The best app for journaling ✍️

Wonder Tools ✨ Why I use Day One, plus other new journaling resources

Day One is the best simple, easy-to-use, free app for digital journaling. Apple is launching its own new app, Journal, this fall. Other similar apps abound. Day One, though, remains my recommendation if you’re starting a new journal. Read on for five of Day One’s most valuable features, along with its limitations and alternatives. Bonus: read my new Medium piece on 9 distinct approaches to journaling, which I wrote to accompany this post.

Get your journal printed as a book 📖

I like that Day One lets me order a physical book with my journal entries. I do it every two years or so. A paper book feels more substantial than a digital file.

• One recent journal I ordered cost about $40. That was 25% off the full price, a discount I earned by being a Day One paid subscriber at $35/year.

• Books are 5.5" by 8.5” — they start at $20 for 50 color pages — plus 10 cents per additional page. They’re capped at 400 pages. I like the printing quality.

• A notable limitation: even though Day One works on Android, iOS, Mac and online, you can only order books from an iOS device.

Include audio and video 🎧🎥

Day One lets you record audio entries. It saves your sound and automatically transcribes it into text. Years from now you’ll enjoy reading or listening to your recordings. In years past I used only text in my journals. Now I like the surprise of encountering a little audio or video snippet when I look back on something I may not have fully captured in words.

• I like that I can record directly into the app, or I can upload other recordings, like my children’s music performances. I like to record conversations with family members to preserve their thoughts and voices.

• I appreciate being able to add photos along with these audio recordings. In addition to audio, I occasionally add video snippets.

Create multiple journals 📚

I like maintaining multiple journals so I can print just my personal journal and keep my work notes in a separate thread. I can also set up distinct templates for each journal to provide simple entry points.

• In addition to my primary personal journal, I keep a book diary, or a BOB (book of books). Each entry is about a recent read, with a few thoughts, quotes and pictures of key passages, photos or illustrations.

• I have another journal about teaching, where I jot down observations, ideas, and adjustments for next time. It's helpful for incremental improvement.

Add to your journal with email or SMS 💬

Each journal gets a custom email address, so I can email a journal entry into Day One or forward an amusing email. Or I can text in a thought, quote or image. I can also use a shortcut on my laptop to type a journal entry while I’m working in another program. I appreciate how easy it is to add entries.

Import social media automatically w/ IFTTT 🦄

You can connect Day One to online services like YouTube, Instapaper, Instagram, and Spotify with a tool called IFTTT. Read more about why IFTTT is so useful.

• Example: when I like a video on YouTube, IFTTT triggers an action to create a new Day One entry with that YouTube video in my resonance journal, where I collect online things I like to review, reflect on, or write about later.

• Here are the IFTTT recipes I use for YouTube, Spotify, Twitter, and Instapaper. You can also create a Day One entry when you post to Facebook.

Additional features ➕

• You can automatically add metadata to your journal entries to include your location, weather, the music playing on your laptop, and your step count.

• You can password-protect your journal.

• You can set up multiple reminders and prompts to nudge yourself to be consistent about writing.

• You can export a nice-looking PDF to back up your journal or print one or more entries.

Limitations

• Stagnant product. Updates have been rare and minor in recent years, so the software hasn’t improved as much as it did in its early days.

• No Windows version. Windows users can use Day One’s Web version, or an alternative app like Life Journal, which syncs with Day One, recommended by Rohit Kamat.

• Book printing works only on iOS, not on Android, and not on Day One Mac.

• Weak built-in templates. There are a few templates built-in for starting journal entries, but they’re simple and haven’t improved much since 2019.

• No Web sharing. An earlier version of Day One allowed me to share links to individual posts with family members. Now sharing means sending a PDF of a post or text. Given that Day One was acquired in 2021 by Automattic, which owns Wordpress and Tumblr, I’m surprised that the Web sharing capabilities are so weak and haven’t improved since the acquisition.

• Limited design options. I’m happy with text, bullets, links, and photos. But if you like the fancier design options you have with Medium, Notion, or other new online services — for embedded content, for example— Day One isn’t quite there.

Pricing 💰

I pay for the $35 annual subscription. I originally used Day One for free. I now pay, mainly to benefit from the following premium features:

• multiple journals, multiple devices

• multiple photos and videos per post

• voice recording and voice-to-text transcription

• 25% book-printing discount

The free version is great for basic journaling unless you need the premium features.

Alternatives

Craft isn’t a journaling app per se, but it’s terrifically designed for writing and it’s easy to create, organize and share entries to make a diary with it. Here’s an example of a travel journal template and a resulting travel diary.

Diarium is a simple journal app that works on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. It’s easy to use and costs less than $10 on each platform for lifetime pro access.

Diarium can automatically pull in your content from social & fitness platforms

Prefer a paper journal?

I bought this 5-Minute Journal to support a daily paper writing habit. I like its hardcover form factor and appreciate that it has space to respond to three simple prompts each morning:

• “I am grateful for…”

• "What would make today great…”

• “Affirmations: I am…”

• In the evening, the prompts invite you to reflect on the day’s highlights

It’s undated, so you can start whenever and pause as needed. It has a sturdy hard cover and thick paper, with space for six months of daily entries. It’s a splurge at $25 compared with the $6 blank notebook I usually use to journal or sketch out ideas. Read about other new paper journaling tactics in my new Medium post.

What’s your journaling tip? 👇

p.s. Create something new! I’m delighted to invite you to apply to join the new cohort of the 100-day Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program I lead at the City University of New York’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. It’s fully-online, so you can participate from anywhere in the world. Read more and apply.

Catch up on last week’s post 👇

Say hi to Pi 🐒