The best time to journal: morning pages or night journaling?

Not one that research has settled. We looked for studies that compare morning journaling with evening journaling head to head and did not find any. In the studies we read for this guide, the variable was what people wrote and for how long, not the hour.

What does differ is the job each time of day does well. Morning writing sets up a day that has not happened yet. Evening writing looks back at a day that is finished. Pick by the job you want done, then protect the slot.

Morning pages come from Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. On her official site she describes them as three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing done in the morning, about anything at all. They are one of the basic tools of what she calls a creative recovery, alongside the “artist date”, a weekly solo outing to do something fun, and regular walks.

• Three pages each time.
• Longhand, with a pen, not a keyboard.
• In the morning, as the first writing of your day.
• Stream of consciousness: whatever comes up, in the order it arrives. Worries, chores, half ideas, complaints.

Let us be straight about the evidence. We could not find a controlled study that tested morning pages the way Cameron prescribes them. The nearest research is on expressive writing, where a meta-analysis of 146 randomized studies found a positive but small average effect of writing about your thoughts and feelings. Morning pages may well help you; the data to show it simply has not been collected.

If three pages are too much, a shorter morning entry still does the morning's job: it gets the noise out of your head and points you at the day. Three lines are enough:

1. 1What is on my mind right now? One sentence, no editing.
2. 2What is the one thing that would make today a good day? Keep it small enough to actually happen.
3. 3What am I worried about, and is there one step I can take? If there is no step, write that down too.

A morning entry is a plan, not a record. Do not expect to reread it the way you reread evening entries; most of its value is in the moment you write it.

At night the day is complete. You know how the meeting went and whether the phone call was as hard as it looked that morning. That makes the evening the natural time for a record you will want to reread years later, and for patterns that only show up across weeks.

Evening writing also has the one piece of time of day research we could find. In a 2018 sleep lab study, 57 healthy young adults wrote for five minutes before bed. Those who wrote a to-do list for the next few days fell asleep significantly faster than those who wrote about tasks they had already completed, and the more specific the list, the faster they fell asleep. It was a small study and the participants had no sleep problems, but the method costs five minutes.

One caution: if writing at night sends you around in circles, keep the evening entry short and factual and move longer writing earlier in the day. Our guide on how to stop overthinking has ways to tell reflection from a loop.

Attach the entry to something you already do every day, in the same place. In a 2010 habit study, 96 volunteers chose a daily behavior and tied it to a fixed moment, such as “after breakfast”, for 12 weeks. How long it took for the behavior to feel automatic varied enormously, from 18 to 254 days, and missing a single opportunity did not materially affect the process.

You can make that link explicit with what psychologists call an implementation intention: an if-then plan that hands the start of a habit to a cue, “Whenever situation X arises, I will do Y.” Peter Gollwitzer's 1999 review describes a program of research showing that plans in this form help people act on their goals. For journaling, it sounds like this:

• “When I pour my first coffee, I write three lines.”
• “When I get into bed, I log my mood before I open anything else.”
• “When I plug my phone in at night, I write tomorrow's first two tasks.”

You can, and it works well when one of the two is tiny. A common split is a longer morning page for thinking and a one line evening entry for the record. Starting both at full length in the same week doubles the effort before either habit has had time to form.

If you are new to journaling, pick one slot for a month. Our beginner's guide to journaling walks through the first entries, and these journal prompts help on days when nothing comes.

Pixmood is a mood journal, and it suits the evening slot. You can only log the current day, so a check-in late in the evening captures all of it: one tap on one of five moods, and if you like a one word tag and a note of up to 1,000 characters. It takes about five seconds, which makes it a realistic “minimum version” for nights when you have nothing left.

Daily reminders arrive at fixed times, 9 a.m., 1 p.m. and 9 p.m., and once you check in, the rest of that day's reminders are canceled. You can switch reminders off, but you cannot move them to a time of your own. There is no account and no server; your entries stay on your phone.

The limits: Pixmood is not a place for morning pages. A note holds 1,000 characters, about one long paragraph, and the daily entry has no writing prompts. If you like three handwritten pages in the morning, keep them in a notebook and use Pixmood at night for the color of the day.