You can find some more prompts here :)

I have a "☕ Daily Check-in" section of my daily journal page, in which I have the prompts:

• How am I feeling?
• Grateful for...
• Top 3 Tasks for Today

I've been thinking about doing exactly the same thing. I haven't tried it yet, so I don't have much advice.

For me a one-page monthly calendar works nicely for events and habit tracking, and even for some tasks that should be addressed on a specific date. But putting my general task list in my monthly spread is not working for me. I never look at it! Anything I want to actually get done needs to go in my dailies. I've been thinking that maybe a weekly list could be a reasonable middle ground - especially since I've been influenced by GTD which recommends a weekly review cycle. And I have the same line of thought about putting weekly stuff inline with dailies.

I'm not certain I completely understand your needs, but maybe something like MDO would do what you want? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANDQIW9RZrA

I dont think there a solution for what you want. Its a trade-off, I would say stick with physical notebook and let the white space go. You can add comments here anr there when its been weeks since that week spread, to make use of that spread.

I am using journaling to help combat depression and I pick one (or more) of the following, depending on what I did that day:

• What are some things that I accomplished today? It does not have to be significant things, just things, no matter how small, even if it is just a step in a larger process.
• Was there a time today that I felt a social connection, like a good conversation or a shared activity?
• What is something I did that was fun?
• What am I looking forward to?

Overall, I only spend a couple minutes each day on it, but the process of thinking about what to write down lets me end each day feeling good about something.

Makes a lot of sense! This reminds me of the "mood logging" idea that I think comes from cognitive behavioral therapy

My journalling is part of me letting go or managing worries, among other things. So if you're specifically doing a practice like worry time, then you could prompt for

• what is making you feel anxious?
• when you felt anxious, how did you know?
• what are you thinking about when you're not busy?
• is there anything you know you have to do but aren't doing?
• do you know why you're not doing something?
• what do you think would wrap things up perfectly, if perfect could just happen?
• what do you wish for?

One of the qualities of being a good writer, for example, is being able to imagine things.

I would say this has little to do with being good (vivid) at it. I mean, like writing is not about much about being inspired by the muse and much more about putting in the work, day after day.

Imagination is ideas, and ideas are plenty. I don't know about you but I can have dozens ideas in a single days of which oftentimes none will survive the first attempt at using them. For me that's how ideas work: a lot of waste that will get recycled, sometimes very slooowly (I recently used an idea I first wrote down in... 2003, there is little in common between the 2003 note and the actual text I'm writing but at its chore it's the same idea).

What's much rarer is an idea turned into something usable/actionable... sharable. The difference between a (great/bad) book one can buy and the best book ever written that no one can buy because its was actually never written is that one author put in the work, the other thought about it ;)

I think Journaling can help a lot in making writing an actual habit (it cna also help putting some order in our own thoughts, but that's not the point). As for imagination, I don't think it helps much, at least it doesn't help me much as for me a journal is supposed to tell things that have happened in the day. Not things I imagine. Those would be put into stories.

I don't do prompts myself, but they have a list at DayOne

(disclaimer: I used to use this app but I've moved back to analog)

I sometimes follow suggestions I remember from Cortex' Theme System Journal. Those were daily reflections on something I'm looking forward to, and something I'm grateful for. I think it was looking forward for the morning entry, and grateful for the evening entry - but I'm not positive which way around it was.

But most of the time what I write is 1-3 things I want to get done during the day.

If you look in !NaNoWriMo2@feddit.online you will find a bunch of prompts that were posted for our Journaling January event. Feel free to use any / all if them.

https://www.reflection.app/blog/daily-journal-prompts-365-questions

If I don't have anything specific I want to write about then I usually start with something mundane that I observed, or that I did. It often evolves into something profound. I have found that what I initially think is mundane is usually something that I have a programmed response to, or is an unchallenged preconception. And when it doesn't turn into something more, at least it's a record of my day-to-day.

Sometimes when I think I have nothing to write about I end up with 4-5 pages!

Five things you're grateful for.

• What was the most interesting (or confounding) thing you saw today?

• If you lived a picture-perfect life, what important value(s) do you hold that you would find it easier to express than you do now? What would expressing them look like?

• What embarrassing thing that happened 10 years ago are you ready to let go of today?

IMO - journaling helps you with your ability to express yourself. It doesn't, IMO, help with imagination in all cases. Imagination means that you are able to picture something that isn't present. If you're writing about things from your past, say an incident you were part of, then no you are not using your imagination.

However, if you are writing about something that you want to create, then you are using your imagination.

I think the key here is that you are writing about something that doesn't exist. Something that you either wish did exist, and are describing it in a fairly detailed manner (how it looks, feels, functions, etc.). That is where imagination comes into play.

But, even if you aren't writing about something that doesn't exist, you can still be accomplishing a lot with your journaling. For example, I've been going through a lot of memories from my past. As I've gone through those memories I've had some interesting thoughts about how I perceived things at the time, versus how I perceive them now.

You also can find new ways of expressing yourself. There are things that as I have written about them in my journal, I've writing about them in ways that I wouldn't have written about them in a more public setting. However, now I find that some of those expressions are starting to come through in my public writing — and it's for the better.

I typically associate "vivid" with intense visualizations, and I have a hard time visualizing things distinctly. I'm ok at imagining narratives and characterizations and "slice of life" analyses that become creative works, but I wouldn't describe them as "vivid" imaginings.

Personally, I don't think imagination or its vividness has much to do with the task of journaling. For me, journaling is more like a chronicle that (sometimes) becomes a source for creative work, rather than a creative outlet itself. I don't think you have to be very imaginative to be a good chronicler. I think trying to be "good at writing" in my journals is what made it so hard to do for a long time. Once I just let myself be mundane and boring, journaling got a lot easier.

I think there's a difference between creativity and imagination. Creativity, an ability to produce unique solutions to problems, is important for writing. Without creativity, one could vividly imagine routine, common, mundane things, which might make for accurate writing, but not necessarily interesting writing. Like instructions for assembling a piece of furniture.

I stumbled on this post in my all feed. I don't journal and don't think I can contribute meaningfully but still feel like contributing a deadpan:

No. I have aphantasia.

lol

Yeah, getting these blogs off WordPress has done wonders in ways I couldn't have imagined — like I am getting more traffic to the new blogs than I ever saw on my WordPress blogs.

Absolutely on the old-school pen and paper writing experience. I got into fountain pens last year and started keeping a journal in A5 notebooks. I'm over 800 pages this year. I also started drafting my longer essays in B5 notebooks. I'm working on my third essay. (When I say long, I mean 20+ pages each.)

Some journal entries I will be turning into short stories, or incorporating into novels. And eventually I'll type up and re-write my essays to publish online.

It‘s important to have the technology sorted out, as nothing kills my creative drive more than having to deal with technical issues. A distraction free experience is a good thing for writing, which is why paper is still very popular, at least for journaling.

My creativity has mostly been going into an app that backs up my journal, and does text search. I added text selection for stuff like copy-pasting phone numbers, and now I'm a little hung up on making it perfect. Fortunately I'm in a spot that isn't very hot so I've got a shot at getting things done.

I can confirm, I did all my creativity-requiring uni homework problems in the late evening when it was like 0.4 degrees colder

It's 27C here in my office, but I'm still plugging away. Just doing things in short bursts, and taking breaks in cooler parts of the house. I've been keeping my drive going fairly well. But I've switched from my journals to working on my websites for a bit. Managed to migrate three of them off WordPress and over to write.as, and I am finding the minimalism more inspiring to writing.