in the morning. This means I would hide everything except for “Sleep Hours”, like so.
It starting to look a lot cleaner. Using Notion’s template feature, I can then automatically populate this page with the structure that I want, which is just splitting the page into three main parts.
I like to use the mornings to set the tone for the day, which just means, my morning section follows a more traditional journal approach.
Then, I would use the “throughout the day” section as a place for me to enter in any thoughts
I don’t track most of these things because I think they are temporary. I use this area as a central location for all my thoughts throughout the day.
Lastly, I open up the journal before bed to log all my information for the day.
This is where I start entering information that I want to keep track of. Remember those page properties that I set up at the top of the page? Using Self-Referencing Pages, I can edit those properties at the end of the page instead of the top.
To me, this workflow feels more natural instead of having to enter all the information at the top.
The best part of this approach is that it is completely customizable. You could take this template and track completely different things, you could even have a space in here for Morning Pages if you wanted to.
Final Thoughts
I have been using this system almost every day for the past year or so and it has given me tremendous value. Documenting my life daily is a big change to my life.
And doing this in Notion gives me an instant high-level view. Like this :
Journaling is a highly personal activity which is why I did not dive deeper into explaining my journaling process. I just wanted to show the benefits of systemizing it.
If you think this might help you, I have the Notion template here.
I also have an in-depth walkthrough, including how I built it, here.
I hope that helps.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. You might be interested in my other Notion related articles
