Digital journaling: how to start

By the Bloome editors · Updated 4 September 2026

Anyone searching for digital journaling is usually already torn between a notebook and a screen. That's a fair thing to be torn about: a screen is easier to get distracted by than paper, and typing is faster than writing by hand, which isn't automatically an advantage. Below is what digital journaling does and doesn't solve compared to paper, what you write on your first day, why most people quit again after a few days, how long a session should take, and when to read anything back. If you want the bigger picture first, that's on the page about journaling.

What makes digital different from paper

The biggest difference is where your journal is. A paper journal lives in a drawer, on your bedside table or in a bag, so you have to go and get it first. On the evening you need it, it's often somewhere else, and that's why it so often doesn't happen. Your phone is already in your hand. That makes digital journaling easier to start. It doesn't work better, it's just easier to begin.

That low barrier cuts both ways. The same phone you journal on also has everything you were trying to get away from: a notification, a chat, or the urge to look something up. A notebook doesn't have that problem, because it can't do anything except be blank. So when you write on a screen, there's always a door open a crack to something else.

There's one more difference, and it's the easiest to miss. Writing by hand is slower than typing, and that isn't only a downside. Your hand can't keep up with your thoughts, so you choose your words more carefully without trying. For a lot of people, that choosing is already part of working through what happened. Typing is faster, but journaling isn't about speed. So digital journaling is a different thing from writing on paper, and it gives you something different too.

What you write on day one

The first page of a journal feels awkward for almost everyone. A blank space makes you feel straight away that something important has to go on it. It doesn't, and it helps to let that feeling go right away. On day one, write down what actually happened that day, even if it was nothing special. What you ate, how you slept, a conversation that stuck with you, being annoyed at the train. Your first day doesn't have to go deep.

If you'd rather not start with a blank space, use a set question. That works especially well on day one. A question turns "where do I start" into "what's my answer". At the bottom of this page there's a link to thirty questions like that, one for each day. Then you don't have to come up with something at the moment it's hardest.

Why most people quit after three days

With digital journaling, day three is a strikingly common point to give up, and it has little to do with discipline. The first two days mostly run on curiosity: what keeping it up feels like, how the app works, what your page looks like. By day three that curiosity has usually run out. Then the only question left is whether it's worth it without that. For a lot of people the answer is still no, because after three days there isn't enough to read back and see a difference.

There's something else that comes with a screen. A notebook you haven't opened for a few days doesn't hold it against you: it just sits there. An app remembers whether you've shown up, and some apps send you a notification about it. That notification is meant to help, but for a lot of people it feels more like a chore you've left. A chore like that is easier to ignore than to pick up. If you open the app again after one missed day, you usually get back into it. If you let a second missed day follow, you're often done.

How long a session should take

A journaling session doesn't have to last a set time. The idea that it has to take at least ten or fifteen minutes is exactly what stops a lot of people on a busy evening. On most days a few sentences are enough, about what happened and how it felt. That usually takes two to five minutes. It sounds short, but it's the time you actually have on an ordinary weeknight. And a habit like that lasts longer than one that only works on a quiet Sunday.

A longer session is fine too, and on a day with a lot to process, writing more often really helps. So short isn't better than long. It's just that today's length isn't the bar for tomorrow. If you wrote for twenty minutes yesterday and three lines today, you haven't done less. You've just had a different day.

What you read back, and when

Reading back only tells you something once there's enough to spot a pattern, and a few days isn't enough for that. After two to three weeks there's usually enough to see whether something keeps coming back, and not just what happened on one evening. That's a good time to read back for the first time. If you read back after two days, you're mostly reading your mood from those two days, and that doesn't say much.

What to look for when you read back is less obvious than it sounds. Looking for something deep doesn't help much. Instead, check whether the same topic, the same annoyance or the same feeling keeps coming back, without you noticing it at the time. That's where a written journal, on paper or on a screen, beats your memory. Your memory mostly keeps what stood out, a journal keeps everything.

What digital journaling doesn't solve well yet: you can't simply take a run of typed entries out of the app you wrote them in as a file. If you want to keep your text somewhere else, you still have to copy and paste it yourself. That's no reason not to start. But it's good to know before you've got months of writing you'd also like to keep somewhere else.

Thirty journal prompts, for when you'd rather start with a question than a blank screen