I know what my motivations are not. In all my years of journaling I’ve rarely reread a journal entry. Journals from the past 20 years line my shelf. I can’t bear to get rid of them, but I also know I will never read them. I’m not interested in looking backward. Keeping records does not motivate me to journal.
I frequently think I’ll want to journal to warm me up so that I can write something real. But that rarely happens. I’ll journal for 10 or 30 minutes, and then my writing itch is satisfied and I don’t move on to something that’s not riddled with “I”s. So “writing warmup” is not a motivator either.
Journaling has always pulled me toward it. I have garden journals, gratitude journals, tarot journals. I have hand-written journals, digital journals, drawn journals. I have journals of pen inks, book journals, nutrition journals, cycling journals, running journals, work journals. But why?
Sometimes, I think I want to journal so that I can observe my progress in an area. That’s where the cycling and running journals would come in, or the journals I start when I want to pick up a new habit. I do reference some of the more specific journals, like my gardening and tarot journals, so I can see what was happening at this time last year in the garden, or learn from other times I’ve pulled a certain tarot card. But I don’t end up using journals to track progress over time (see “I’m not interested in looking backwards” above). It might be good for me to reflect and all that, but ugh, I don’t want to.
I do know one of my motivations for journaling is that I like to write. Plain and simple. Take words out of my brain and put them in order on a page? Yes please. Journaling is the most frictionless path to do that. I love using my fountain pens, but I’m fine tapping words out on a keyboard as well. Journaling helps me clear my head. It gets messy in there if I don’t let some of the words out. Similarly, but a little different, I journal to clarify my thinking. I frequently turn to pen and paper when I’m trying to work through a problem, and I need to get all the pieces out on paper (it does have to be paper when I need to work through a problem). This helps me understand what I think, whereas when it’s all swirling around in my head, I can’t put all the pieces together in a way that makes sense.
But even those motivators don’t explain the fact that I tend to start journals for everything I’m interested in. Several of my journals don’t involve stringing words together. My nutrition journal is primarily checkboxes and colors. My drawn journal is sketches, often without words. So what is it that drives me to say, “I’m going to start a journal for that”?
I think my motivation for journaling is that it helps me focus on the things I want to bring into my life. To capture something on paper or screen, I have to give that thing my attention. I have to say, “What did I eat today? Did I eat anything green?” Or “What’s beautiful in the garden today?” Or “What’s going on in my head? What do I think?” Or “What am I thankful for today?”
It is work to do this! And strangely, I think that’s a motivator as well. When I sat at the breakfast table this morning and read the prompt*, “What are my motivations for journaling?”, I had a bunch of thoughts. The presence of a lot of thoughts could make it seem like it’d be easy to answer such a prompt. But thinking without writing is very different from actually writing. It took effort for me to pull out my laptop and start writing. A lot more effort than what I had previously planned to do, which is lay on the couch and read.
But the effort of journaling results in creation rather than consumption. It feels good to create. You put in the effort, you make something, and it’s concrete. It’s not ephemeral. The act of creation feels very grounding. And the work of creating makes me feel satisfied. I like to lay on the couch and read, and that is what I’ll do next, but reading doesn’t make me feel satisfied. Not like writing does. And especially not like writing towards something I want bring into my life.
*I’m doing a journaling challenge through the Day One journaling app, and today’s prompt was “What are my motivations for journaling?“
Butterfly Mind 
It sounds like you’re someone who processes information better externally and your preferred method is through the written word. If that’s the case, it doesn’t surprise me that you make a journal for everything that you’re interested in as that would be essential for you organizing your thoughts efficiently enough to learn about something. I do a lot of the same thing and only very rarely look back at anything I’ve written or otherwise created.
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