Journaling can increase your productivity and well-being in just a few minutes a day. Just jotting down your thoughts or jotting down what happened during the day is a simple way to manage stress, increase creativity, increase happiness, improve health and increase work performance.
The trouble is, keeping a journal isn’t easy. It takes commitment to this new habit and a willingness to open up to writing on a blank page. what did you do today Who are you? Journaling apps can help you figure this out and help you create a daily writing routine.
After testing nearly two dozen options, these are the best journaling apps for recording your memories this year and for years to come. Click on any app to learn more about why we chose it, or keep reading for more context on journaling apps.
What makes a great journal app?
How do we evaluate and test apps?
All of our best app roundups are written by people who have spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as intended and evaluating it against the criteria we’ve set for the category. We are never paid to feature in our articles from any app or link to any website – we value the trust our readers place in us to offer authentic reviews of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read a full overview of how we select apps to be featured on the Zapier blog.
A paper notebook and pen are fine for journaling, but apps offer more. They will give you more context of what you have achieved and where you might want to go. They also allow you to include photos from your phone or posts from your social media channels to make the journaling experience more rewarding. Add reminders and the ability to search journal entries, and digital journaling is almost a given.
I have been testing and writing software professionally for over ten years. I have also written to myself every day for the past three years. It’s an important ritual for me personally, and it’s also where a lot of the best ideas in my writing come from. In my experience, the best journaling apps have a few things in common:
- Ease of entry: If adding a journal entry requires more than a few clicks or taps, chances are you won’t.
- Pleasant interface: A minimalistic, uncluttered interface helps you focus on your thoughts and makes journaling a pleasant experience.
- Reminder: Perhaps the biggest challenge of journaling is remembering to do it. Automatic reminders help you stick to the habit.
- Export: In the event that the application stops being developed or you want to switch to another journaling platform, you will want to be able to export your records in a format that other programs can read, such as PDF or RTF.
- Synchronization: Synchronization ensures that your diary is up-to-date no matter what device you use.
- Affordability: We have removed some apps due to the high cost. Journaling shouldn’t be expensive.
Other digital journal features you may find important include password protection, Markdown support, the ability to add more than one photo, location and weather tags, and journaling prompts.
For each journal app, I started by creating a few new entries complete with images. I then spent some time exploring the settings, testing the daily reminders and making sure the sync and export worked as described.
The best self-care and daily motivation app
Journy
Being too severe with yourself can be incapacitating and counterproductive. Everybody needs to take care of themselves days where they can deal with themselves for their psychological wellness without outside impact. As opposed to prevalent thinking, taking care of oneself is age and unbiased. Ladies, men and kids can benefit incredibly from taking care of themselves through exercises. Tragically, a man’s taking care of oneself is frequently underrated, which incredibly influences men’s mental strength.
Since taking care of oneself is for everybody, it can without much of a stretch be transformed into family time! Here are some pleasant action thoughts that you can have a ball or urge your family to appreciate as well!
Journey App Download Links:
The best diary apps for Mac and iOS users
Day One
Since its release in 2011, Day One has been one of the most recommended journaling apps and has been named Apple’s Editors’ Choice multiple times in the App Store.
It’s not hard to see why. The app offers a wide range of features – almost everything you could want or need in a digital journal. You can create journal entries with one click on your Mac from the menu bar, use templates to make journaling easier, and automatically add metadata like location, weather, physical activity, currently playing music, and step count.
The best apps for different platforms
Diarium
Diarium offers beautiful native apps for every platform. The Windows app in particular is nicer than any I’ve found. But there is much more to recommend. You can add multiple media types to journal entries. If you prefer to speak rather than type, you can dictate your thoughts using accurate speech recognition. You can attach an audio file, an ink drawing, or any other type of file to your entries, as well as multiple photos. Heck, you can even rate your journal entries (perhaps the most useful way to track how happy you are each day).
