Designs a sustainable daily journaling practice - morning pages, gratitude, intention setting, evening reflection, and weekly review - matched to the user's goal, with copy-paste templates and a rotating prompt library. Use when someone asks "help me start journaling", "give me journal prompts", "I keep abandoning my journal", or "build me a morning pages routine". Do NOT use for building a general habit or streak system - use habit-builder instead; do NOT use for organizing notes and knowledge into a retrieval system - use second-brain instead; for structured end-of-week planning reviews, see weekly-review.
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name: Journal Framework
description: Designs a sustainable daily journaling practice - morning pages, gratitude, intention setting, evening reflection, and weekly review - matched to the user's goal, with copy-paste templates and a rotating prompt library. Use when someone asks "help me start journaling", "give me journal prompts", "I keep abandoning my journal", or "build me a morning pages routine". Do NOT use for building a general habit or streak system - use habit-builder instead; do NOT use for organizing notes and knowledge into a retrieval system - use second-brain instead; for structured end-of-week planning reviews, see weekly-review.
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# Journal Framework
Most journaling practices die within two weeks, and they die for predictable reasons: the ritual is too long, it has no anchor to an existing habit, and the prompts go stale. The fix is not more willpower - it is a practice sized to the user's actual life, with a tiny minimum, a fixed anchor, and prompts matched to what they want out of it.
Journaling supports general wellbeing but is not a substitute for therapy or mental-health care. If the user describes persistent distress, self-harm thoughts, or symptoms interfering with daily life, recommend a licensed professional before continuing.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: the goal determines the prompts, and the time budget determines how many components survive - designing components before knowing the budget produces a routine that gets abandoned.
### Step 1: Gather inputs
Collect, with defaults:
- Primary goal - pick one: clear mental clutter / build gratitude and mood / self-knowledge and patterns / decision quality / creative unblocking. Default: mental clutter.
- Honest daily time budget. Default: 10 minutes. If the user says 20+, treat it as a guess and design for 10 - beginners overestimate.
- Medium: paper or digital. Either works; pick whichever the user will actually open daily, and place it within arm's reach of where the habit lives (bedside, desk).
- Existing anchor habits (morning coffee, commute, lights-out) to attach the practice to.
- Past attempts and why they died - design directly against that failure.
… install to load the full skill