Easy Therapy Journal Goodnotes

Using a Therapy Journal in GoodNotes

I've been using GoodNotes for clinical work for about four years now. The short version: it's a PDF annotation app, not a note-taking app in the traditional sense. That distinction matters more than you'd think when you're trying to build a therapy journal workflow. The most common approach I see people take is downloading a pre-made therapy journal template and importing it as a template folder item. This saves time, but it also locks you into someone else's structure, which tends to become a problem after a few weeks when your actual needs diverge from the template designer's assumptions.

Easy Therapy Journal Goodnotes

This is one of the more straightforward templates available. It uses a basic CBT-inspired layout with sections for mood logging, thought records, and a daily check-in area. The design is clean enough that you won't fight the pen tool fighting you, which is more than I can say about half the journal templates out there. The template folder works like this. You download the PDF, import it into GoodNotes, and set it as a template source. Then each new page pulls from that source instead of creating a blank page. That means every page you generate has the same structured fields already laid down. If you're doing daily entries, this cuts setup time from maybe ten minutes of drawing boxes by hand down to literally zero. Here's where things get tricky. The Easy Therapy Journal Goodnotes template doesn't include hyperlinked navigation. I ran into this when I was trying to build a monthly review system. Every page is sequential, so going back to month one means scrolling through potentially forty pages. I worked around it by creating a separate index page at the front of my notebook and manually linking dates to specific page numbers using GoodNotes' link annotation feature. It took about twenty minutes to set up but it saved me from wasting time every time I needed to reference an older entry.

Another issue that isn't obvious at first. The template assumes you're writing in English left-to-right. If you use a stylus and prefer to write your thought records in a more freeform way rather than filling in the structured boxes, the layout fights you. The boxes are fixed positions on the PDF. You can't resize them or move them without rebuilding the template, which most people don't want to do. I found that switching to a different pen tool and writing above the printed lines rather than inside them actually worked better for my handwriting size. Your mileage will depend on your pen tip and how large you write. GoodNotes' template engine has a quirk that catches a lot of people off guard. When you set a file as a template source, every new page is a fresh copy of the original template. That means if you annotated page one and then generate page two, page two won't carry over any of your highlights or annotations from page one. Some people mistake this for a bug and try to work around it by copying and pasting, which doesn't work either. The workaround is just accepting that each page is independent and building your journal with that in mind. The template I linked to above is free. There are paid versions that add features like mood graph generation or automatic summary pages, but those require third-party automation scripts that often break when GoodNotes updates. I've had two of those paid templates stop working entirely after a GoodNotes update. Free templates don't have that problem because they're just static PDFs.

If you're starting out, I'd recommend getting the free version, importing it, and spending a week actually using it before you decide whether to modify it or find something else. The template itself is fine. The real question is whether GoodNotes is the right tool for your workflow, and that's something you can only answer by using it.