An image of my Rollbahn notebook. It features an illustration of a train on Japan's Odakyu line.

2025 was the first year that I maintained a physical journal for the entire year. I had never been able to continue the habit, and admired people who could. My goal was pretty simple – at the end of the year, have a journal that I wrote in consistently for 12 months. This has been a success!

What to write

I have never been one to write down my thoughts and feelings. I understand that it can be very therapeutic for some, but I’m not one of those people. Bullet Journal was a great starting point to determine a basic philosophy, even though I did not end up following most of the format.

The index page

Bullet Journal’s index page is a fantastic idea. Instead of trying to organize your journal into meaningful sections as you fill it out, you just write everything in what ever order it comes out of your head. If you think you might want to find something later, just add it as an entry to your index with its page number. Easy.

For example, I have a few recipes scattered through my journal. Instead of creating specific Recipe pages that may or may not get filled, my index entry for ”Recipe” has three page numbers listed. No wasted space, no mental overhead when writing.

A two-entry daily log

The main point of the journal is to write what happened that day, to be able to look back and remind myself. But many days end up being mostly the same:

  1. Wake up and do stuff around the house.
  2. Go to work.
  3. Come home for dinner and family time.
  4. A couple hours free after the kids sleep. 5. Go to bed.

What do I write on days like this? At first I skipped those days because there was nothing noteworthy, but then I started skipping too many days.

Media log

I kept a log of the various media I consumed throughout the year – books, TV shows, movies, and games. I kept it simple, just a single line for each entry with a 5- star rating. This is the first time I’ve tracked this, and it is a lot of fun to look back on the year and see what all I watched and read.

Japanese practice

I think one of the most important things about journaling is making it low-friction, and this completely goes against that philosophy. But my Japanese writing skills are embarrassingly low, and now that everything is more and more digital there is really no opportunity for it to get better on its own. I decided to keep my journal in Japanese, to force myself to practice writing. I’m definitely glad I made this choice, because my writing has improved, even if just a little bit.

Continuing the habit

Will I continue to keep a journal in 2026? At first I was not sure, but I’ve committed myself to another year. I have a better idea of how I want to approach the journal, so I’ll write another post about the format I’ll follow in 2026.