How to reflect on past journal entries

By now, most of us are familiar with the benefits of journaling.

But I’ve found that rereading my old journal entries can be just as valuable—or maybe even more—than writing itself.

Why?

Because revisiting past entries gives me perspective, helps me spot patterns, and allows me to connect the dots in ways that directly helps me set future goals - a topic I go into more detail in this article.

And since we're in the middle of the goal-setting season, I thought it would be the perfect time to share a step-by-step process and framework I use to reflect on my old journal entries, which helps me:

• Create specific, personalised goals tailored to my unique strengths, challenges, and habits.
• Built on my past experiences instead of always feeling like I'm starting from scratch.
• Develop a customised support system with templates and notes for specific situations that aren’t just generic advice but something specifically tailored to my own situation.
• Rediscover old ideas and form new, unexpected connections.

I hope it can do the same for you.

Before we get into it, let me give you a quick overview of the process.

What the process looks like

There are four types of insights we'll be looking for when rereading old journal entries: parallels, accomplished goals, not accomplished goals, and ideas.

Each type helps you extract meaningful takeaways from your past writing. In this article, I’ll explain what each type entails and guide you through a 2 phase step-by-step process to find and use these insights.

The 2 phases are:

• Review and Reflect
• Plan and Progress

The Review and Reflect step is about rereading your journal entries and organising your insights using a reflection template I created for you.

The reflection template (available here) will guide you through capturing your thoughts in a structured way. I’ll explain how to fill out each part as we go.

Why use a template?

Because reflecting on past journal entries without a structured approach can feel overwhelming—especially if you write in a stream-of-consciousness way.

It’s easy to get lost in tangled threads of thought, making it difficult to extract clear insights. The template serves as a framework, helping you organise your reflections and draw actionable conclusions.

In the Plan and Progress step, you’ll take the insights gathered during reflection and turn them into forward-looking tools. This might include creating new templates, setting informed goals, or developing actionable plans.

We need this step because, after all, the purpose of this exercise is to make the insights from our past experiences usable for the future. There’s no point doing all this reflection if it’s not going to serve us in a tangible way.

What's next

I’ll now walk you through each of the four types of insights, explaining their purpose and sharing examples based on my own journal entries. Then, I’ll show you how to use these insights to create actionable plans and forward-looking materials.

What follows is a practical step-by-step how-to guide, but if you’re looking for more background or context, feel free to revisit the first part of this series here.

Before You Begin: To make this process easier, I recommend reading through the entire guide with the Notion template on hand before starting the exercise. Understanding the big picture upfront will help things click into place as you work through them.

Disclaimer: This is my personal process for reflection and journaling. If you decide to use it, use your judgment to adapt it to your own needs or speak to a professional if needed.

Let’s get started—it’ll be cool, promise.

1) Parallels

Step 1: Review and Reflect

When reflecting on your past journal entries, you can draw parallels between different entries and use the perspective you have gained to identify patterns in situations, behaviours, and outcomes.

By identifying these patterns, you gain insights that can help you improve your decisions, understand yourself better, and refine your routines.

I'll share an example below, so hopefully, it will make more sense.

For now, think of any event as having these components:

1. Something happens (a situation or trigger).
2. You react (with thoughts, emotions, or actions).
3. A result follows.
4. Maybe you also evaluate the experience and draw useful conclusions.

When you reflect on your journal entries, you can draw parallels between situations at each of the above steps.

For example:

• Do certain situations keen on repeating?
• Do you respond to these situations in similar ways?
• Are your reactions producing consistent outcomes?
• Do you hit the same wall over and over?
• Do your reflections often lead to similar conclusions?

To structure your reflections and uncover these parallels, use the journaling template and fill in the relevant sections as outlined below.

1. Situation

Here you're going to describe the situation or trigger.

I suggest keeping your descriptions high-level rather than diving into unnecessary details. This will help you make parallels with other situations.

For example, instead of this detailed journal entry:
"Today is a big day. I’m creating a blog and starting a YouTube channel. Fear or no fear, I’m doing it. But I’m pretty scared!!"

You might summarise it as:
"Feeling worried/anxious about putting myself out there."

Feel free to use chatGPT to help you make these little summaries.

2. Reaction

This is where you describe your reaction and response to the situation or trigger.

Continuing with the example above, my reaction to feeling anxious about putting myself out there included:

• Pumping myself up to start.
• Turning anxiety into excitement.
• Planning my day to the dot and taking on a lot of tasks.

3. Result

That's where you briefly describe the outcomes.

For example, I continued the above journal entry by talking through how many things I accomplished that day.

Yet, at the end of the day, I felt frustrated and angry because I didn't complete nearly half of what I had planned. I also got distracted by doubting myself, which led me to postpone some tasks.

I summarised these results as follows: "Felt frustrated because I did only half of what I planned + doubted myself.".

4. Conclusion

This is the “so what” section. 

In other words, is there something you can change next time a similar situation arises to avoid the undesirable outcome? Or, if the result was positive and something you'd like to experience more often, are there habits or actions you should incorporate into your daily routine?

For example, my conclusions for this particular journal entry were:

• Make more reasonable plans instead of cramming everything back-to-back.
• When doubting yourself, acknowledge the discomfort but keep going—you tend to view your work as worse than it actually is.

As you review more journal entries, you'll begin to recognise recurring situations. Over time, you'll gather more insights, allowing you to draw deeper conclusions that you can apply when similar situations happen again in the future.

Step 2: Plan and Progress

Once you've gone through your entries, use the conclusions to create reusable resources, like templates or notes to your future self.

Building on the above example, if I frequently felt worried or anxious about putting myself out there, I could create a template with all the relevant conclusions I reached while journaling and reflecting on past entries. Then, I could fall back on this template when I feel anxious about putting myself out there next time.

I store these pick-me-up templates in Daylio because I often turn to journaling when I’m feeling down.

When I open Daylio, I have a curated list of personalised advice for different situations, which is almost like having a past version of myself giving me tailored advice, which I find very helpful.

By building a library of these templates, you create a resource tailored to your specific challenges and solutions.

2) Goals I have accomplished

Step 1: Review and Reflect

As you go through your entries, you'll come across things you once wished for and worked toward, and they have now become your reality. We tend to forget how far we've already come, and reflecting on past journal entries can help us appreciate our progress so far.

So essentially, whenever you read something in your journal and you're like, oh, this was once a dream, but now it has become reality - write it down in the template under Goals I accomplished - appreciation list.

Small notes like these from your past self can make a big difference, especially during challenging times. They’re tangible proof of how much you’ve achieved and the kind of person you’re becoming.

Make sure to also briefly outline what were the things you did to help you accomplish this goal and reflect on what it says about you as a person.

Continuing with the example we already started above, I was really scared of putting myself out there, but I did it anyway and I am no longer so terrified.

What does this say about me?

Maybe that I don't let fear get in the way of doing something I might want to do?

Next time a similar situation comes around, I might be more inclined to do it anyway despite the discomfort because I have real evidence that I am the kind of person who steps out of my comfort zone regularly.

Step 2: Plan and Progress

Just like finding parallels in your entries, you can use the goals you’ve accomplished to create templates or insights for your future self.

How might this look like?

For example, if there's something you completed successfully, you can create a template of the strategies or approaches you used that worked really well for you.

Another example could be creating a comparison list of who you were 5 years ago and who you are today, as a reminder of your progress on days when you feel like you're going nowhere.

In my experience, these small notes from the past can really make a big difference when I'm feeling low.

3) Goals I haven’t accomplished - strategy adaptation list

Step 1: Review and Reflect

When we set out to start doing something new and set a goal for ourselves, it would be incredibly lucky to get the perfect plan right from the start — unless, of course, we're working with someone who has experience in this area and can guide us.

That’s one reason why we might not reach our goals: the ingredients of the plan may need to be adjusted so we stop running into the same obstacles.

Reflecting on your past journal entries (or even relying on recalling events) can be very helpful in this process because it becomes apparent if our actions actually align with the original plan and:

• if they don't, it gives us room to think about the obstacles on our way and how to resolve them
• and if they do, it allows us to reflect on which elements of the plan work well and which ones don't.

So, as you read through your entries, take note of the things that are still a work in progress or ones you've given up on entirely, even though you planned to have them completed by now. For each of them, fill out the relevant sections in your journaling template:

Goal

Self-explanatory - that's where you describe your goal.

For example, one of my goals was to release one of these articles every week.

And if you've been subscribed to this newsletter for a while, you know this wasn't quite the case.

At some point, I focused more on creating YouTube videos than writing articles, and while I'm happy I did, I would like to get this newsletter back on track in the future.

Considerations/obstacles

Here, list everything that’s been preventing you from achieving your goal. Each obstacle or consideration should be written in a separate row so you can easily review them later.

Building on the example above, one of the obstacles that prevented me from releasing one article per week was not having a backlog of articles I could fall back on when life got in the way.

And once I missed one week, it became so easy to miss the next. And then the next. And then the one after that.

But to be completely realistic, there will be times when I just won’t be able to write an article in a given week—whether because I’m travelling, sick, or too busy.

Solutions

In this section, think about all the solutions to the corresponding obstacle/consideration.

Continuing with the above example, I figured that one simple thing I could do to prevent this pattern from happening again was to do the same thing that's worked well for my YouTube videos: create a buffer of 5-6 articles in advance and schedule them to go live in the upcoming weeks.

That way, if something unexpected happens, I could still stick to my schedule and reduce the chances of getting out of the flow.

Step 2: Plan and Progress

Approaching your goals in this way allows you to build on the experience and data you have already gathered and use the insights on what works and what doesn't to your benefit.

Of course, I could have simply stated that my goal was once again to post one video per week without any prior reflection, but that would have made failure much more likely because I wouldn’t have addressed the underlying issues that were standing in my way.

Now, my goal is much more specific and tailored to what works for me, and so I assume I will be much more likely to succeed at it.

If you do this exercise for the goals you’ve set for yourself but haven’t quite achieved yet, I bet you’ll be surprised at how much easier it becomes to achieve them.

4) Ideas

Finally, the Ideas section serves as a place to store any creative thoughts or inspiration that come to you during the review process. This could include anything from blog post ideas and original gift ideas to business concepts you want to explore later.

I recommend having a dedicated space to keep track of these ideas so they don’t get forgotten. 

For example, whenever I come up with a newsletter idea, I add it to my Notion ideas repository. Then, the next time I’m ready to write, I simply go through the list and choose which idea I feel inspired to work on. This way, I always have a well of ideas to pull from when I need them.

Wrapping up

That's about it for this week - if you decide to incorporate these exercises into your New Year goal-setting routine, I bet it will strengthen your New Year resolutions and make them so much easier to achieve.

Let me know how it goes if you try it out.

Hope 2025 is full of insightful breakthroughs for you.

Speak next week xx