The right journal prompt depends on two things you already know: how many minutes you have, and what kind of day it has been. With five minutes, take one prompt from the ordinary morning or evening set. With fifteen, take a pair. With thirty, take a whole situation set, and save the hardest questions for a night when you are steady. The 44 prompts below are sorted by situation so you can find the one that fits in the time it takes to open the notebook.

Three of them are quoted from my book 100 Self-Discovery Journaling Prompts and marked as such; the rest are written for this page. If you want the full hundred, the book is the long version of this list.

Quick Answer: Pick a prompt by time and situation. Five minutes: one prompt from the ordinary morning or evening set. Fifteen: a pair, one to notice and one to decide. Thirty: a full situation set. If you have a feeling and no words, take a hard-feelings prompt; if you have words and no feeling, take a sensory morning prompt; if the same thing has come up three days running, take an end-of-week pattern prompt.

Definition: A journal writing prompt is a question that decides the subject of an entry for you, so the entry starts.

Key Evidence: Kathleen Adams of the Center for Journal Therapy tells new journal writers to date every entry and to keep and reread what they write, because the throwaway entries carry the seeds of later insight. That is the basis for the repeat-set rule below.

Context: I kept a business journal through my executive years, weekly and more often when things were on fire, and stopped fifteen years ago when it had done its job. The weekly and year-end sets below cover the ground that journal covered; the journals themselves are gone and none are quoted here.

Key Takeaways

Pick one in ten seconds

Time you haveTakeGo to
5 minutesOne promptOrdinary morning or Ordinary evening
15 minutesA pair: one to notice, one to decideOrdinary evening plus End of week
30 minutesA full setA transition, A loss, A creative stretch, A hard-feelings evening or The year’s end

If time is not the constraint, use the state you are in. A feeling with no words: go to the hard-feelings evening. Words with no feeling: go to the ordinary morning and answer the sensory prompt. The same subject three days running: go to the end of week and answer the pattern prompt.

Prompts by situation

Ordinary morning

  1. What can I hear, smell and feel right now, before I look at a screen?
  2. What emotions shape your energy today? (from the book)
  3. What is the one thing today that I would regret leaving undone?
  4. Who will I speak to today, and what do I want that person to leave with?
  5. What did I decide yesterday that today has to live with?
  6. What am I quietly dreading, and what is the first two minutes of doing it?

Ordinary evening

  1. What I learned today ... (finish the sentence)
  2. What went well, and what did I do to cause it?
  3. What surprised me?
  4. Where did I spend energy that bought nothing?
  5. What did I avoid, and what did the avoiding cost?
  6. What do I want to remember about today in a year?

The first evening prompt is the oldest one I know. A teacher at school gave me “What I learned today ...” as the opening line of an entry, and it is still a good way to start seeing the day in front of you.

End of week

  1. What pattern asks for your attention? (from the book)
  2. What moved this week, what stalled, and what do I owe to whom?
  3. Which goal did I miss, and which did I exceed, and what does the gap say?
  4. What problem did I write about more than once, and what options have I listed for it so far?
  5. Which decision did I make too fast?
  6. What would I tell a colleague to stop doing, and am I doing it?

In my executive years the weekly entry held the problem, the options and the ideas for solving it, and later the solution. Goals went in too, and I reflected on the ones I did not reach and the ones I exceeded. My own rule for those entries was “Go slow to go fast”: writing the problem down slowed my thinking enough to think it through, so that I could then move quickly. Meeting notes, board preparation and conversations stayed out; the journal was for thinking, and record-keeping lived in minutes and task lists.

A transition

  1. What am I leaving behind, and which part of it do I want to keep?
  2. What does the new situation ask of me that the old one never did?
  3. Who has been through this before me, and what would I ask them?
  4. What support do I need that I have not asked for?
  5. What stays the same whatever happens next?

A loss

  1. What am I missing most today?
  2. What feeling has surprised me since the loss?
  3. Which memory brings comfort, and which brings the opposite?
  4. What has this changed about what matters to me?
  5. What would I say if I could have one more conversation?

A creative stretch

  1. What possibility whispers to you today? (from the book)
  2. What would I make if nobody would ever see it?
  3. What did I notice today that everyone else walked past?
  4. If this month were a song, what is its title and its chorus?
  5. What is the smallest version of the thing I keep putting off?

A hard-feelings evening

  1. What emotion has been hardest today, and where in my body is it sitting?
  2. What unmet need is under the frustration?
  3. What would I say to a friend who had today?
  4. What am I telling myself that I would not accept from someone else?
  5. What is the story I am telling about today, and what is the second story?
  6. What is my deepest fear right now? (not on day one)

The last prompt is the classic reason people stop journaling: they open a new notebook, answer it on the first night, and never come back. Use it after a month of ordinary entries, with thirty minutes and nothing scheduled afterwards.

The year’s end

  1. Which goals did I reach, which did I miss, and which did I exceed?
  2. What did this year teach me that I could not have learned faster?
  3. Who mattered most this year, and do they know?
  4. What will I stop doing, starting now?
  5. What is the one word for next year?

I ran a year-end review on calendar-year, fiscal-year or mid-year cycles, and the three versions were the same exercise. It took a day or two of retreat, sometimes a walk on the beach, sometimes an overnight train ride, and it was less formal than the review process I describe in The Art of Journaling, though the book captures much of what I acquired by doing it.

How to use them

Three rules. First, take the prompt that makes you slightly uncomfortable; the resistance marks the useful subject. The exception is your first night, when the ordinary sets are the right choice. Second, date every entry. Adams puts this first among her suggestions for new writers because a dated entry can be compared with a later one, and comparison is where prompts pay off. Third, return to the same prompt monthly. A prompt answered once is a snapshot. Answered on the first of every month it becomes a record of what shifted.

One prompt, answered, then reread a month later

An illustration, invented for this page. On 1 August the prompt “What did I avoid, and what did the avoiding cost?” gets this answer: “Avoided calling the accountant again. Cost: another week of not knowing whether we can afford the move. Also avoided the gym. Cost: nothing I can see yet.” On 1 September, rereading it, the note is one sentence: “Called the accountant on the 14th; the gym is still on the list, which tells me it is not a priority and I should stop pretending it is.” The August entry is unremarkable. The September sentence is the point.

The monthly repeat set

Choose three prompts, answer them on the first of each month, and keep the answers in a two-column layout you can copy into any notebook or note app.

DateAnswer
1 OctWhat am I avoiding? ...
1 NovWhat am I avoiding? ...
1 DecWhat am I avoiding? ...

To compare, read the column top to bottom and underline any noun that appears in two or more rows.

What research still does not tell us

This page does not claim that a gratitude question does more for anxiety than an avoidance question; the sets are not ranked by evidence. The recommendations come from practice: Adams’ long work with journal writers, and my own use of weekly and year-end questions in business. I believe journaling helps in more ways than I used it, and that belief is why I wrote the books. Treat the sets as a starting list and keep the prompts that produce entries you reread.

Why choosing the prompt this way matters

A blank page asks you to decide what to explore before you have explored anything, and most people close the notebook at that point. Sorting prompts by time and situation removes the decision, so the entry starts. The monthly repeat set then does what a single entry cannot: it shows which subject you keep avoiding, which goal keeps slipping, and which fear quietly left. That comparison across dated entries is the whole return on the practice.

Related reading

Sources