Dot Journaling: A Practical Guide: How to Start and Keep the Planner, To-Do List, and Diary That’ll Actually Help You Get Your Life Together

by Rachel Wilkerson Miller

Writing about yourself and your life—even just brief notes!—is a huge privilege, and that writing can be incredibly liberating. Writing in a diary is, at its core, a declaration that your voice matters.

And finding your voice in private makes it much easier to find your voice in public.

Dot journaling takes up as much or as little time as you want it to. The initial setup takes less than an hour, and I tend to write in mine for ten to thirty minutes each night.

Journaling by the numbers 12: number of books in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which was written between 170 and 180 AD, and is credited as the first surviving diary 381–384 AD: years that Egeria, a Gallic pilgrim, wrote a travel journal as an ongoing letter to her friends back home 1450: year that Luca Landucci, an apothecary in Florence, Italy, wrote the first modern diary 176: number of unknown plants and wildflowers that explorers Lewis and Clark noted in their journals 15: number of notebooks that Charles Darwin had with him in 1831 when he began a nearly five-year trip around the world, notebooks he would later say “determined my whole career” 116,080: number of words Darwin wrote in said notebooks 15: age at which Beatrix Potter began writing in a diary, a habit she kept up from 1881 to 1897, in a code known only to her 1958: year that a man named Leslie Linder cracked the code and made it possible to read Potter’s diaries 10: number of gifts that Anne Frank received for her thirteenth birthday on June 12, 1942, one of which was a diary 30 million: number of copies that Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has sold worldwide since its publication 91: number of years that Colonel Ernest Loftus kept a daily diary, which currently holds the Guinness World Record for the longest-kept diary $30.8 million: final price for which a seventy-two-page notebook belonging to Leonardo da Vinci, called the Codex Hammer, sold at auction in 1994; the buyer was Bill Gates 1988: yea...

During the Renaissance and early modern period, a type of journal known as a “commonplace book” became popular with students, scholars, and reading enthusiasts. According to the Harvard University Library, “a commonplace book contains a collection of significant or well-known passages that have been copied and organized in some way, often under topical or thematic headings, in order to serve as a memory aid or reference for the compiler. Commonplace books serve as a means of storing information, so that it may be retrieved and used by the compiler, often in his or her own work.”

The commonplace book originated in the fourteenth century, when it was known as a zibaldone, which is Italian for “a heap of things.”

admit that it’s a little strange to put so much time and effort into something and then barely look at it again, but I see my journals more like a time capsule. They are for this moment, and then they are for some far-in-the-future moment.

Don’t press so hard. Maintain a light touch; you only need enough pressure to make the ink appear. Anything more than that is just going to make your hand hurt.

Research what your letters should actually look like. Yes, there is a correct way to form each letter—and it may not be the way you learned in grade school. If you want inspiration, check out the Spencerian script, the Palmer method, and the Zaner-Bloser method. While all these penmanship systems are beautiful (and can be very intimidating at first glance), they weren’t actually created with the goal of looking pretty—they were designed to make writing faster, easier, and less painful. Following these methods can make your handwriting look better and also make it possible to write comfortably for long periods of time.

Making your dot journal look pretty (or handsome) isn’t a requirement, but it’s an aspect of dot journaling that many people (myself included) really enjoy. I’ve always loved the idea from Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up that the everyday objects we surround ourselves with should “spark joy,” and that attitude extends to my dot journal. For my journal to spark joy, first, it needs to be functional—I want to be able to write in it, read it, and find important information in it without much effort. And, second . . . yeah, I want to like how it looks!

I think clickable black gel pens are the best way to get this job done, and I like them on the finer side—0.5 mm or less, though I’ve noticed that pens that are much thinner than that can feel “scratchy” as they move across the page. I wrote pretty much all the black text in the layouts throughout this book with a Pilot Juice 0.38 gel pen, which is my go-to everyday pen. My runners-up are the Pilot G2 0.5 black gel pen (which I used faithfully for years, and is also the easiest of these pens to find in stores) and Muji 0.5 gel ink pens. And if you’re looking for something extra fine that won’t drag across the page, the Uni-ball Signo 0.28 is great. When it comes to rollerball pens, I like the Uni-ball Deluxe Micro 0.5 and the Pilot Precise V5 RT. If ballpoint pens are more your style, my favorites are the Uni Jetstream Alpha Gel Grip 0.7 and the Uni Jetstream Standard 0.5. I also like the Zebra F-301 0.7 (my grandma’s favorite pen, and what many of my old diaries are written in), though its ink is fainter than many of the competitors. And although it’s not my personal favorite, tons of my ballpoint-loving friends are big fans of the Pentel R.S.V.P. 0.7.

Confused about what all of these different terms mean? Don’t worry, I gotchu. (Actually, my friends at JetPens gotchu, because I wasn’t sure what the exact technical differences were, either, and so I asked them.) Ballpoint pens: contain viscous oil-based ink that dries quickly and is compatible with most types of paper Rollerball pens: contain water-based ink; they offer a smoother writing experience than ballpoint pens, but the ink takes longer to dry Gel pens: contain ink made of pigments mixed in water-based gel; the ink is thinner than ballpoint ink but thicker than rollerball ink, so it’s both smooth-flowing and quick-drying

“Commonplace Books.” Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History (Open Collections Program, Harvard University Library). ocp.hul.harvard.edu/reading/commonplace.html