The journal template has been the most used — and most asked-about — thing in the library since it launched. This week it gets its first full rebuild, and I want to walk through what changed and why, in plain language, so you can decide whether to update or keep the version you have.
The biggest change is the daily page. The old version opened with a prompt and a wide writing area. It looked calm, and on good days it worked. But when I read through the feedback, one note kept coming back: the blank space was intimidating. People would open the page, feel the weight of the empty field, and close it again. So the new daily page opens with three small, labeled lines instead of one large blank one — what today needs, what I noticed, what I’m carrying. You can still write as much as you want underneath. The writing area is still there. It’s just no longer the first thing you meet.
The weekly view changed more than I expected. The old one was structured as a review: wins, misses, adjustments. Useful, but it had a grading quality I stopped liking. The new weekly page is closer to a weather report. Three lines — what the week felt like, what actually got done, what I’m letting go of. There’s no place to write what went wrong, because that question tends to produce answers that aren’t true and aren’t kind. If you want a harder weekly review, the old page is still in the template as an optional extra. It’s just not the default anymore.
The monthly look-back got the most careful pass. It used to ask you to rate your month on a scale. I’ve removed that entirely. In its place are four open prompts: what repeated, what surprised me, what I want more of, and what I’m ready to put down. Rating a month on a scale of one to ten is a strange thing to ask of a life. Naming what repeated is a strange thing to be able to do, and much more useful.
On the technical side, the whole template has been rebuilt so that a new daily entry appears only when you press the button on the journal home. If you’ve used the old version, this is the change you’ll feel most. There are no more pre-filled pages for days you didn’t write. The journal has no gaps because it has no expectations. It’s the single most requested change since launch, and I’m glad it’s finally here.
A few smaller things. The color palette has been warmed slightly — the old blues read colder on some screens than I intended. Every page now has a short line at the top explaining what it’s for, which sounds obvious and wasn’t there before. The setup guide has been rewritten to be shorter and to say, plainly, that using one field out of three is a complete practice. And the whole thing now works cleanly in dark mode, which the old version only half did.
One thing I deliberately did not add: a streak counter. It came up in testing. People wanted to see how many days in a row they’d written. I understand the appeal, and I’ve watched streaks turn a pleasant habit into a debt too many times. If you want to track consistency, the monthly look-back will show you what repeated. That’s a truer signal than a number anyway.
If you already own the journal, the update is free and yours now — check the email tied to your purchase, or re-open your original download link. You can either duplicate the new version alongside the old one and move your entries across, or start fresh and keep the old one as an archive. Either is fine. There’s a short note in the updated setup guide on how to migrate without losing anything.
If you’re new here, the rebuilt journal is the version you’ll get, and it’s the one I’d start with. It’s smaller than it looks. Three lines a day, a weekly page you can finish in five minutes, and a monthly look-back that asks better questions than the last one did. That’s the whole thing. Everything else is there for the days you have more to give.