My Journals for 2025 and What I'm Using Them For

I've lost count of how many I have. But they all have a purpose, honest!

Scrolling through the Substack Notes app (which has become one of my favourite pastimes in the last week) I came across

Emily

and her newsletter piece entitled These Are the Journals I’m Using in 2025 - is four too many? I’d literally just uploaded my YouTube video with a very similar title but it had never occurred to me to actually write about all of my journals. So Emily, thank you for the inspiration - and no, four is definitely not too many!

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I’ve been a writer for a very long time now, two decades in fact, whether I called myself a writer back then is another story. It took me a long time to get used to carrying a notebook around me for when inspiration would strike. I read advice from other writers and they’d all say the same, use a notebook, but I ignored it. On reflection this was probably tied up in the fact that I didn’t consider myself a real writer back then. I thought I was being pretentious. *insert giant eyeroll here*

I would buy lots of notebooks (nothing has changed twenty years later). My favourites at the time were from the now defunct (at least in its original form) Paperchase, which I would purchase from the now defunct Borders bookshop. I’d get something for my baby boy who was in his car seat that I wheeled around, and a book and a journal for myself.

I still have those journals I purchased with my first baby. Most of them are unused. There are seven of them in the picture below, three of which still have their plastic wrappers on. The Beano one is fully covered in plastic, I’ve never even opened it. [Reminder: my son is now twenty-one!)

Once I did start carrying a journal around with me it wouldn’t be one of those fancy notebooks. Those fancy notebooks were saved for special occasions. I used one to document the pregnancy and birth of my daughter. And that was pretty much the only one I used. And the reason why I didn’t write in them - other than they were ‘too special’. Is because they weren’t easy to write in. They don’t lay flat and the paper is either really thin with really wide ruling or has no lines at all. It would take me many years to find the perfect journal for me. Now I go for paper weight/thickness - 120gsm specifically, how it sits when opened, A5 (mostly) and a hard cover.

Eventually I would encourage myself to have one notebook in my car, one by the side of my bed and a couple on my desk. The only thing was, I could never find what I’d written down when it came to writing my blog or my novel on the computer. Which of the four notebooks was it in?! I spent many lost hours trying to find pieces of writing.

And that is how I came to only have one notebook that I carried everywhere with me. Which I called my writing journal.

Then I wanted to be more productive so added my planning journal. Then I wanted to record all the books I’d read so added a reading journal. Then I did The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and added a journal for morning pages. And so on.

So yes, I have gone back to having more than one journal. But each journal now has a specific purpose and my main one is always my writing journal. Always.

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This is a short video showing the writing journals I’ve completed over the past six years.

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My current journal line up consists of the following:

Morning Pages (or more specifically, my Evening Pages)

I have an A4 spiral bound, very thick notebook that I use specifically for morning pages that I’ve been using since the beginning of 2024. I started them because we were reading The Artist’s Way here on my Substack. The rules Julia Cameron gave were three A4 pages every single morning without fail. I tried to do that but it didn’t work for me. So now I do one page, every evening before I go to sleep. I write about my day, my anxieties, things that have ‘bothered me’ (which often turn out to be nothing when I write them down) and things that have gone well. Anything that is there uppermost in my mind that is likely to spiral unless I examine it in pen and ink. It really does work for a good night’s sleep without things spiralling and keeping me awake all night. I highly recommend.

Planning Journal

I added a planning journal to the mix some years ago and have never looked back. It evolved quite significantly in the early years until I settled on a routine I stuck to that really improved my productivity. I credit both my writing and planning journals for significantly helping me with projects and actually getting them completed (for example, projects such as my YouTube channel becoming monetised, starting my mentoring club, this Substack newsletter, my ebook workbook about journaling and my non-fiction book proposal).

I have mixed it up again this year. Previously I’d use an A5 squared or dotted notebook and a white A3 sheet of paper covered in post-its that was on my note board behind me. Now I use an A4 2025 planner (week and notes system) from Paper Republic, which I have inside a petrol blue Portfolio, and no longer use the A3 sheet. I’m still tweaking the process but I’m loving it so far.

This video shows me setting up the Portfolio with the 2025 planner.

Writing Journal

Currently I’m using an A5 (XL) 120gsm lined notebook from Paper republic in The Dybdahl reef design. It lays flat which I love but is not as chunky as the notebooks in my little vertical video above. It goes inside the Grand Voyager leather cover from Paper Republic alongside my private notebook (also reef design but dotted), my Dopamine Journal (also reef but which has blank pages) and my Script notebook (a basic lined journal) which I use for writing out the voiceovers for my videos.

Reading Journal

My current reading journal is a Leuchtturm1917. It is A5 and hardback, it lays flat and has 120gsm paper. I love writing in it, I love recording the books I’ve read and really thinking about what I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy. I’ve written more about my reading journal and why I started it and how it’s helping me recover from burnout here:

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Literary Agent Journal

This is just a simple thin journal from Paper Republic (as with my script notebook mentioned above) where I include all the literary agents I’m contacting. Previously I had the list in my writing journal but, when I got a new one I’d lose the notes I’d made. So now I have a dedicated one for this project. I could do all this on an excel spreadsheet, of course, but honestly I prefer pen and paper.

Dopamine Journal

I mentioned this above but this is something I record in after writing my Evening Pages. It’s basically one line a day where I try and write something positive that’s happened to me during the day I’ve just had. Something lovely to look back on.

Diary

Just a regular diary for appointments and so on. Nothing groundbreaking.

Extras

My script journal, as mentioned above, my really private journal inside the Grand Voyager from Paper Republic and notes for my novel using an A4 dotted notebook which goes inside the Portfolio from Paper Republic.

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And that’s it. All I have left to say is, if you’d like my workbook on how I use my writing journal and how it significantly helped me in my writing life, you can find that here.