Setting Up a Stoic Journal in GoodNotes Without Losing Your Mind
I spent about three weeks building what most people call a Stoic Journal in GoodNotes before I realized I was overthinking it. The idea is straightforward: a daily writing template that pushes you to run through the core Stoic exercises—morning preparation, evening review, and some midday check-ins. But the actual implementation in GoodNotes is where things get messy. Let me walk you through how I built mine and what went wrong along the way. First, you need to understand what you're actually trying to capture. The Stoic practice boils down to three main components: the premeditatio malorum (morning rehearsal of potential difficulties), the evening examen (reviewing your day against your values), and the dichotomy of control exercise (sorting what's up to you from what isn't). Your template should have spaces for each of these. Not more, not less. I used to add sections for meditation goals and habit tracking, but that just became another chore I ignored after two weeks.
Stoic Journal Goodnotes
The download and setup process is simpler than most people make it. You can find free templates on Reddit's r/Stoicism and r/GoodNotes communities, but honestly, building your own takes about twenty minutes and gives you something that actually fits your workflow. Open GoodNotes, create a new document, and pick A4 or US Letter with dot grid. Dot grid is better because you're writing prose, not doing math. Don't use lined paper for this—it just makes everything feel like schoolwork. For the morning section, I set up a small box with the heading "What could go wrong today?" Below that, a larger writing area for your intended responses to those scenarios. The key insight here that most template designers miss: keep the morning section under four bullet points. I learned this the hard way. My first version had six scenarios and three response boxes. It took me eighteen minutes each morning. I quit after five days because I was waking up twenty minutes earlier just to do it. Four scenarios, three minutes each. That's sustainable. The evening section needs two parts: a quick behavior log and a longer reflection. For the behavior log, create a simple table with columns for time, action, and whether it aligned with your values. Don't overcomplicate the value categories. Pick three max: reason, virtue, and duty. Everything else is noise. The reflection area should be a single open text box. Write whatever comes out. I used to structure this with prompts like "What did I do well?" and "Where did I fail?" but that just made me write performative answers. Empty space works better than forced questions.
Midday check-ins are optional but useful. I set up a separate page in my notebook for quick notes between 11am and 1pm. Just a checkbox for "Did I practice what I prepared this morning?" and a line for anything that surprised me. This section doesn't need pretty formatting. It's functional, not aesthetic. GoodNotes makes this easy because you can duplicate pages and create a shortcut on your home screen. Takes about two taps to open the journal when you need it. Here's something nobody tells you about using GoodNotes for journaling long-term: the search function is brutally unreliable for handwritten text. I spent three weeks trying to search for a specific evening entry about a conversation with my boss. The handwriting recognition either missed it entirely or returned forty-seven irrelevant results. If you want to reference past entries, add a manual index page at the front of your notebook. Date, one-line summary, and page number. It takes ten seconds per entry and saves you from the frustration of digging through unsearchable pages later. I also started using the bookmark feature sparingly—maybe five to seven bookmarks per month for entries I actually wanted to return to. Don't bookmark everything. You'll end up with a notebook full of bookmarks and no unread pages. Another practical issue: pen pressure sensitivity in GoodNotes is inconsistent depending on your Apple Pencil generation. Second-generation pencils handle this better. If you're using first-gen or a generic stylus, your line thickness won't vary much, which makes your journal look flat and hard to scan visually. I switched to using a highlighter tool for section headers instead of relying on pen pressure. It's cleaner and more consistent. The highlighter tool in GoodNotes has preset colors that actually work well for this—blue for morning, green for evening, yellow for midday. Color-coding by section type instead of by date makes navigation faster.
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Now for the limitations, because this setup has real ones. GoodNotes syncs through iCloud, which means your journal entries are scattered across devices in a way that's painful to manage. If you edit on your iPad and check on your Mac, there's a two-to-four-minute lag sometimes. Not terrible for casual use, but if you're trying to do a midday check-in and your last evening entry hasn't synced yet, you'll get confused about which version you're looking at. Workaround: only edit from one device during any given day. Check in on your phone in the morning, write the full entries on your iPad. Don't bounce between devices mid-day. Storage is another issue. Handwritten journals eat space. My current Stoic Journal notebook is about 2.3 gigabytes with just nine months of entries. If you're inserting screenshots or photos into your entries—which I don't recommend but some people do—it gets worse fast. Clean up your notebooks quarterly. Delete duplicates and pages you don't need. I use GoodNotes' built-in organize feature to archive completed years into a separate folder. Keeps your active notebook under a manageable size. There's also the question of whether this practice actually works for anyone beyond the initial novelty period. The honest answer: it depends entirely on your baseline discipline. If you already write in a physical journal daily, adding a Stoic framework to GoodNotes is a natural extension. If you've never journaled before, you're going to burn out in about three weeks regardless of how beautiful your template is. I've watched this happen with multiple people in online communities. They spend a weekend building elaborate systems with color-coded sections and stickers, then abandon them because the system required more effort than the actual writing. The minimal approach—four morning bullets, one evening reflection, optional midday check-in—is the only version that scales long-term.
One more thing worth mentioning: the template file format matters more than most people realize. GoodNotes supports its native format, PDF import, and notebook import. I initially tried importing pre-made Stoic templates as PDFs, which seemed convenient. Bad decision. PDFs are locked—you can't easily modify the text boxes or add new sections without recreating them. Native GoodNotes documents are editable, which means you can adapt the template as your practice evolves. I've restructured my morning section twice in eight months. That's easy with a native document. Nearly impossible with a PDF. If GoodNotes isn't working for you—maybe you're on Android, or maybe the app's interface grinds your gears—there are alternatives. Notes app on iPhone with a structured template works fine for basic Stoic practice. Obsidian with the Templater plugin gives you more control over automation. But those require more setup time and technical comfort. For most people who just want to write and reflect without fiddling with software configurations, GoodNotes remains the simplest option that actually supports the three-part Stoic structure without turning journaling into a productivity project. The download links for templates float around r/GoodNotes and r/Stoicism pretty regularly. Search "Stoic journal template" on those subreddits and you'll find several free options. Most are shared as .GNB files you can import directly. I'd recommend trying one before building your own, but plan to customize it within the first week. Off-the-shelf templates assume a level of discipline and attention to detail that most people, myself included, don't consistently maintain. Your journal should be ugly enough that you don't care about making it pretty, and structured enough that you actually use it.
