Prayer Journal Template

A prayer journal template needs 4 pages: a baseline page you fill in before you start, a daily line for the names you're praying for, 5 questions at the end of the week, and a monthly page that sends you back to the baseline. The daily part takes about 40 seconds. What makes it work is that it measures your attention rather than God's answers.

What should a prayer journal template include?

4 things: a baseline page completed before day 1, a daily line for names, a weekly set of questions, and a monthly review that compares today against the baseline. Skip the streak grids and the scoring boxes. The daily entry should be short enough to finish in under a minute, or you'll stop doing it by February.

What goes in a prayer journal template?

4 pages. That's the whole thing.

The baseline page gets filled in before day 1. You write 3 names, and under each one you write what you know about their life right now: the last thing they told you that mattered, and what's happening for them this week.

If you can't write anything under a name, leave it blank and don't go and find out. Blank is the honest answer, and blank is the measurement.

The daily line is 2 lines at most, one for the names and one for what you noticed, if anything. A half page would make it a diary, and 365 diary entries is a book you abandon.

The weekly page is 5 questions, about 5 minutes, once a week. It asks who was on your mind and where you were when they were, what the week cost you in minutes, what went wrong, what you saw that you'd have walked past a month ago, and what carries into next week.

The monthly page asks the baseline question again, then tells you to turn back and read what you wrote before you started. Nothing is printed underneath, because the 2 pages sitting next to each other are the finding.

You'll notice what's missing. There's no streak counter, no tick boxes, no printed dates, no "5 of 7". The record is made of names rather than marks.

What about ACTS, and the 5 P's of prayer?

ACTS is the one with a stable form: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. It's a good frame and this template doesn't replace it.

The 5 P's and the 7 P's are worth being straight about. Search either one and you'll find several different versions, most of them rearrangements of ACTS with alliteration doing the work.

They're memory aids somebody made up, which is fine. None of them is scripture, and none has enough authority to be worth memorising over another.

Here's the distinction that matters. A prayer method tells you what to say once you've sat down, while a template decides whether you sit down at all.

Most people who quit journalling didn't quit because their adoration section was weak.

Paul names the same elements without the acronym, though it's worth saying what he's actually doing with them. He's telling anxious people where to put the anxiety, rather than handing them a structure: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:6-7, NIV).

Note where Paul lands it: the guarding is done by God, in Christ, while you're still the one holding the anxiety.

How to start a prayer journal, in the first 40 seconds

Write 3 names.

3 people outside your church, written down. That's the whole of day 1.

I time this at about 40 seconds, which is my own count rather than anything measured properly. What matters is that it's small enough to displace nothing.

A practice that needs 20 minutes makes you choose between prayer and whatever those 20 minutes were already doing, and that's a fight you'll lose most weeks.

3 rather than a list, because a list of 30 is a list you scan. 3 is a number you can hold in your head at a traffic light.

Dallas Willard put the principle better than I can. A discipline, he wrote, is "something in my power that I do to enable me to do what I cannot do by direct effort".

Writing a name is in your power. Caring more about that person isn't, at least not directly, so you do the first thing and the second one follows or it doesn't. Either way you haven't failed at something you were never able to do on command.

That second part is God's work rather than yours. The template exists to put you where he can do it, which is all a discipline has ever been for.

Where to keep it, so you'll actually see it

The names go somewhere your eyes already land without you deciding to look, like a phone lock screen or the kettle.

A journal on a shelf sits there waiting for you to remember it, which is the opposite of what a cue does.

The page is where the practice gets recorded and the cue is where it gets remembered. When those 2 collapse, and the book becomes the only place the names live, the practice quietly turns into journalling.

Journalling is a thing you do when you have time. You won't have time, and that's the design constraint.

Why answered prayer is the wrong thing to track

Nearly every prayer journal on the internet tells you to record answers to prayer. The Navigators tell you to track petitions and praises, TemplateLab tells you to keep track of your progress in terms of your answered prayers, and Compassion UK gives it a numbered section of its own.

I understand the appeal, and I want to be careful here, because remembering what God has done is commanded. Israel piled up stones at the Jordan so the next generation would ask what they meant (Joshua 4:6-7), and the psalmist talks himself out of despair by recalling God's past acts: "I will remember the deeds of the LORD" (Psalm 77:11, NIV).

So write down what God has done. Just keep it clear of the thing you measure yourself by.

Recording answers turns God's replies into a scoreboard you're keeping. On a good week that's encouraging.

On a week where nothing visibly moves, and there will be plenty of those, the scoreboard reads as failure. It reads that way to someone who already suspects their faith has gone flat.

Track your own attention instead, because it's the half of this you control.

The weekly question is "who was on your mind this week, and where were you when they were". The location does the work there.

You can talk yourself into believing you've been more prayerful. You can't invent standing in a supermarket car park thinking about your neighbour's job interview.

There's good evidence for writing it down. Harkin and colleagues reviewed 138 studies covering 19,951 people and found that monitoring your progress toward a goal genuinely helps you reach it (d+ = 0.40), with a larger effect when the information is physically recorded rather than just noticed.

Their work covers goal progress in general, though. No study I've found tests progress monitoring on spiritual formation, so applying it here is a reasonable inference rather than a measured result, and 0.40 is a moderate effect rather than a dramatic one.

What if you've tried this before and stopped?

You will miss days. Missing a day does not undo this.

That's what the research found. Lally and colleagues, tracking how habits actually form, put it plainly: missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour "did not materially affect the habit formation process".

This is why there's no grid on the template. Build a grid and the person who misses Thursday quits on Friday, because now there's a visible hole with their name on it.

A skipped day here is a blank line, and a blank line among 365 of them reads as blank. Start again on the next line, whatever day it is.

The thing I'd want to have known earlier: the 3rd time you do this and the 30th are completely different, and almost everybody stops in between. The 30th time you don't remember to do it, you notice you already have.

The practice

The action. Write 3 names on the baseline page. Under each, write what you know about their life right now. Tomorrow, write the same 3 names on the daily line.

What it costs. About 40 seconds, by my own count. It displaces nothing, which is the point of it being first.

Where to put it. Somewhere your eyes already go without deciding to look: a lock screen, the kettle, the back of your hand. The journal on the shelf won't do it.

How you'll know it's working. At the end of the week, answer this: who was on your mind, and where were you when they were? Read it against what you wrote on the baseline page before you started.

The question is whether these 3 people occupied more of your week than they did before.

And the reason that's worth measuring has nothing to do with your performance. These 3 people matter to God, which is the only reason it matters whether they cross your mind.

Common questions

Where can I find a free PDF template for a prayer journal?

There's one at the bottom of this page: the 4 pages above, laid out to print from your browser. Compassion UK and get-prayer.com both publish free PDFs. Most free templates are built around recording answered prayers, so check what the weekly page asks before you commit to a year of it.

What are some ideas for a simple prayer journal?

Simple means fewer fields rather than prettier ones. 3 names and one line about what you noticed will outlast any template with sections for gratitude, scripture, confession and reflection. If you want to add something, add the weekly question about where you were when you were thinking about them.

What is the first thing you say when you pray?

There's no required opening. If you want a shape, ACTS starts with adoration, which is saying something true about God before you ask him for anything. If that feels stilted, saying a person's name out loud to God is a complete prayer, and it's where this template starts.

Do I have to be a Christian to use this?

You can use the template however you like, though the whole thing assumes you're talking to someone, and the someone is Jesus. If you've never done that and you'd want to, you can say so to him in your own words today, and it counts. Nothing on this page is a prerequisite for that.

What not to say when praying?

Very little is off limits, and the anxiety behind this question usually isn't about words. The Psalms carry complaint, confusion and open anger at God, and Psalm 88 ends in the dark without resolving, so honesty is safe ground. The thing worth avoiding is praying about people in general when you could pray for someone in particular.

Get the template

The prayer journal template is 4 pages: the baseline, the daily line, the weekly 5 questions, and the monthly review. It's free, and it takes about 40 seconds a day to use.