How to Journal Consistently — Using Google Forms and Automated Emails
By: Jordan Pierre
Tags: Habits, Journaling, Quantified Self, Self Improvement, Daily Journal

Introduction

If you’ve spent any time in the self-help community, then you don’t need anyone to tell you how beneficial having a daily journal practice can be.

However, if you’re like most people, you probably gave it a shot, went strong for a week or two, but, for whatever reason, you weren’t able to stick to it — allowing your daily practice to regress into a weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly practice.

For a long time, I wanted to record my thoughts and reflect each day but I just couldn’t do it. I bought a new journal, prepared some prompts, scheduled time to do it, tried to tie the practice to other habits like eating breakfast or brushing my teeth, bought different sized notebooks to make carrying them easier, and tried writing them in the notes app on my phone, but nothing would stick long enough to become a daily practice.

In my opinion, the biggest adversities facing a daily journal practice are:

Not having your journal when you want to use it.

Not wanting to spend the time to write in it each day.

Not having a physical reminder to do it each day.

Not being able to easily analyze past entries.

After boiling my problems down to these four issues, I came up with a solution that addresses each one. It’s allowed me to record my thoughts and experiences daily for over a year. The method that works for me is sending myself automated emails with a link to a Google Form which stores the responses in a Google Sheet.

It works because it:

Is always available on any device.

Has a standard set of questions which can be answered in as much or little time as I’d like.

Provides an email to-do reminder and is easy to see if it hasn’t been done.

Allows previous records to be analyzed easily in Google Sheets.

Is easy to update with new questions as my life changes.

With the help of this article, I hope it can do the same for you too.

How to Make an Organized Daily Journal for Free Using Google Drive and Zapier.com

Outline

At a high level, we will:

Create a set of questions we want to ask ourselves daily, based on the habits we’d like to track and what questions we’d like to reflect on.

Put those questions into a Google Form survey.

Create an automated workflow to send ourselves an email containing a link to that survey at the same time each day, using Zapier (for free).

Review past responses in Google Sheets and see how easy it is to visualize the responses to our daily surveys.

Creating Your Google Form

Google Forms is a free tool in Google Drive — like Docs and Sheets — used to conduct surveys. It allows users to ask questions and accept specific types of responses like multiple choice, check boxes, and long answer. Each response is stored logically in a single Google Sheet, where each row corresponds to a particular day and each column represents the question answered. In this case, we’ll use Google Forms to make entries into our journal and our actual “journal” will be the Google Sheet.

To create the form,

Go to drive.google.com. Click “New” > “More” > “Google Forms”. Give the form a name and think of some questions about your day that you’d like to track over time.

When it comes to the Google Form, you want to make it long enough to record all the information you want to track, without making it so long that you dread filling it out.

New form with a title and description.

Add new questions by pressing the “+” on the right side. Play around with the different types of responses.

I think a good survey has some questions about habits you care about, some objective questions like what you did, and some personal questions like what you thought and how you felt.

Some of the questions I ask myself are:

How did you eat today on a scale from -2 to +2? (Multiple Choice: Horrible, Bad, Decent, Good, Great)

What type of diet did you follow today? (Checkbox: Vegan, Vegetarian, Whole 30, Standard, Meal Plan) (i.e. “Vegetarian Only” or “Vegan Meal Plan”)

Did you meditate today? (Multiple Choice: Yes, No)

How was your day on a scale from -2 to +3? (Multiple Choice: Horrible, Bad, Decent, Good, Great, Amazing)

What made today good or bad? (Long Answer: usually describing everything I did and what I thought about it)

What did you read today? (Short Answer: delimited with “+” signs for analytics)

What do you want to get done tomorrow? (Short Answer)

Anything else you’d like to record? (Long Answer)

It’s not my whole survey, but it gives you a good idea about the types of questions and responses. I try to spend between 7 and 15 minutes on it, with the majority of time spent on the long answer responses.

Once you’ve added your questions, click the “Send” button at the top of the screen and copy the shortened link. This link will be how you navigate the form later, and what we’ll put in the body of the automated email.

Send form link.

Create an Automated Email Workflow Using Zapier

Once you have a shareable link, you’re ready to make an automated email.

There are plenty of ways to create reoccurring emails such as Chrome extensions like Boomerang for Gmail and email marketing tools like MailChimp. The problem with most tools is that their free tiers are either too small to allow 1 email per day, or creating a reoccurring email as simple as ours is just too complicated. That’s why I use and recommend Zapier.

Zapier is a web-based general task automation software. Their free tier allows up to 5 workflows to be executed up to 100 times per month — which is perfect because we only need 1 workflow to be executed up to 31 times per month.

To get set up, go to Zapier.com and sign up if you don’t already have an account. I signed up with Google but they also allow signups using Facebook or email.

Zapier Dashboard

When you log in, click “Make a Zap!”.

The first thing to do when creating a workflow is to set a trigger. In this case, our trigger will be a specific time of day.

To make the trigger:

In the “When this happens…” search bar, type “Schedule by Zapier” and click the result with the same name. In “Choose Trigger Event,” select “Everyday” and press “Continue”. Click the box to make sure the event occurs on the weekends. Select the time of day that you’d like to receive your email, then press “Continue”. Skip the “Find Data” section because you wont have any daily schedules to add the trigger to. (Don’t worry if you already clicked it, it will behave the same.)

Choose App & Event

Customize day.

Now that we’ve told the app when to run, we need to tell it what to do.

Press “Continue” to make the event:

Under “Do This”, type “Email by Zapier” and click the app. The action event should be “Send Outbound Email”. Press “Continue”. In the “Customize Outbound Email,” the “To” section should be addressed to the email you check regularly. The subject can be whatever you’d like the email subject to be — it really doesn’t matter. Mine is “Your Daily Survey is Ready!”. For the body, the only requirements is that you include the shareable link to your Google Form. My email body only says: “Record your day here: <link to form>”. You can change the “From Name” to anything you’d like or leave it blank. My email “From” section says “Yourself”. Click “Send Test” if you want to check if you receive the automated email and see how it looks. After the test, click “Done Editing” and then “Turn Zap On”

That’s all there is to it! Now you’ll get an email to your inbox at the same time each day prompting you to fill in the survey. If you haven’t done your survey yet that day, then the email will be marked as unread — so you’ll know the next time you check your email if you forgot to journal.

Editing, Referencing, and Analyzing

When you want to reference your survey records, go to your Google Drive and find the Google Sheet with the same name as your survey, plus the phrase “(Responses)” — so if your Form is called “Daily Survey,” then your Sheet is called “Daily Survey (Responses)”. You can also get to your Responses Sheet by navigating to your form and clicking, “View responses in Sheets”.

If you want to add to or edit a previous entry in Sheets, just go to the corresponding cell and edit its contents like you would any other Excel sheet.

If you want to edit your survey (i.e. the questions you ask or acceptable responses), navigate to your Google Form in Google Drive and edit the questions on the “Questions” tab.

The “Responses” tab will display visualizations of your responses in either a table or chart, which can be helpful when analyzing all responses at once. If you want to analyze specific time periods, I’d suggest making a copy of the Sheet and adding charts to the copied Sheet rather than the live one which is accepting responses.

“How was your day” all responses chart.

By recording my responses to these questions each day, I can easily answer questions like:

“What do I usually do on days I consider great?” (It usually has to do with having great conversations, meeting exciting new people, traveling, or all of the above.)

“Does meditating actually make a difference on my perceived well-being?” (Yes. I’ve never had a day that I both meditated and considered a bad day.)

“Can I actually tell people I’m vegetarian?” (Probably not, only 68.9% of days in the past 90 were vegetarian or vegan.)

You can answer your own overarching questions with whatever data you collect with your survey.

Conclusion

Directing yourself to an online survey through a reoccurring email can alleviate some of the biggest challenges in maintaining a daily journal practice, and even add some unique benefits when analyzing your life with your journal.

By using Google Forms to add entries, Google Sheets to store records, and Zapier to automate reoccurring emails, you can easily create a system, that you actually stick to, for free.

Postscript

I also use Google products to host my personal website for free and for implementing the Getting Things Done Methodology. Feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or my website, jordanpierre.co, to let me know if you’d like me to write similar articles about either of those.

Happy journaling!