How to Organize Your Nature Journal: 5 Great Options
Nature journaling as a hobby offers everyone the chance to feel more peaceful and connected with the incredible world around us. Organizing your nature journal from the beginning sets you up to enjoy your nature experiences and helps you find peace, joy, and connection faster.
Picking an organizational style for your nature journal doesn’t need to be difficult, complicated, or feel daunting. It’s not an end-all-be-all decision. You’re always free to adjust how you work with your journals over time, as you get more familiar with your own preferences and style.
Here are some possible organizational strategies to choose from. I’ve tried them all myself. Each approach can work great if it matches your style. I’ve placed them in the order I personally recommend to beginner nature journalers, starting with the best choice.
List of options for organizing your nature journal
- Chronological order
- By location
- By activity
- By season
- By theme
Regardless of which strategy you choose, starting with some kind of basic organization will save you time and tons of aggravation. Your future self will thank you!
Organize by your nature journal by chronological order
“Chronological order” means you write your entries in the order you experience them. This organization strategy is also called “sequential”.
With this approach, you write your first journal entry on page one of your notebook, then add new entries as you go. Entries at the front of your notebook happened farther in the past than those at the back. Your journal eventually fills with records of your movements, observations, and feelings about your nature experiences over time.
Advantages of chronological organization
You can’t beat “chronological order” as the best option for organizing your nature journal. Here’s why:
- It keeps the focus on the actual activity of nature journaling rather than on managing the “stuff” of nature journaling.
- There’s no need to maintain multiple notebooks or remember elaborate organizational schemes. You can get out the door and into nature faster because you’re not sorting through stacks of in-progress notebooks.
- It limits clutter because you journal in only one notebook at a time.
- It feels natural to our brains to track experiences sequentially over time.
- Our minds relax into this familiarity, which lessens stress and pressure on us- always a great thing and one of the biggest benefits of nature journaling as a hobby.
- It keeps all your observations and thoughts in one place, and in logical order. This makes it easy to revisit a particularly awesome nature experience in the future.
Disadvantages of chronological order
- Finding specific information within past entries takes time.
- For example, let’s say that you focus mostly on birds and their behavior during your nature walks. One day, you want to see what information your past self captured about nesting behaviors of American Robins. If you’ve organized your journals chronologically, your journal contains more than just your observations about American Robins. Therefore, you must wade through all the entries to find those that apply, even those that have no nesting information at all.
Organize your nature journal by location
Some nature journalers enjoy organizing their nature journalers by location. For example, you record observations from your beach get-aways in one journal, and those from vacationing at the lake in another.
Advantages of organizing by location
- It is easy to remember.
- Like chronological order, this organizational method feels natural. We instinctively understand that our experiences will differ widely when we visit different locations. So it feels natural to use different journals to capture those experiences.
- It helps you notice habitat-specific patterns and trends over time.
- Finding past journal entries about specific experiences becomes faster and easier.
- For example, you can go straight to your “seaside” nature journal to find the list of shorebirds you spotted during your last trip to the beach.
Disadvantages of organizing by location
- It requires advance planning.
- Maintaining this organizational strategy depends on you knowing your destination in advance so that you grab the correct notebook. You have less freedom to change or add to your destination since doing so risks messing up your organization.
- It increases clutter in your home and/or in your hobby.
- Any nature journaling organizational strategy that involves more than one journal- or even more than one section within the same notebook- means more stuff for you to manage, keep track of, carry, and store.
Organize your nature journal by activity
Organizing your nature journal by activity is another great option. In this strategy, you separate your nature journal entries by what you were doing at the time, rather than where you were. The same location offers different natural experiences depending on your focus and your activity.
For example, your local park may contain both the soccer field on which your child plays his weekend games and the nature trails upon which you like to walk. The habitats around you are the same but outdoor experience will be very different on those days when your focus is watching your child play than when you indulge in a two hour hike around the park. Same location, totally different nature journal entries.
Advantages of organizing by activity
- It lightens the pressure on perfection.
- You will naturally notice the plants and animals that surround you less when you are focusing elsewhere so your journal entries will be correspondingly sparse. Organizing your nature journal by activity acknowledges that your focus on nature varies depending on what you are doing at the time, while still supporting your engagement in your hobby.
Disadvantages of organizing by activity
- It makes finding specific entries in the future harder because the system relies on what you were doing, not what you experienced.
- It increases clutter in your home and/or in your hobby.
- Any nature journaling organizational strategy that involves more than one journal- or even more than one section within the same notebook- means more stuff for you to manage, keep track of, carry, and store.
- It makes nature journaling more complicated because most people engage in many different activities outdoors.
Organize your nature journal by season
Another option for organizing your nature journals is by season. Seasonal organization means you create separate nature journals for each of the seasons your area experiences.
For example, some nature journalers living in temperate climates maintain separate journals or sections for each of the four seasons; spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Those in arid and tropical climates create separate journals for the dry and wet seasons.
Similar to chronological organization, you add entries one after another, in order, over time. Unlike chronological order, nature journalers who organize their notebooks by season switch to the next season’s journal or section when it’s time to do so, even if the first notebook or section isn’t full.
Advantages of organizing by season
- Finding and comparing particular, time-sensitive information year over year is quick and easy.
- For example, let’s say you’re curious about the earliest time of year ospreys returned to your area. You know ospreys return in the spring. You can go straight to your “spring” nature journal and find this information rather than sort through a year’s worth of irrelevant entries.
Disadvantages of organizing by season
- The start and end points of seasonally organized journals are arbitrary.
- The easiest and most consistent separation points are the dates of the solstices and the equinoxes. However, these dates don’t always signal hugely obvious natural changes from one day to the next.
- Seasonal transitions appear drastic when looked at over time but are much more subtle day-over-day. Late entries in your “spring” journal may have a lot in common with early entries in your “summer” journal.
- Multiple notebooks or notebook sections require more attention and effort to maintain. You have to calendar-watch and remember to switch over at the end point you picked or you’ve lost your organization.
Some nature journalers organize their notebooks by category. For example, they split their entries into categories that appeal to them, like “birds”, “weather”, “plants”, or “rarest sightings”. These journalers maintain either separate journals, or separate sections, for each category and split their observations between them.
Organize your nature journal by category
Advantages of organizing by category
- It helps you learn about yourself and discover your likes and dislikes.
- Over time, you will notice patterns in the information you choose to record. Organizing your nature journal in this way distills information down and makes it easy to compare.
- For example, you may notice you naturally write more detailed descriptions about wildflowers than about the insects buzzing around them. This leads you to seek out more habitats with wildflowers and enjoy nature even more.
- It makes finding specific information easier. You avoid sorting through information about cloud formations and the water level in the lake when you just want to review the bird species you saw last week.
Disadvantages of organizing by category
- It lends itself to clutter.
- You may create multiple categories and end up with an unruly stack of disorganized, half-filled notebooks.
- It introduces complexity and decision-making into the nature journaling process.
- For example, let’s say you’ve created three separate journals or sections in your notebook; one for “animals”, one for “plants”, and one for “rare sightings”. During a nature walk, you spot a group of squirrels positively surrounded by acorns. The squirrels gather nuts frantically and several squabble over the same acorns, despite the abundance. The squirrels are so single-minded they fail to notice the red-tailed hawk circling above. The hawk stoops and snatches an unfortunate squirrel in its talons. In which journal do you write about this experience? In “animals” because of the squirrels and hawk? In “plants” because of the abundance of acorns? Or in “rare sightings” because of the hawk’s successful attack? All of this extra thinking and effort makes nature journaling more work and less fun.
- It ignores nature’s complexity.
- Like in the above example, nothing in nature exists all on its own. Everything in nature reacts to everything else constantly. Dividing your observations across categories makes it much harder to notice and appreciate those relationships.
Conclusion
I’ve tried every one of these strategies for organizing my nature journals over the years. I always come back to the tried-and-true chronological order.
Why? Because it’s a grab-and-go system. As a result, I get to spend more time out in nature, making observations and unwinding, and less time preparing for my hobby. Simplicity suits my particular nature journaling style and I recommend it for other nature journalers, especially beginners.
However, please know that each option I’ve presented above works extremely well if it suits your particular journaling style and interests. Nature journaling is a flexible hobby. No one gets to tell you what, when, or how to maintain your nature journal. You’re in charge and you make it your own.
Remember, nature journaling is one hobby you just can’t get wrong. So pick an organizational strategy, grab your supplies, and get outside.
For my recommendations on the type of information to include in every nature journal entry, regardless of how you choose to organize your journals, check out this other Now I Wonder post “Top Facts To Record In Your Nature Journal From the Start“.
Happy nature journaling!
