How to organize your journal with tags and notebooks
A journal that's easy to search is one you'll actually use. Here's how notebooks and tags work together.
After a few weeks of daily journaling, you will run into a familiar problem: everything is in one long list. You want to find that entry from two weeks ago about your work project, but it is buried between a note about dinner and a half-finished thought about sleep. Scrolling back through everything is not sustainable.
Daykept has two tools for this: notebooks and tags. They solve different problems and work best together.
Notebooks: drawers for different areas of your life
Think of a notebook as a physical drawer labelled with a topic. Everything in that drawer is about one area of your life. You open the Work drawer when you want work entries. You open the Personal drawer when you want personal ones. They do not mix unless you want them to.
A simple starting setup for most people:
- Personal — daily reflections, mood, personal goals
- Work — meetings, decisions, things to remember from the day
- Health — exercise, sleep, energy notes
You do not need more than three or four notebooks. More notebooks means more decisions about where each entry goes — and more friction leads to fewer entries written.
Creating a notebook
Tap the + icon on the Notebooks screen. Give it a name, pick a color, and optionally add tags that should be associated with it. The color makes notebooks instantly recognizable when you are browsing.
Tags: labels that cut across everything
Notebooks organize by area. Tags organize by topic. A tag can appear across multiple notebooks. If you tag entries with #Fitness, you can pull up every fitness-related entry regardless of whether it was written in Health or Personal.
Good tags are short and consistent. Use the same tag every time — “Fitness” not “fitness” one day and “exercise” the next. A few tags used consistently are more useful than many tags used inconsistently.
Suggested starting tags: Wellness, Work notes,Daily life, Fitness. Add more only when you find yourself wanting to filter by something new.
How tags appear in entries
When you save an entry with tags, they appear inline below the title — making it easy to see at a glance what that entry is about, and to tap a tag to filter the timeline by that topic.
The system in practice
When writing a new entry: choose the notebook first (which area of life?), then add one or two tags (what is this about specifically?). That is the whole system. It takes five seconds and means any entry is findable within two taps later.
You do not need to apply this retroactively. Start using it with your next entry and let the organized archive build forward from here.
New to Daykept? Start with how to build a daily journaling habit. Once your entries are organized, the weekly review gives them purpose.