Staying organized is super important, especially when hit with that first-month-of-school reality check. Between homework, academics, and extracurriculars, throughout the school year, students have a lot on their plates; journaling is a way to help. This week, to help me balance my schedule, stay organized, and reflect on my day, I tried journaling every night as I got back into the swing of school.

Wednesday (first day of school): I started to journal and then realized I didn’t really know what to write about. I had tried journaling before, and it hadn’t worked, partially because I was not very committed, so I was feeling apprehensive. My day was pretty regular, so I thought that there wasn’t much to put on the page. That caused me to search for ideas on what to write about. I compiled a list of prompts, ranging from “why do I like my favorite color?” to “who do I look up to the most?” and picked one at random. The one I picked was “favorite places I’ve been.” After some time reminiscing and eventually writing, thirty minutes had gone by, and my hand was not cramping too terribly.

Thursday: When I picked up my pencil and placed it in my journal, the act of journaling felt a bit easier after having prepped myself with many prompts. I felt much more confident going into this second day, my previous pessimism slowly went out the window. The prompt I used was “What is my ideal day?” and instead of just writing in paragraphs and full sentences, which I didn’t feel like I had the energy for, I just jotted down bullet points that would make my day ideal. While writing down on a page is the more traditional way of journaling, writing down thoughts in the notes app, drawing and sketching to get ideas out, or a mix of different strategies are also effective in this exercise. The point of journaling is different for everybody, so it really depends on what people are looking to get from journaling and what they put on the page. After writing for a little bit, time started to fly by, just as it had on Wednesday, and I was able to get a lot of my thoughts onto the paper.

Friday: I came to Friday completely uninterested in journaling, but for the integrity of this test, I persisted. I decided to get creative with what I was doing today, to spark some interest. I filled a page with random questions I had and had another with lists of places to go and things I was grateful for. After writing down what I felt grateful for, I found that I actually had way more to be grateful for than I had previously thought.

Saturday: After a busy day, instead of not wanting to journal, I found myself wanting to reflect on my day’s experience on paper. While Saturday’s page was not super in-depth and detailed, I found just releasing Saturday’s events in addition to all of my thoughts was really nice. I ended up falling asleep super quickly that night. Compared to Wednesday, I felt much better about my journaling; words flowed out of my mind and right onto the page.

Sunday: For my final day of journaling, I decided to continue with just summing up the day’s events and any other thoughts I had that I needed to just get out. This again led to a pretty quick entry, but also a restful sleep and feeling accomplished after I had finished writing. Journaling, especially the night before the new school week started, calmed me down and left me feeling composed.

My experience with journaling was definitely not what I had expected. I ended up finding it really nice and enjoying writing about different things and getting all my thoughts out. I’ll definitely continue journaling, even though the five trial days are up.