Morning or evening: when journaling works better (and why it does not matter)

In 2011 the sociologists Scott Golder and Michael Macy took 509 million short public messages from 2.4 million people in 84 countries and counted, hour by hour, how many positively and negatively coloured words they contained. Nobody was asked how they felt. The authors just looked at what people wrote and when.

The curve repeated from country to country. Positive words were most frequent early in the morning, dipped through the middle of the day and climbed again towards midnight. At weekends the morning peak slid about two hours later, along with sleep. Negative words went the other way: rarest in the morning, piling up by night.

For a journal this means something simple. A morning entry and an evening entry are written by two different authors. "When is it better to write" is really "which of the two do you want to read a year from now".

The morning author does not know anything yet

A morning entry is written before the events. The morning author has the residue of sleep, a plan for the day, yesterday's sediment and a clear head, but no day. So intentions, dreams and whatever spun around at night write well in the morning. "How the day went" writes badly, because it has not gone yet.

There is a less obvious argument for the morning, and it is not about alertness. Rather the opposite. In 2011 Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks tested when people solve two kinds of problems: analytic ones, which you work through step by step, and insight ones, where the answer arrives once you stop staring at the problem head-on. Participants were sorted by chronotype and given problems at their "best" and "worst" time of day. Analytic problems did not care about the hour. Insight problems were solved better at the non-optimal time: owls in the morning, larks in the evening. The authors' explanation is that at the wrong hour the attention filter works worse and lets through things an alert mind discards as noise.

Translated to a journal: at the "wrong" time you control what you write less. For a report that is a minus. For an entry where you hope to find something you did not know about yourself, it is a plus. That is probably why Julia Cameron's "morning pages", three handwritten pages straight after waking, have lasted so long: not because morning is better, but because half-asleep you are worse at pretending.

The evening author knows, but is tired

An evening entry is a reconstruction. The day has happened and you sort it into what mattered. Almost every study about "writing before bed" lives here, and it is worth looking at what exactly they tested, because it was not a journal.

In 2018 Michael Scullin and colleagues put 57 young adults in a sleep lab and, five minutes before lights out, had half of them write a to-do list for tomorrow and the other half a list of things they had finished over the past few days. Falling asleep was then measured by polysomnography, not by a questionnaire.

Those who wrote tomorrow's to-do list fell asleep on average nine minutes faster than those who wrote about what they had completed. And the more specific the to-do list, the faster its author fell asleep.

The authors' conclusion runs against intuition: thinking about unfinished business before bed ought to be bad. But unloading the open loops onto paper means you stop holding them in your head, and that beats a pleasant summary of achievements.

The second thing tested before bed is gratitude. In 2009 Alex Wood and colleagues showed, on a sample of four hundred people, that a tendency to notice the good is linked to sleep quality not directly but through what a person thinks about while lying in bed: fewer worried thoughts, more calm ones. That is about a trait, not a notebook, but the mechanism suggests why an evening entry of three good things helps in the evening specifically: it changes what is in your head in the last minutes before sleep. I have a separate piece on the format itself.

An honest caveat on both studies: one is 57 people and a single night, the other is a questionnaire, not a practice. They show which kind of evening entry helps. They do not prove that evening beats morning.

Whose morning?

The main problem with the morning-versus-evening argument is that everyone's morning is different. In 2003 Till Roenneberg and colleagues collected data on when people sleep on work days and free days and described chronotype as the midpoint of sleep on a free day. The result was not two camps but a distribution: from people whose mid-sleep is around one in the morning to people whose mid-sleep is closer to six. Several hours lie between the edges.

So "write in the morning" means seven o'clock for one person and eleven for another, and both are right. Any advice with a clock time in it compares your rhythm to someone else's.

Why the time does not matter and the cue does

Now the part this piece exists for. In 2006 Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran gathered 94 independent tests of one technique: instead of the goal "I will keep a journal", a person forms the plan "if X happens, I do Y". The meta-analysis found an effect of medium-to-large size, and it is one of the most replicated results in the psychology of behaviour. The technique is called an implementation intention, but the idea is simpler than the name: you tie the action not to a time but to a situation that will happen anyway.

For a journal that flips the question. Not "morning or evening" but "what in my day happens for certain, so that I can hang one line on it". The kettle boils. I sit down on the bus. I plug the phone in for the night. I take the dog out. These events arrive by themselves, you do not have to remember them, and they are already tied to your chronotype rather than someone else's.

A fixed time has a well-known enemy: the first trip, illness or guest who stays late. The clock in another city says something else, but the phone goes on the charger there too, and in that sense a cue survives travel better than a schedule.

I have written in detail about why one missed day breaks nothing in the piece on why we quit journaling: in Lally's 2010 data, a single missed day had no noticeable effect on habit formation. What the cue removes is something else: having to decide all over again each time.

If you still want to choose

Then choose the author. The morning author writes intentions, dreams and the things they do not control about themselves better. The evening author is better at emptying the head: open loops as a list, three things that were good, one line about what mattered. Nothing stops you keeping both, at different frequencies: evening more often, morning when something was dreamed or when you wake up with a thought already formed.

The most honest way to decide for yourself: one line every morning for a week, one line every evening for a week, then reread both. The difference between the two authors will be visible at once, and it will tell you more than any article, this one included. How to start so you do not stop on page three is here.