Human mind is complicated and beautiful. Did you know that on any given day, there are 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts that cross your mind? That’s mind-boggling. It’s no wonder that we are forgetful beings. That also shows how vital journaling apps can be. A place where you can jot down important thoughts and ideas or how your day went by.
A few months ago, I started meditation using an app called Headspace. One trick I learned there was the process of filtering thoughts based on importance and priority. Then came the act of concentrating on positive thoughts and moods instead of negative events in life. Journaling is a great way to note all these thoughts and life's events.
- Evernote uses cookies to enable the Evernote service and to improve your experience with us. Connect your favorite apps. Gratitude Journal. Keep a list of what makes you feel grateful, and the people you’re thankful for having in your life.
- Penzu is a free online diary and personal journal focused on privacy. Easily keep a secret diary or a private journal of notes and ideas securely on the web.
- A product concept I created for Evernote.
- Mar 17, 2021 Touted as the world’s most widely-used productivity app, Evernote is an be used simply as a notetaking app or can be customized to be your GTD app of choice — among other things. Download it here.
Use it a few times a week to 'scan' my documents, receipts, book excerpts - whatever I want to keep as a digital file. Then I 'share' to my Google Drive to store in the cloud, 'share' to iBooks or GoodReader to have on my phone, 'share' to CudaSign if I need to sign it first, and/or 'send' as an email attachment, and I love that.
With these thoughts in mind, let’s take a look at some journaling apps for the Windows platform.
1. Journey
Journey is a light-weight journal app that is available on every platform along with Windows. You begin by creating entries for each day. Adding photos, audios, and videos is easy, but only one at a time. Journey uses Google Drive to backup data and sync it across platforms.
The app will automatically add weather and location to your entries. You can also add smileys to note how you were feeling on that day, or about that moment. I like the timeline and calendar feature that allows me to go back in time and find or rediscover and relive all those moments easily.
While Android and iOS apps are free, Windows app will cost you $19.99. There is also a cloud plan priced at $2.49. That will unlock dark theme, daily inspiration quotes, unlimited entries via email, Zapier integration, and more ways to customize entries.
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Read More2. Journalist
Journalist is a Windows-only journaling app that comes with a drawing tool. People who like to draw or sketch their emotions and feelings on paper will love it. What’s more? You can join up to 4 papers to create a scrolling video of sorts. It supports various video and GIF formats. Adding text, images, audio, and videos are easy. Data is backed up to OneDrive.
Journalist acts as a scrapbook of sorts which adds new ways to maintain a diary and log your life. The ability to draw and sketch using a variety of pens and colors gives more freedom to be expressive. However, it also makes the process equally time-consuming. It's definitely more suitable for artists.
You can also record voice to narrate your life’s story which is pretty cool. On the flip side, it lacks advanced features like calendar, timeline, and auto geo-tagging. Maybe in a future version? Fingers crossed.
Download Journalist3. Glimpses
Glimpses is a free journaling app for Windows that’s packed with features. You can add tags to your entries for easily categorizing them by events or places. You can also mark certain entries as favorite which makes them easy to search. The calendar and timeline features makes reliving old memories fun and easy.
There are a few interesting writing modes available that I haven’t seen in other journaling apps. Typewriter mode arrives with a custom font and makes clicking noises with each keystroke as if you were using a real typewriter. Then there is the dark and distraction-free mode. On the downside, no reminders and you can’t add audio files as of now, and they are still working on Android and iOS apps. Well, it’s free, so you can’t complain much.
Download GlimpsesAlso on Guiding Tech
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Read More4. Evernote
Evernote is probably one of the best note-taking apps, but that’s not all it can do. A lot of fans are using it as a journaling app too. How? Evernote supports images, audio, video files, PDF, and more. You can also record audio or take images directly with it.
How to begin? You create a heading called journal and then create one notebook for each year. Now create one note for each day. You can then tag them for further sanity. Evernote works on all platforms, integrates with third-party apps like Google Calendar (birthday events?), Zapier, IFTTT, much more.
If you are already using Evernote for taking notes and whatnot, using it as a journaling app for Windows makes a lot of sense. One less app to worry about.
Download Evernote5. Diarium
Diarium takes a different approach. The app integrates with Windows’ system calendar, and for each day, you can create an entry. Text, images, audio, video, files, or drawings; anything goes. You can also import entries from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even Google Fit. That means everything you do, that app will log it automatically. You can view all of that on a map.
Available on both Android and iOS, Diarium is probably the only journal app that doesn’t have a subscription model in place. Instead, you can buy individual apps for a one-time fee of $19.99 (often available for less during a sale).
Download DiariumDear Diary
Journaling is a great way to note important dates and events. They are also useful for jotting down ideas. That flashing moment when you have a stroke of genius. That one idea that could possibly change your world and your life. If you carry a laptop with you at all times, one of the above Windows journaling apps will prove helpful.
Next up: Do you also use an iPhone? Click on the link below to learn more about 4 journaling apps for iOS platform.
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An in-depth
One of the best things you can do to clear your head and to improve your level of self-awareness is to journal. There is nothing quite like being able to empty out your thoughts in a place that is for you and you alone. Journaling allows you to reflect and then adjust your plan for tomorrow and beyond.
At first glance, you may think it takes too much time to journal. Sure, if you decide to journal on paper that can be a valid point (The Five Minute Journal makes it easier as do several other books designed specifically for journaling). The good news is you also have the option to use technology to create a journal entry in just a matter of seconds.
While there are dedicated applications for journaling available, there is one app that many people already use that can be adapted for journaling quickly and easily.
And that app is Evernote.
Why Evernote?
Evernote has several built-in features that help simplify journaling. Here are a few reasons why it is my journaling app of choice.
First off, Evernote is accessible from a variety of devices. This means you can begin your entry at the office for work tracking and then at home you can add to that entry to discuss other home and life matters, all without skipping a beat.
Second, Evernote has location awareness built in. So if you’re traveling, you’ll get to see where you were when writing entries and what time of year you were there.
Third, you don’t just need to do written entries in Evernote. You can also do audio entries or use an image to represent (or go along with) a written entry. This versatility makes it a real journaling powerhouse.
Finally, Evernote has incredible search options. So if you want to look back at entries when you decided to try to become a morning person to see if it’s worthwhile for you (Hint: it often doesn’t make a difference to your productivity), then you could use tags for entries or simply search the text in notes based on “morning person” or “early riser”. You can also search images that have words in it, thanks to Evernote’s amazing OCR (optical character recognition) technology. If you want a journaling app that can find whatever you’ve written with just a few keystrokes, Evernote has got you covered.
How to Start
If you’ve been looking to start the journaling habit, it is important to start simple so you can build momentum and see your progress. Let’s go through what you need to do to set up an ongoing journaling setup in Evernote.
Evernote Journal App Review
Step 1: Create a Notebook for the Current Year
Creating a notebook in Evernote is pretty basic stuff, so all you need to do is create a notebook that you’ll use exclusively for journaling. Ideally, you should name your notebook with the year of the journal first (as numbers sort higher in Evernote than letters), but you can always place an asterisk or an underscore in front of the notebook name if you don’t want to go that route.
If you want to create separate notebooks for each month, you can do that as well. But I must warn you that can get pretty unwieldy and you can only have a limited number of notebooks in Evernote. I recommend you go with one notebook per journal year and just take it from there.
Step 2: Use Separate Notes for Each Entry
Each journal entry should have its own note. If you want to have multiple entries per day, just edit the note you used earlier in the day. This keeps it simple and clean, so that the notebook doesn’t get too overwhelming.
I recommend using the date to name each entry as this keeps the notebook cleaner. If you would like to title them differently, then you’ll still know when each entry was created thanks to Evernote’s “Note Created” field. You can always edit that field if you want (as you can see in the image below) but I think it’s best to leave it be. The “Note Updated” field is another nice feature in that it tells you when you last edited the note. This is particularly useful if you add to that entry throughout the day.
Don’t forget that you can use your voice to take notes into your Evernote app if you want to speed up the process – at least on the Mac and iOS. Speech to text on both of these operating systems works quite well in Evernote. Just be sure to go back and re-read what was transcribed so that nothing gets lost in the translation.
Step 3: Create a Reminder Note
Online Journal
If you’re new to this whole journaling thing, then you’ll want to keep yourself on top of the ritual. That means finding a way to trigger when to do your next entry. If you’re not using features in a task management application or calendar to act as a daily reminder, then Evernote can help you out on this front.
As you can see in the image above, Evernote allows you to set a single reminder in a note but it won’t make it repeating. That means that when you create a note to act as reminder to do your journal entry, you’ll only be able to set the reminder for one date.
So what I do is set it for the next day (after all, I’m already in Evernote and ready to go with today’s entry) and set the ideal time for me to be reminded. I like to journal before bed as part of my evening routine, so my time is set to 11:00 PM. Then every time I go into Evernote to write a new entry, I simply go into this reminder note and set a reminder for the next day.
Again, it’s not the most elegant of solutions, but it works. There are plenty of other ways to create this reminder. But if you want to get used to the idea of going into Evernote daily to write in your journal, this will definitely help you do that.
Step 4: Write on
The last step is both the simplest and the hardest: write in your Evernote journal notebook every day. No matter what. Build that habit. Your future self will thank you for it.
(As an added bonus, you’ll also get better at using Evernote!)
This is just the beginning of using Evernote for your journaling habit. Once you’ve got this process down, you’ll be able to find new ways to make your Evernote journal even better. Here are just a few of those enhancements:
- Create a menu Shortcut to make finding your journal faster.
- Create appropriate tags so that you can highlight milestones in your journal.
- Create a Journaling Notebook Stack so that you can combine yearly journal into one convenient location.
- Create automation routines in IFTTT so that some journal entries pretty much write themselves!
I’ll dive deeper into these topics and other ways to make Evernote an even better journaling tool in a future post. Until then, start with the basics and keep writing in your journal every day.
And start doing that today!
One of the key components of TimeCrafting is completing a Daily Log, which is basically a fancy name for journaling. You can learn more about other components of the productivity method that I’ve created and we teach at Productivityist by clicking here.
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