Reflective journaling

Reflective journaling starts where a diary stops. A diary keeps the record of what happened. A reflective journal reads that record back and asks why things went the way they did, so that the next time can go better. A diary might say “the meeting ran late”; a reflective entry asks why it ran late and what you would change.

Reflective journals are common in teaching, nursing and other training, where students are asked to learn from their own practice. Those courses often use a formal model, and a widely used one is Gibbs’ reflective cycle. The educator Graham Gibbs set it out in a guide to learning by doing (Gibbs, 1988). The University of Edinburgh’s reflection toolkit lists its six stages: describe what happened, say how you felt, judge what went well and what did not, analyze why, conclude what you learned, and plan what you would do next time.

Six stages suit a written assignment. For a daily entry, three parts carry the same idea in less time. What happened is the description. What it meant folds the feelings, the judging, the analysis and the conclusion into a few sentences. What comes next is the action plan.

Reflection is only as good as the record under it, because you cannot find the reason for a bad day you only half remember. “I rushed the talk” is a feeling. “I spent the morning on slides nobody looked at” is a reason, and it points at what to change.

The record is easier to keep if you write through the day, a line at a time, rather than all at once at night. That way of writing is called interstitial journaling, because the lines go in the gaps between tasks. For questions to reflect on, try the self-reflection prompts. For the basics, read what to write in a journal.

Whichever way you write it, keeping the record by hand, a line at a time and then adding up the hours, is the part most people let slide, and the reflection loses its footing when they do.

Reflective journaling needs nothing more than a notebook. In an app, a good one keeps the record of the day from your own words, with no timer, so each reflection has real hours under it and leads to a change you make tomorrow. Reflection is the part most journaling apps do well. What they lack is the record of the day beneath it, so a thought about a lost afternoon has no hours to check against.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: work, sleep, time with people, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. It has reflective journaling, morning and evening, in several journals, with daily prompts, your own prompts, and a mood and energy check-in.

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1. Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by Doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic.
2. The University of Edinburgh, Reflection Toolkit (read October 1, 2026). Gibbs' Reflective Cycle.