By Kelly
I’ve still going strong on my New Year’s Resolutions and I think it’s because I got the Daily Greatness Wellness Journal for Christmas. This pastel, undated planner is full of inspirational quotes; yearly, quarterly and weekly goal planners; daily food and exercise trackers; weekly shopping lists; and healthy habit reminders.
I’m learning that getting to track your healthy habits makes you more likely to repeat them. Getting to update a page in the journal due to working out or eating well gives me a happy which motivates me to take action to keep updating it. In fact, I’ve gone from working out barely over the last year to doing four fitness classes a week, eating mostly salad and drinking mostly water. (Don’t want to spend $45 on a journal? Try Self Journal. This one lets you download a whole PDF of the layout for free to print out if you don’t want to buy it.)
But as I continue this habit, I’m also starting to realize that I want an even more customized solution. I like writing into the little premade boxes and lines that I like, but sometimes there’re things I don’t want to fill out (like the “Daily Why”) because I find it boring or irrelevant. I doubt I’ll ever check that “Meditation” box. (My bar is so not that high.) I’d much rather have a box that just says “Floss.”
This made me want to look at something less structured, like the Bullet Journal. If you haven’t heard of this yet, you will. It’s a great system that uses indexes, page numbers, keys and future logs to organize your thoughts, and it’s really popular.
But I can’t help noticing that it’s mostly dots on a page. I’m sure that blank canvas is fun for someone with artistic ability, or even just someone who can draw a straight line, but I need a little more structure than that.
Check-list journals are a little closer since they have both structure and flexibility. (You just check a box and fill-in the lines with whatever you want.) But I still want a little more structure.
So now I’m on the hunt for some way to custom-make a journal where I control all the words, boxes and lines to fill in, but I still want that structure of printed words on a page and nice layouts.
Cafe Press, Shutterfly and Etsy has some options, but not quite what I’m looking for. Any other suggestions?