Back Journaling!

Every time I post about journaling, I get a ton of questions, so I thought I would do a bit of a deep dive into my process here because the concept of back journaling is what really transformed my practice from feeling like something I could never keep up with to something that was manageable and enjoyable and a space for play, experimentation, and practice. So, I first have to give a lot, a lot, a lot of credit to Ammie y'all. It was her back journaling video that completely transformed my approach to journaling. I thought I was the only one who didn't know about back journaling, but it turns out that is not familiar to many of us who love this creative journaling practice. So, I'm going to tell you about how I do it. So, first of all, I have my Hobonichi Cousin. I work in this journal every day, but not on my daily pages. Like, there's absolutely no way that I would be able to on my daily pages every, like wake up the next and do the daily page the day before. It doesn't happen that way. I batch create pages in my creative journal. But the way that I keep top of it on a daily basis is by updating my weekly pages. I use this as a recap of every day. I'm just writing what I did, what we ate for dinner, anything notable that happened. Sometimes it's a news headline. A lot of my time actually spent thinking about journaling and not putting something on the page. I'm thinking about what that day, how I want to represent it, and not necessarily, the making part is sometimes quick once you know what you're going to do. The making part is pretty fast. So, what I've been doing is I use this little Penco sticky memo pad. It has the days of the month. And it acts like a to-do list. So, I keep this on my craft desk, and when I'm working on my journal, I might just jot down a note of what I wanted to journal about that day. And what ends up happening is that I'm constantly ideating. The thinking part is sometimes the biggest hurdle. You need time to think things and process and mull things over, even if it's not deep and introspective. I'm just thinking about like, okay, there was a heat wave for two days. How do I want to do that? Do I want to cut out the letters that spell heat from like a bright orange paper, or do I want to draw fire? Like, there's so many things, and I do like to push myself creatively and try techniques that I tried in a while or that are new to me. And so, every time I'm working on my journal, I'm looking at this list, flipping through my brain to try to figure out how I want to journal about this thing I've made a note of. And I've been doing this consistently for almost a year now, writing in this little memo pad. And again, I have to give credit to Ammie. She's the one who posted about this. I immediately bought it, and I have been using it every day. And so, what I love about this process as well is that it becomes easy for me to visualize what I need to do, and it also helps me batch create in certain ways. So, for example, I like to print my photos on a letter-sized vinyl matte sticker paper, and I obviously want to do that when I have a page worth of photos. I'm not going to print one photo, I'm not going to print two photos. I need like a whole page of photos. And so, when I'm looking at the list of pages that I need to finish, if it's a page where I include a lot of photos, I can see at a glance which photos I need to gather to create the whole sheet. And then once those photos are printed, bam, bam, bam, like I can bang out those pages very quickly. That's actually what happened in the Paper Cloud meetup that we did over Zoom. I finished like five pages during our 45-minute work session, and it was because I had all of my photos printed in front of me, were like ready to go. And so, what I love about this process as well is that it becomes easy for me to visualize what I need to do, and it also helps me batch create in certain ways. So, for example, I like to print my photos on a letter-sized vinyl matte sticker paper, and I obviously only want to do that when I have a page worth of photos. I'm not going to print one photo, I'm not going to print two photos. I need like a whole page of photos. And so, when I'm looking at the list of pages that I need to finish, if it's a page where I include a lot of photos, I can see at a glance which photos I need to gather to create the whole sheet. And then once those photos are printed, bam, bam, bam, like I can bang out those pages very quickly. That's actually what happened in the Paper Cloud meetup that we did over Zoom. I finished like five pages during our 45-minute work session, and it was because I had all of my photos printed in front of me, were like ready to go. It helps me figure out like how to compartmentalize and how to approach certain things. Like I wrote down the gym. All I had to do was photocopy the page from my gym journal on sticker paper and slap it into my journal. That was so fast, but if I didn't have the note, it would have taken me longer. The other thing that I do is, when it's appropriate, I do write, you know, just notes in pencil throughout my journal. And that helps me too, but I do also still write it that list. And so, the other thing was pretty behind in June for a long time. So, I keep, you know, June stuck here, even as I'm making notes the current month, July, when I'm sitting down to journal, when I have that chunk of time to work on my journal, I'll prioritize ones that need to get in June before I go into July because that just makes me feel better. You don't have to do that. Of course, there's like no right way to journal. You don't have to journal about every day if that doesn't feel right for you, and you don't have to back journal. You can leave the pages blank if you want. I consider this to be like my creative practice, so something that I like to do and go back in. But if you felt any like pressure or obligation doing that, like you don't have to. That's one thing I love this practice as well. There's just like no right way. It's your personal journal, like figure it out. But these notes have transformed how I manage back journaling and it really just helps me with the noodling part of the process. I'm always referring to this and always thinking. And then when it comes time to put pen to page, it's a little bit faster. So, I hope this was helpful. If you have any tips for how you back journal, how you keep track of what you want to journal about, please leave them in the comments because people really have so many questions about this, and it would be great if we could all share our tips and tricks. Thank you for watching. I hope you are enjoying your journals this year. Can you believe it? It's almost planner season for 2027. There will be more about that later. See you.