5 pro tips for using a 5-year journal
Every morning, I open a book that contains fourteen years of my life, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the day.
If you’re not familiar with a five-year journal, the idea is wonderfully simple. Instead of filling pages and pages every day, you write just a few lines. Each date has its own page, so when you return to that page the following year, you can see exactly what you were doing on that same date one, two, three, or five years earlier. Except I’ve taken mine a little further.
I’ve figured out how to turn a five-year journal into a ten-year journal. I’ve been doing this every day for fourteen years now, and I’m currently on my third book. At this point, the ritual is so woven into my morning that I can’t imagine not doing it.
But what I love most isn’t the writing; it’s the reading.
After I add a few sentences about yesterday, I go back and read everything I’ve written on that same date over the previous thirteen years. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I’m surprised by something I’d completely forgotten. And every once in a while, I read an entry that stops me because I’m suddenly looking at the beginning of something that eventually changed my life.
I can see when I first began thinking seriously about leaving my corporate career. I can follow the winding path that eventually led me to teach collage. And I can even see the period when I was finding my artistic voice, although I didn’t recognize that’s what was happening until a couple of years later.
Fourteen years into this little experiment, I’ve learned a few things about how to keep a five-year journal meaningful, simple, and most importantly, something you’ll actually want to continue.
1. Write About Yesterday, Not Today
This is probably my most practical tip.
I write in my journal in the morning, and today’s story hasn’t happened yet. So I write about yesterday.
This eliminates that strange feeling of sitting down first thing in the morning and wondering what on earth you’re supposed to say about a day that’s barely begun. Instead, I have a complete day sitting right behind me and can quickly ask myself, What happened yesterday that I want to remember?
Some days the answer is obvious. Other days, nothing particularly significant happened, and that’s okay too.
Which brings me to the next thing I’ve learned.
2. Don’t Try to Record Your Entire Life
A five-year journal isn’t a diary, at least not the way I use it. I don’t write down everything I did yesterday. I certainly don’t need to know fourteen years from now that I went to the grocery store, answered emails, and did three loads of laundry. Instead, I choose one to three things I might actually want to remember five, ten, or fifteen years from now.
Sometimes it’s a milestone. Sometimes it’s something I’m working toward or a realization I had. It might be a feeling, a funny moment, or something meaningful that happened to someone I love.
When my niece moved to Asheville, for example, I wrote it down. My family sometimes thinks I have an incredible memory, but I don’t.
My journal does.
And because I only have a tiny amount of room to write, I’m forced to decide what was worth remembering about that particular day. I’ve come to really love that.
3. Turn Your 5-Year Journal Into a 10-Year Journal
Most five-year journals give you five spaces on each page, one for each year. Instead of using one entire section every year, I divide each space in half.
That gives me room for ten years on the same page. Yes, the writing space is tiny. That’s intentional. Having only a few lines keeps me from turning this into another big daily obligation. I can’t write an essay about my day even if I want to. I have to capture the essence of it and move on.
And years later, those little entries are much more enjoyable to reread than long paragraphs would be. They’re like tiny postcards I’ve been sending to my future self.
4. Change Your Ink Color Every Year
This is a small thing that makes a surprisingly big difference once you’ve accumulated several years on the same page. I use a 0.5 mm fine-point pen, partly because I’ve created such ridiculously small spaces for myself, and I choose a different ink color each year.
That way, when I’m looking back at ten years of entries squeezed onto one page, I can immediately see where one year ends and another begins.
It also makes the pages themselves rather beautiful as they fill up. All those different colors begin to look like layers of time.
5. Buy the Best Journal You Can Afford
Trust me on this one. My first two five-year journals are literally falling apart.
I open these books every single day. I write in them, flip backward through the years, reread old entries, close them, and do the whole thing again the next morning.
That’s a tremendous amount of wear and tear over ten years. So when I bought my current journal, I invested in a much better-made one. If I’m going to touch something every day for an entire decade, I’ve decided it’s worth buying something that can survive the relationship.
And when I calculated the cost over ten years, even a beautiful journal works out to very little per day.
THE 5-YEAR JOURNAL I CURRENTLY USE
Why I’ve Kept This Habit for 14 Years
I’ve written before about the role consistency has played in my life and art. But there’s something different about this particular habit.
Most of the time, we move through our lives looking forward. We’re thinking about what needs to happen today, what we’re doing next week, what we’re working toward, and what still hasn’t been crossed off the list.
My five-year journal asks me to look backward for just a few minutes every morning. And because I’m revisiting the exact same date year after year, I get to see something that’s almost impossible to notice while I’m living it.
I see how slowly a life changes.
The enormous decision that once consumed my thoughts eventually becomes a tiny entry I can barely remember writing. An idea that seemed insignificant turns out to be the beginning of something huge. A problem I thought might never resolve is suddenly sitting seven years behind me.
And sometimes I read about an ordinary moment with someone I love and feel incredibly grateful that fourteen-years-ago me thought to write it down.
It’s like watching my life unfold in backward motion, one day at a time.
You Don’t Need to Write Much to Remember a Life
Maybe that’s the biggest surprise these journals have given me.
We think preserving our lives requires writing pages and pages, but it doesn’t.
- A few carefully chosen sentences can bring an entire day back.
- A place.
- A conversation.
- A decision.
- The first tiny beginning of something you didn’t yet realize would matter.
And when those little entries accumulate over five, ten, or fourteen years, something rather extraordinary happens.
You begin to see your own story.
Not the polished version you might tell looking backward, where everything seems to connect neatly and make sense. You get to see it as it actually happened, when you didn’t know what was coming next.
I find that endlessly fascinating.
And tomorrow morning, I’ll open my journal again, add another tiny piece to that story, and find out what I was doing on September 15th during all those other versions of my life.
Then I’ll close the book and go live the next part.
So here’s the question I’d love to leave you with:
What happened yesterday that you would genuinely want to remember five or ten years from now?
You don’t need a special journal to begin. Write down just a few sentences somewhere today. And if you already keep a five-year journal, I’d love to hear what you’ve learned from looking back at your own life. Please share in the comments.
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