Used to spend 45 minutes drawing out my monthly spread with a ruler and colored pencils, now I just scribble the dates in a plain notebook while waiting for my coffee.

Switched after I realized the fancy layouts were making me avoid writing stuff down because I was too worried about messing up the lines, anyone else ditch the decorations for pure function?

3 comments

3 Comments

josephmartin1mo ago

I guess people really get hung up on the aesthetics of their notebooks. It's a personal diary, not an art gallery. If you can't function without perfect lines, maybe the problem isn't the notebook, it's you being a little too precious about it. Just scribble the dates, move on with your life. It doesn't matter if the corners are messy.

faith_king1mo agoMost Upvoted

But why does it bother you so much that other people care about how their notebooks look? I mean you say it doesn't matter but the way you framed it sounds like you think there's something wrong with people who want their pages to be neat. Does having nice handwriting or using a ruler really make someone too precious? Some folks just enjoy making their notebook a nice place to write in, like decorating their room or picking out a comfy chair. Why compare a daily journal to an art gallery when lots of people use them for sketching or bullet journals where layout actually helps them stay organized?

blair_webb1mo ago

And yeah same here, I used to stress about making my journal look perfect with washi tape and matching ink colors and then I realized I was spending more time decorating than actually writing anything. Honestly once I let go of the whole aesthetics thing I started filling way more pages and actually enjoying the process instead of stressing about how it looked. The messy pages in my old notebooks are the ones I look back on the most because they actually have real thoughts and memories instead of just pretty layouts.