[supersrdjan]

My stack is org mode plus the Denote package which has a nifty journaling feature. Each day has its own file. The date is in the file name, but more useful to me, the file name also includes a signature that looks like this today:

2025q4w40thu

I find that the week number and day of the week is a more meaningful coordinate than the date itself to orient myself when browsing through the files.

[supersrdjan]

The issue I'm having is that the daily file is sometimes a running log of notes I jotted down, other times a structured journal entry written the next morning. I wish I could separate the two so that I could export all my proper journal entry into a pdf.

[HankStallone]

One option would be org-mode's capture templates. If you had a capture template for structured journal entries, you could keep your daily file open for notes, and then pop open a capture window when you want to start a journal entry.

Or, if you're not sure which a piece of writing is going to be when you start, you could tag the ones you want to save in your "proper journal" with a :JOURNAL: tag, and then refile those once in a while to a separate file.

I do a lot of captures which all go to refile.org, and then I go through that weekly or more often and refile items to other files where they belong. That makes it easy to jot down a thought down quickly, since I don't have to decide where it goes first.