How to Turn Off Journal “Time to Write” Reminders on iPhone & Apple Watch
Once you use the Journal app, it will send a daily notification to your iPhone and Apple Watch (yuck) with a reminder that says “Time to Write”, nudging you to create a new journal entry for the day. If you’re annoyed by the Journal “Time to Write” alerts on your iPhone or Apple Watch, you can disable them completely.
And just a heads up, there does not appear to be a way to disable Journal alerts on Apple Watch only, but preserve them on your iPhone. Basically that means you either disable them everywhere, or have the Journal app pester you physically every day if you’re an Apple Watch user, with a tap, buzz, and vibration on your wrist, something that basically zero notification or app should have the ability to do by default in my opinion (for my own Apple Watch use, I have all notifications disabled completely except for phone calls, and I am contemplating turning those off too. It’s a watch, I don’t want it ever physically interrupting me or what I’m doing). Anyway, let’s get to turning off the “Time to Write” Journal alerts on your Apple Watch and iPhone.
How to Turn Off “Time to Write” Journal Alerts on iPhone & Apple Watch
As mentioned above, there does not appear to be a setting specific to only disabling this on Apple Watch, so to disable it there, you must also disable Journal notifications on your iPhone too. This might change in a future software update, who knows:
- Open the “Settings” app on iPhone
- Go to “Notifications” and then find “Journal”
- Turn off all notifications ability for Journal app to disable them on iPhone and Apple Watch
Now you won’t get any Journal notifications on your iPhone, and you will no longer feel the tap, buzz and vibration on your wrist once a day every day, nor will you see the weird fuzzy low-resolution Journal icon pop up on your Apple Watch screen.
Separately, you can disable the journaling suggestions too on iPhone.
Journal app is a handy app for keeping a personal journal, but it feels like an oversight to not allow users to be able to disable Journal notifications only on their Apple Watch, where there are no settings for this behavior. Perhaps that will get addressed in the future, but for now disabling Journal alerts on iPhone is the only way how to stop getting Journal notifications on my Apple Watch. At least that’s what I’ve figured out so far, if you have additional information or another approach to turn these off, let us know in the comments.
