I keep two journal notebooks, one personal, the other a record of my work stuff (I'm doing a PhD so it's important to not let the days blur together and also to look back on my ideas)
I've got an, I think, pretty well thought out system:
I use months as notes and have each day be a header in those notes, they're labelled "Year-Month - MonthName" so they automatically sort chronologically (that's a hot tip: YY/MM/DD date formats sort the same chronologically and alphabetically 
)
I also have a plugin that lets you run JavaScript within Joplin so I have another note I just to generate the headers of my notes
Here's a gist to that note The markdown needed to generate journal headers in Joplin using the JavaScript plugin · GitHub
And the JavaScript plugin: GitHub - S73ph4n/joplin_automate_notes: Joplin plugin to automate notes with javascript
The auto generated stuff includes a table of contents to jump to specific days but hides it in < details > tags 
I like to think it's pretty feature rich while not being very complex, I've found it fits me pretty well 