Pocket Reflections: Harnessing the Power of iPhone Journaling

Journaling Suggestions on iPhone is a feature of iOS itself, available to any journaling app that supports it. Your phone groups recent photos, workouts, places, music, and the people you have been in touch with into moments, and any journaling app that supports the feature can offer those moments as starting points for an entry. The grouping happens on the phone, and an app only receives a moment when you choose to add it to an entry. You control what the feature draws on in one place, Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling Suggestions, and the choice applies to every app that uses it.

Key Takeaways

• Set the data categories once, at Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling Suggestions; the choice applies to every app that uses the feature.
• Apple documents no per-contact exclusion. To stop one person appearing, remove those suggestions with touch and hold, or turn off Contacts and Photos.
• End-to-end encryption of Journal entries in iCloud depends on two conditions: two-factor authentication on and a passcode set.
• Run the seven-day plan: 5 minutes on day 1, three sentences a day for six days, 10 minutes on day 8 to switch off the categories that produced filler.

What the feature is and what it draws on

Apple's privacy page lists six categories a suggestion can be built from: activities (workouts, routes, heart rate), media use (podcasts and songs), contacts (whom you texted, called, or FaceTimed), photos (including names of people and pets), significant locations, and state of mind (moods logged in the Health app). When you first enable it, "limited historical data stored on your iPhone" is used to build the first set.

In the Journal app, Apple's user guide says to "browse the recommended suggestions or tap Recent to see suggestions sorted by date," then start an entry with all of a suggestion's attachments or preview them and pick which to keep. Touch and hold a suggestion to remove it.

Control what it draws on

Everything on the data side lives at Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling Suggestions. From Apple's documentation, that screen gives you:

• Category switches. Tap a category (Activity, Media, Contacts, Photos, Significant Locations, State of Mind) to turn it on or off. The choice "will apply to all apps" using the feature.
• Turn Off All stops suggestions for every journaling app; Clear History deletes suggestions not yet shared with an app.
• Prioritize Moments with Contacts. Uses a Bluetooth count of nearby mutual contacts to rank moments spent with people you know; names and locations are never shared.
• Apps Using Private Access. Lists the installed apps using the feature.

The Journal app's own settings are at Settings > Apps > Journal: turn off Show Suggested Moments so entries open blank, and tap Lock Journal to require Face ID, Touch ID, or your passcode. A reminder schedule is set inside the app, under Notifications above the Insights summary: Custom for a weekly schedule, Smart for reminders based on routine and location.

Privacy of suggestions

Three statements from Apple's privacy page set the boundaries. The grouping uses "on-device processing." "Only you can see your suggestions prior to sharing them," and an app receives a moment only when you add it to an entry. And with iCloud, "if you have default two-factor authentication and a passcode, your Journaling Suggestions are end-to-end encrypted when stored in iCloud, so even Apple can't read them." Journal entries themselves get the same guarantee under the same two conditions.

So "end-to-end encrypted" is accurate for Apple Journal with two conditions attached, and it covers Apple's storage only. Use a suggestion inside a third-party app and the entry is then governed by that app's own sync and storage.

Which app to use it in

The decision rule that falls out of the table:

• Fewest taps, Apple devices only: Apple Journal. It is installed already and the lock is one switch.
• Suggestions plus an archive you can open on Android or in a browser: Day One, with the categories set in iPhone Settings; Day One's guide says the feature is managed there.
• You do not want the phone proposing topics: tap Turn Off All and work from a prompt list. The daily journal prompt generator on this site gives you one a day without reading your photos.

When suggestions do not help

Every photo becomes a prompt. If you take a lot of pictures, Photos will dominate the list. Turn it off for a week and see whether the other categories give you fewer, better moments.

A person you would rather not think about keeps appearing. Apple documents controls per category and per suggestion only. There is no switch that excludes one contact. Remove those suggestions with touch and hold, turn off Contacts (and Photos if the person appears through pictures), and use Clear History for anything already generated.

Days with no data. No workout, no photos, no trips means nothing to group, and the feature goes quiet. My own first journaling prompt came from a teacher at school, "What I learned today ..." as the opening line of an entry, and I still think it is a great way to start visualising the day. A line like that needs no data at all.

In The Art of Journaling, chapter 9, I argue that "the most feature-rich option may not be the one that inspires you to write consistently." Suggestions remove the blank page on the days your phone has something to offer; they should not become the only way an entry begins.

A first-week plan

• Day 1 (5 minutes). Go through each category in the Settings screen and leave on only what you would be comfortable seeing proposed back to you. Then tap Lock Journal.
• Days 2 to 7 (3 minutes each). Accept one suggestion and write three sentences: what the moment was, what was on your mind, and one thing you would do differently or again. Suppose the suggestion is a 40-minute walk with a route map: "Walked the shore loop at lunch. Spent most of it rehearsing the afternoon meeting. Next time, leave the phone in the bag." On a day with no suggestions, start with "What I learned today ..."
• Day 8 (10 minutes). Read the seven entries back and switch off the categories that produced filler.

Why journaling suggestions on iPhone matter

The defaults decide what your phone proposes you write about unless you visit one Settings screen, and ten minutes there settles which of six data categories, from workouts to the people you texted, can appear in a journal entry in every app that supports the feature. Set deliberately, the feature answers the question that stops most first entries: what to write about. A started entry is the whole difference between a journal and an app you installed once.

Related reading

• Best journaling apps for iPad
• Private digital journaling platforms
• How to start digital journaling
• Journaling apps for mental health