10 Types of Journals to Help You Easily Obtain Your Goals

Journals & Journaling

There are many types of journals you can use to achieve your goals when building your journaling habits.

In my Morning Journaling Routine post, I described the importance of morning journaling. It can help you plan your day or help you work through important issues you have been dealing with. It’s also a way to start your day with gratitude. 

If you are anything like me, when you decide to start journaling, you will get caught up in what type of journal to buy. You’ll even buy several journals and not really know which one to use or how to start.

In theory, when you buy more than one type of journal, you could use the type of journal that applies to the way you want to journal for that day’s session. Again, in theory. I have found this doesn’t really work. It caused me to get bogged down trying to decide which journal to use. 

10 Types of Journals

The Classic Journal

– This is the basic format journal that is simply lined where you can write your journal entry however you choose. Your entry can be whatever length you want it to be and you can skip days if you choose. This type of journal is simply a medium for you to record your thoughts as you please. 

Gratitude Journals

– This is my favorite type of journal. My morning journaling routine starts with gratitude. I use a digital Gratitude journal that I created. A gratitude journal is a place for you to write down things in your life you are thankful for. Things that make you happy and feel appreciative. It’s a way to start your day on the right foot. 

Line a Day Journals

– Clearly, this is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a journal where you write down only one line a day. There are many journals like this one available on Amazon. It gives you blank lines where you simply write a short entry about your day. Usually, it’s only a sentence or two maximum. If you use a blank journal not dedicated to a line a day, your entry should still be short and shouldn’t take up much space on each page. You could even use a calendar to record your line a day entry. 

Prayer Journals

– This type of journal is a place you can write your prayers, a scripture from the bible for the day that you want to focus on, who you are praying for, a gratitude list, etc. This type of journal is where you spend time with God. It also gives you a place to reflect on your prayers and the people you are praying for.

Travel Journals

– Using a travel journal is a great way to document trips you take and memories you make while you are traveling. You could use one journal per trip or have a general travel journal for all of your trips. There are so many different things you could write about in a travel journal. For instance, you could write about how you traveled (air, car, etc), foods you ate, places you visited, people you traveled with, how you felt about the trip, etc. The possibilities are endless. You could also attach plane or train tickets, pictures, and receipts from places you went to memorialize your trips.

Vision Journals

– Unless you’ve had your head in the sand you’ve probably heard of a vision board. A vision journal is essentially the same principle except it helps you to form your vision. You can set it up to only have one goal per page. From there, you would write words, add pictures, or if you’re artistic, draw things that enable you to achieve your goal. When you do achieve your goal, go back to that entry and add the date you achieved your goal. 

Food Journals

– Self-explanatory and not really what I mean by journaling but still technically counts. In this type of journal you simply write down everything you eat and drink each day. You could also include calories and macronutrients if you want. More importantly, you would write about your feelings when you eat. This would help you sort out when you are emotionally eating or eating out of boredom. Some people may want to include the calorie content and so forth. It can also help to write down why you eat what you eat, how you felt about eating it, and things like that.

Dream Journals

– A dream journal is a place to write down the things that you dreamed about during the night. If you can remember them. I normally never can. However, I know some people are really into tracking their dreams. They like to try to figure out the meaning behind their dreams and what it means in their day-to-day life. Dreams can also help people figure out what is bothering them. If you want to track your dreams, you need to make a habit of writing in your dream journal every morning as soon as you wake so the dream is fresh and you don’t forget any of the details. Then you can, if you so choose, do research to try to figure out what the dream means and then journal that too.

Bullet Journals

– Not my jam but may work for you. I’m not artistic whatsoever and putting together a physical bullet journal and drawing pages. Nope. But if this is your thing and you love using pen and paper to create your to-do lists and goal trackers, go for it. Try to organize it with an index or table of contents (verbiage smerbiage) that you also have to create as you add to your journal pages. This will make it easier for you to find sections of your journal. Ideally, you should be able to glance at a page and know what it’s about. To make your bullet journal you will use lines and symbols along with colorful pens. There are tons of journal supplies like stencils and pens made just for the purpose of helping you create your perfect bullet journal.

Project Journals

– This is a journal to keep handy for anyone who regularly works on projects. By keeping a journal of each project you work on, you can track the actions taken, your results, and the outcome. This will help you make improvements on the project and will give you ideas in the future for ways to do things better the next time. 

Benefits

Journaling can be very therapeutic and can help you achieve your goals. There are so many different benefits to using a journal and as you see so many different purposes.

For me, having a different journal for different things I wanted to journal about wasn’t practical. It actually stopped me from journaling altogether. Plus, I wasn’t keen on keeping paper journals because I wanted privacy. I needed a better way.

The Begining of the Digital Journal Journey

Due to my need for various types of journals and the desire to keep my thoughts private, I decided to create what I wanted. This was the beginning of my digital planners and journals.

I have since created Fitness Trackers, Migraine Trackers, Christmas & Thanksgiving Planners, Gratitude Journal, and an Undated Planner that can be used as a stand-alone planner or the pages can be inserted into an existing planner.

All of these digital planners, trackers, or journals are for use with GoodNotes or Notability. The BEST part about these digital planners is that you can make them what you want. You can insert digital planner pages into a digital journal you have already purchased to add in an element that was missing. Plus, each digital page can be duplicated as many times as you need it to be. It’s the perfect solution.

Grab this free digital planner page insert below

If you want to journal to help work through a problem or to achieve your goals, keeping a digital journal that covers all of the different things you want to journal about is the most effective way to go about it. It’s also the safest way to store your thoughts and memories for the future in a more private, organized, and useful manner.

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