This month we shipped the biggest update to the Journaling Template since we launched it two years ago. If you bought it at any point, you should have an email with a fresh duplicate link. If you didn’t get one, reply to any order confirmation and we’ll sort it out. Here’s what changed and the thinking behind each decision.
The biggest change is that we cut the prompt library from ninety prompts to thirty-six. That sounds like we removed value, and in a spreadsheet sense we did. What we found after two years of customer emails and a few hundred shared screenshots is that most people used somewhere between six and ten prompts and felt vaguely guilty about the rest. A prompt library is not a curriculum. It’s a set of doorways. Too many doorways and you stand in the hall.
The thirty-six that remain are organized by season rather than by mood or theme. Spring prompts are about beginnings and small experiments. Summer is about attention and heat. Autumn is about harvest and letting go. Winter is about rest. This was a suggestion from a customer named June who wrote to us last November saying that her journaling fell off every year around the same time, and she’d realized it was because the prompts didn’t acknowledge that some months are harder to write in. She was right. The new structure doesn’t ask you to feel a certain way, but it does leave room for the year to have a shape.
We also added a single new page type: the seasonal reflection. It’s a two-page spread, one for looking back and one for looking forward, with four questions each. It’s designed to be filled out in about twenty minutes, once every three months. We tested it with a small group of customers over the winter and the feedback was consistent: people wanted something that felt like a pause, not a review meeting. So the questions are open-ended. “What did this season teach you about your pace?” is one of them. “What are you carrying into the next season, and what are you leaving?” is another.
The unglamorous work was a fix to the date property. For about eight months, a subset of customers who exported their journal to markdown found that dates were coming through as plain text instead of dates. This was a Notion quirk with how we’d set up the database, and it only affected people who used the export feature, which is maybe two percent of customers. But those two percent are exactly the people who care most about their journal being portable, and they were right to be annoyed. The date property is now a proper date type, and exports work as expected. If you’ve been putting off an export, now’s a good time.
We also simplified the cover image system. Previously, each template came with four cover images you could swap between. It was a nice idea that created a small headache: people would set a cover, then wonder why their duplicate didn’t match a friend’s. Now there’s one cover, and a short guide on how to add your own if you want. The guide is three paragraphs and a screenshot. It’s the most-read page in the template.
One thing we deliberately didn’t change is the weekly review. We’ve been asked, more than once, to make it auto-populate with the week’s entries. We’re not going to do that. The review is meant to be a place where you sit down with your week and read it. If the system reads it for you, you’re not reviewing, you’re skimming. The page is still blank when you open it, and it still asks you to type the date yourself. That’s the feature.
A few smaller things: the template now opens on a welcome page with a short orientation instead of dropping you into the journal, which was a common source of confusion for new buyers. The reading log has a place for quotes, which people had been adding manually for a year. And the whole thing is about fifteen percent lighter, which mostly means faster loading on mobile. Several customers told us they journal from their phone in bed, which we should have thought about sooner.
If you’re on the fence about updating, the duplicate is side-by-side safe. Your old journal stays exactly where it is. The new template is a fresh page you can copy entries into at your own pace, or start over with, or ignore entirely until January. We’re not going to tell you which. The update is there when you want it.