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If you’ve ever needed a sign to journal…this is it.

The other day I was chatting with a high school friend.

I dug up some of my journal entries of our shared memories together - memories we’d both forgotten (but we still cherished very much).

She told me this:

But how can I stay so consistent with journaling when I’m pretty lazy and forgetful?

Today I’m sharing all my systems…

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Making journaling easy

Students in my life tracking course are always shocked that they can journal as little as:

• Just 1 sentence

• Just bullet points

I call it minimum viable action - think of the smallest, easiest thing you can do.

And just focus on that.

Here’s what I do:

• Cue - have a specific reminder to journal (alarm, seeing an automation on my home screen, etc.)

• Action - make it super easy to do something (I click a button and it launches an automation to open my voice transcription app and then my 24/7 time tracker - so I just yap to my phone and look at my calendar to share how I felt about the events of the day)

• Reward - it’s fun to reflect when I make it easy! My students mentioned this too, they said they felt a sense of completion so they can “let go” and go to bed without feeling guilty about not “finishing” some work

Having something that’s easy for me to do (press a button, yap to my phone and then just copy pasting the transcript) helps me stay consistent.

Weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reflections

When I do my daily journaling (which can totally be 1 sentence of bullet points, especially on busy days), I put a summary of the highlights in brackets:

Then, at the end of every week, I have a Notion reminder that lets me know it’s time to do my weekly reflection:

After I reflect, I put the highlights in brackets again:

Then, at the end of the month, I look at all the highlights of each week to fill in my monthly reflections (which also has a summary of highlights):

So then the only thing I look at to fill out my quarterly reflections is the monthly highlighted summaries - because that’s what stood out the most to me so I reflect on why they were so important.

Then at the end of the year, it becomes easy to reflect on everything that’s happened, instead of feeling like I did nothing this year:

Am I perfectly consistent?

No - last year I was 3 months behind on my weekly reflections (and therefore didn’t do my monthly, quarterly, or yearly reflections until mid-Jan this year).

But because my daily journaling habit was so easy, I made it my non-negotiable. I would write at least 1 sentence (or even 1 word) every day, no matter how tired I was.

I can always spare time to write something even when on the toilet or brushing my teeth.

And usually, that 1 sentence would turn into more, and I felt my day was more complete after I reflected on it.

When I have my daily journals to reference (which my 24/7 time tracking helped with cuz sometimes I can’t even remember what I did during the day),

It became easier to spend 2-3 hours at the end of the year to “catch up” and update all my monthly, quarterly, and yearly reflections.

Template: reflections

The template below includes 1 more thing I do - “end day.”

When I press this button on Notion, it opens a page where I can log my habits and daily journal/reflection.

• Something I’m grateful about

• Whether I did fulfilling work that day

• Happiness rating

• 1 sentence sharing 1 thing I would’ve improved about my thoughts or actions today (so I can become a better person daily)

Example:

Template:

Til next time,

Jennifer