I first heard about Five-Year Journals (5YJ) while reading Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson’s Bright Line Eating. It’s the only thing from that book that stuck with me. Afterall, no matter what she writes, I don’t feel in a position to give up sugar and flour. I could limit helpings and portion size and whatever the fourth line is but it’s not much fencing yourself with only two sides, there’s no point.
As is quite apparent, I’m decent at logging things (making notes, blogging, journaling) so it’s the right endeavour for me to take up and what a great result there will be after five years at it!
I started on March 10 last year. It’s not just my birthday but my fortieth. Very timely.
I kept up with it quite well for a few months, logging every day, filling out all the 2018s at the start of a month for the month, filling out “19”, “20”, “21”, “22” on the day of logging.
But then I started just logging in Google Keep and carried months and months of backlog. I would spend a lunch hour transcribing entries into the physical journal. Over one lunch hour, I would get a couple of weeks worth transcribed and it would feel good while at the same time I don’t know when I’d have the next free lunch hour. It was a source of low-level stress.
To be honest, I never loved the look of the journal I bought. Online, I saw and thought The Happiness Project one is prettier but took some review to heart (that the lines were too closely spaced and the goldleaf on the edge of the pages rub off) and thought the darker cover was more mature. constellations would appear more mature but never liked it. It has goldleaf on the edge, too, and why wouldn’t it rub off when there will be 1,825 (+1 or 2 days) entries entered!
I started to think that I just needed a bigger notebook even if it meant creating the four partitions per page. At least if the stationery was so beautiful, I’d be happy to carry it everywhere and sit down and transcribe the backlog and then everything back to my birthday in 2018? Stationery is getting prettier and prettier with folios.
But the honest to goodness fact is that I’m moving further from being paper-based. It’s not even so much a conservation thing but certainly I have to restrain myself from buying stationery I’m honestly not going to use. I don’t bother considering reading physical books these days, it’s all e-books. A similar principle applies here.
Still, the current gorgeous stationery at Chapters/!ndigo (Paper) was super-enticing especially with a gift card burning a hole in my pocket.
The correct decision was for me to move my 5YJ to Microsoft’s One Note. I use it at work all of the time, it’s an app on my phone and I also don’t get around to recipes if they are merely bookmarked and not in One Note.
Google Keep is awesome and my go-to for quick note-keeping but in One Note, that’s where I can organize my digital life. I wanted to create a template with stationery/backgrounds like above but in the end, it’s vanilla tables. It’s the content that matters, right??
Watch me be revamping the pages only after I’ve created a whole year’s worth in One Note. Oh well! There’s over three more years to go , and who’s to say it won’t become a 10YJ? By then, who knows what system we’ll be using?!
