I've tried a variety of times to keep month notes, week notes, logs, all sorts. Failure, all of them.

However.

I still need to solve these anxieties for myself:

• Feeling like time slips by too fast.
• Feeling like I'm not getting anything done.

The system that's finally worked for me is one that's private and low-effort, scrappy and ugly.

At the beginning of the year, I started a fresh daily log book. The rules are:

• No rules!
• Actually, rules: just notes, don't plan, don't think.
• No pressure to write something funny, clever or interesting, because only I'll read it^🟉.
• Write anything for every day, no matter how mundane. I existed, therefore something happened.
• Skipping a day isn't the end of the universe, but go back and fill it in anyway.

The perfect book for this turned out to be the calendar version of my already-favourite notebook form factor that I've been using for years. The Leuchtturm1917 week planner and notebook in B6+.

On the left-hand side are the days of the week. At the end of the day, I write a few words to describe what happened that day (e.g. finished annoying project. went to movies. did laundry.). The right-hand side is just a piece of lined paper, so that's a place I can either leave totally blank or use freeform. I've used the right-hand side to hold badly-thought-out ideas, unbaked to-dos, lists of things bothering me, sketches, contact info, or as a scrapbook of random bits of paper I've collected that week. The cover gets any stickers I am given.

I have filled it in for every day this year, so far, and flicking back through it is satisfying. It is effective in addressing the aforementioned anxieties in an amount that is worth continuing next year.

That's it. That's the post.

^🟉 Do you ever stop and wonder what will happen to all your stuff when you die? Like, will the person clearing out my shelves for recycling bother to stop and read my notebooks? Probably not.