I used to think minimalist spreads were better until I tracked 6 months of habit data and saw the difference a detailed weekly layout made for my consistency

My simple one page monthly was neat but I missed 60% of my daily habits over 3 months, then I switched to a full weekly spread with time blocks and suddenly hit 85% consistency - has anyone else found that more structure actually helped them stick with journaling long term?

2 comments

2 Comments

wade78016d ago

Oh man, I've gotta push back on this hard. More structure is the enemy of journaling for me. I tried the whole time-blocked weekly spread thing and it turned my journal into a chore list. I was spending more time setting up the layout than actually writing anything meaningful. Eventually I just quit for two months because it felt like homework. My scrappy mess of a bullet journal with half-assed entries keeps me way more consistent than any fancy system ever did.

willow24416d ago

Three months of wasted spreads and stickers taught me the same lesson @wade780. I went all out with a traveler's notebook kit with all the inserts and color coded washi tape. It looked amazing on Instagram but I never wrote in it. The pressure to make it perfect killed everything. Now I just grab a cheap spiral notebook from the grocery store and scribble whatever comes to mind. Sometimes it's just a sentence about how I dropped my phone in a puddle. Other times I'll write two pages about a dream I had. The messier and less planned it is, the more I actually want to do it. And that's really what matters I guess.