Journaling is such a refreshing habit to start.  Journaling has many positive effects that like improving your mood, your stress, keeping your memory sharp, and inspiring creativity in your writing.  From reflecting on your day, recording goals, or just using writing prompts are all creating things to use when journaling.  

How do you start, what do you use, or how do you remind yourself each day? 

For me I use the Day One app.  Day One is a great tool to start journaling with because they make it so easy to do on a daily basis.  They give you reminders, prompts, and help you recall memories on certain days after you’ve been journaling for a while.   Even on the days you don’t feel like writing you can snap a picture and write a short caption to describe the day’s happenings instead.  The photo will be tagged with the day and location.  In fact, each journal entry stores the location so you can have a reminder of both what you did and  where you did it.  All the locations show up on a maps tab for you to see at a glance.   

If you’re feeling ambitious then you can use one of their random daily prompts and start writing about a random topic.  This  exercise challenges your creative mind to think about a random topic  and use free writing  skills to describe it, keeping your creative juices flowing every day.  Some days may be harder than others and not all prompts you will like, but if you’re stuck in writer's block they are a great resource.

Another feature that is great is after you have been journaling for a while memories start to appear and remind you of what you did on a particular day in past years.  You can use those to remember some good times or maybe some growth times.  Take a piece of the  memories and write  an update in today's journal entry.  The journal has quick formatting tools for headlines and quotes for placing your memories in your current entry.  

If you get the premium subscription you can have the benefit of uploading more than one photo per day, have multiple journals, and have everything sync with all your devices to the cloud.  You can have a personal journal, a writing prompts journal, vacation journals, and list journals.  You could even have a journal for each of your kids for quotes and photos of their childhood years.  This comes in handy for one of the best features.  Printing.  At the end of the year you can select to have your journal or journals printed in a nice hardback.  The dates, locations, photos, and entries will all be there.  If you start early you can have 18 great books for your kids that aren’t just stuck on some hard drive, they will be printed.   

“In a fast paced world where your kids move 100mph you can quickly snap a picture to remember even the crazy days.”

I hope you start journaling, it’s a fun way to remember the days and years and see how you grew through them.  The benefit of having it on your phone is even better.  In a fast paced world where your kids move 100mph you can quickly snap a picture to remember even the crazy days.