The oldest journal prompts are still the best ones

I've never been big on journal prompts. Most of the lists out there feel sort of random to me. A hundred questions, and which one do you choose? None of them are really about anything, and you scroll past them looking for the one that kind of fits your day. And like, I get it. It's cool.

I'm the type of writer who just wants to dive in and put words on a page. So personally, I've never been a big prompt user. Haumm never sends you a question, and nothing is waiting for you in the morning.

This actually started somewhere else. We were researching whether Haumm should have separate notebooks and tagging systems (it doesn't, and here's why). That led to a bigger question: what does structure do for writing, compared to just writing? Some research suggests structured writing can really help, not only with getting words down but with things like clarity and feeling a little steadier. Tags still felt like a different crowd than us. But prompts? Those could actually help people get stuff down on the page and start writing.

You'll hear that structured writing helps some people and doesn't help others. I don't think it's as binary as that. Structured writing can really help you if it's what you need at that particular moment. Sometimes it's just what gets the ball rolling.

And the deeper I went, the more I kept coming back to the old ones. These old guys knew what they were doing. There's a lot of wisdom in the things they were thinking about and the questions they asked themselves. Honestly, some of them might have been the best journal keepers in history. Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations. I mean, come on. And they didn't use random prompts at all. They asked themselves the same few questions, every single day, sometimes for decades.

Benjamin Franklin's two questions

In his autobiography, Franklin lays out his whole day, hour by hour. At the top, the morning question: "What good shall I do this day?" At the bottom, the evening one: "What good have I done to-day?"

That's it. Two questions, one at each end of the day. I love how plain they are. No framework, no worksheet. Just a promise in the morning and an honest look back at night.

Franklin also kept a chart of thirteen virtues. He worked on one a week and marked every day he fell short of it. Decades later, in the 1850s, a young Leo Tolstoy copied the method almost exactly and kept what he called his "Franklin journal," a list of his weaknesses with a little cross for each one he'd shown that day. Good questions get passed down.

Seneca's three questions

Seneca, the Roman Stoic, describes his evenings in his book On Anger. Once the lamp was taken away and his wife, who knew his habit, had gone quiet, he went back over the whole day. He'd learned it from his teacher, Sextius, who asked himself three things before sleep:

• What bad habit did I cure today?
• What fault did I resist?
• In what way am I better?

What gets me about this one is how gentle it is. It doesn't ask what you did wrong. It asks where you got a little better, and it assumes you did.

Zengzi, 2,500 years ago

The oldest one I know comes from the Analects. Zengzi, one of Confucius's students, said, "I daily examine myself on three points." Was I faithful in what I did for others? Was I sincere with my friends? Did I practise what I was taught?

Notice that two of his three questions are about other people. Most of us journal about ourselves. Zengzi journaled about how he showed up for everyone else.

Marcus Aurelius, writing to himself

The Meditations was never meant to be a book. It was the private notebook of a Roman emperor, written to himself, and it reads like it. In the morning he'd brace for the day: "Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant…" Then he'd remind himself that those same people were made of the same stuff he was.

And the very first part of it is basically a thank-you list. Person by person, he writes down what he learned from each of them: his grandfather, his mother, his teachers. That might be my favorite journal page ever written.

Epictetus, and the other handle

Epictetus, who taught Stoic philosophy after growing up enslaved, told his students that these were the things they should write down daily. Two of his ideas still turn up in good journals everywhere. First, some things are up to us and some aren't, so start the day by sorting which is which. Second, everything has two handles. When someone wrongs you, you can pick it up by the handle of what they did, or by the other one: that they're your brother, your friend, someone you came up with. You can't carry it by the first.

And for the days you've got nothing

Pliny tells a story about Apelles, the most famous painter of ancient Greece. However busy he was, he never let a day go by without drawing at least one line. That's where the old saying comes from: not a day without a line.

Some days that's all I've got too. One line. It still counts.

Why the old questions work

I've thought a lot about why these hit so differently from a random list, and I think it comes down to a few things.

• They're the same question, again and again. The point was never variety. The variety is in you: the same question on a different day gets a different answer. In my own practice I might do similar things day to day, but what novelty can I find in the mundane? Ask yourself the same thing every night for a year and the answers start to show you who you're becoming.
• They're about one thing, not your whole life. "What fault did I resist?" is answerable at 11 pm on a Tuesday. "What is the meaning of my life?" isn't.
• They hold two ideas against each other. Good and bad, up to me and not up to me, the handle you've been carrying and the other one. That little bit of tension is what makes you think instead of just reporting.
• A small answer is allowed. One line, one person, one habit. You never feel like your day fell short of the question.

A few newer ones in the same spirit

Once you see what makes them work, you can write new ones that sit right beside them. A few we've added to Haumm:

• Something I'm grateful for that made me uncomfortable. What it asked of me, and what it gave back.
• Something small from today I might still feel in twenty years. Emerson, who kept a journal for most of his life, put it best: "The years teach much which the days never know."
• Something from today that's part of a larger pattern in me, when I've seen it before, and whether I want it to keep going. Kierkegaard wrote in his journal that life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

The best prompt is your own

Here's the part I keep coming back to. Franklin's questions were Franklin's. Seneca's were borrowed from his teacher and made his own. None of them were handed a list.

So in Haumm, the first place on the shelf is yours. Choose + then Prompt beside your page and write your own questions once, and they're there whenever you want them. Beside them sit Franklin's, Seneca's, Zengzi's and a few others. Pick one and its questions drop onto your page as plain lines. Answer them, change them, delete them. Nothing checks whether you did, and you never have to use one.

If there's an old question you think belongs on the shelf, please write to us at support@haumm.com.

Ask yourself the same good question for a year. The answers will teach you more than a hundred new questions ever could.

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— Kit