A journal is a documentation of our experiences, feelings, and opinions. Those who keep journals can go back and self-reflect, note their past views, and experience personal growth.
While some traditionalists stick to the centuries-old pen-and-paper journaling method, many iPhone users who love documenting their experiences in a journal have turned to Apple’s Journal app.
If you are only finding out about the Journal app and looking to get started, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s talk about how to use the Journal app if you are a beginner.
Much like a traditional journal, the Journal app allows you to capture your ideas, memories, thoughts, and desires, formatted in an easily accessible, structured format.
It contains several features, including customizable templates, text entries, and image attachments.
If you want to document your experiences and reflect on them later, the Journal app is one of the easiest modern ways to do so.
Setting Up the Journal App
Any iPhone or iPad device with iOS 17.2 or later will have the Journal app pre-installed.
But if your device is older, you can easily download it from the App Store by searching for “Journal” and tapping the Get button to start installing it.
Once the installation is complete, open the app on your home screen to get started. To use Journal, you will need to sign in with your Apple ID or create a new account.
This is important because once you create an entry, it will sync across all of your Apple devices, allowing you to access it regardless of where you access the Journal app next.
Additionally, you can customize the app by going to Settings and checking the Journal tab, where you can define aspects like font size and theme.
You can also adjust notification preferences here to suit your particular needs.
Creating Journal Entries
Now that you’ve set up the set up the Journal app, you can start documenting your first entry. The process is simple:
Open the Journal app and tap on the (+) button to create a template for your new entry.
You can select one of the available templates from the list of options that best suits the type of entry you are creating.
Or you can enable Journal Suggestions in the Settings app by giving it access to personal data such as location, photos, contacts, and more.
If you ever want to jot down your thoughts without any suggestions, select New Entry at the top.
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Tap on the text field and begin free-flowing your thoughts. Don’t get hung up on spelling, grammar, or how to break up paragraphs since journals are meant for your eyes only (unless you choose to share it).
If you’re not certain what to write about in your entry, look online for journaling and diary prompts to give you some ideas of topics to work with.
Tap the camera icon if you would prefer to enhance your entries with photos. You can either use this to take a brand new photo to add to your journal entry or attach existing ones for additional context
You can also add voice memos to capture vocal recordings of your thoughts that you may want to transfer to text later
Journal Organization
Entering journal entries one after another can feel liberating and fun, but without proper organization, they may become a diluted collection of paragraphs, making it difficult to revisit specific entries in the future.
For instance, if you have 150 entries in a year and want to find one in which you talk about traveling, you would need to read through many entries to finally find the one.
Therefore, organizing entries can help narrow future references and searches. When you create an entry, tag it with a relevant keyword such as “work,” “travel,” “family,” or “pet.”
You can denote every entry into a category type for even more organizational flexibility. One category example could be for work goals, another could be for a creative outlet, and so on.
When you return to find particular entries in the future, you can use the search function to look for particular tags, keywords, and dates.
Speaking of dates, if you know the date range in which a particular entry you are looking for was written, you can filter your search by that date range.
You can do this by clicking the calendar icon and choosing the start and end points to a particular date range.
Reminders
Sometimes, our days may get away from us, and we might completely forget to enter our daily journal log.
Luckily, you can enable notifications from the Notifications tab in the iPhone’s Settings for the Journal app.
You can also set daily reminders, which will prompt you to write a new entry. You can set the reminders icon and select the best time that works for you so that you can stay consistent with your journal goals.
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Additional Journal Features
If the pre-built journal templates do not suit your needs, you can create custom ones from the Templates tab in the Settings.
Here, you can define where the sections and prompts you are looking to include are placed, generating an ideal template that suits your needs more readily.
If you want to share your journal entries, you can export them to PDF format for sharing or printing.
All you need to do is tap the export icon, then select “Export as PDF,” and select which entries to export.
If you want to share the entry with friends or family members, you can tap the share icon, choose the entry to share, and select the method by which you’d like to share it.
If you are not keen on sharing and want to ensure that unwanted eyes do not land on your journal entries, you can protect the Journal app from being accessed unless a user can pass the Touch ID or Face ID checks. You can set these up in the Security tab of Settings.
The Bottom Line
The iPhone’s Journal app is an incredibly accessible and versatile tool for recording memories, feelings, reflections, and thoughts.
We hope this guide will help you on your journaling journey and that it becomes a meaningful daily activity that permits you to liberate your thoughts and reflect on them in the future.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comment section below.
