My journey to analog journaling in 2025

Journaling has so many types and ways to go.
I will describe what I found useful for myself.

It started simple with a habit tracker. By doing a lot of different things during the day (go for a walk, study new tech, reading various books, leetcode :), coding, drawing, English study) I wanted to stay focused.

I started with one notebook. Draw a tracking table every month.
Rows – habits, Columns days. Crossed when habit was done.

I used a pomodoro technique for each habit to stay focused. 25 min work 5 min rest.
It helped me a lot with discipline.

Later I added a One Line a Day journal. Page with lines numbered from 1-30. Every day I wrote something I wanted to be memorable or simply what I did that day.

So, for a month I had on the left page the habit tracker, on the right page the one line journal.
30 days working with those two pages. Progress and history were always in front of me. Very powerful.

When something interesting comes up during a month, I put it on the next pages (from my tracking activities or from somewhere else) till the next month begins.

The next step - I started The Morning Pages from The Artist’s way book. I kept them in a separate book because they are not supposed to live for a long time. The value is the process not the content. The method is to write 3 pages of stream of consciousness every morning.
Benefits:

• Clear my mind.
• Helps reasoning with myself.

Also I had a small notebook with me all the time for quick notes and todo lists.
Info from this book might go to the main notebook.

One good practice with todo lists is to write all things I was trying to do that day and if it was not done I rewrote it again for the next day. Very powerful.

It became my hobby. I started using a lot of Japanese stationery.
I love the feeling when I’m writing with a fountain pen on Japanese paper. (It came to me after a while :))

Before I used different digital tools but for me they lack grasping a lot of the information at the same time.
I still use Obsidian but it is my secondary not primary information storage. I copy information from my notebook. to it sometimes.

Journaling main points for me:

• Helps me to stay focused
• Free up my brain by writing everything on paper.
• Clear my mind.
• Have my history of the past that I read from time to time.
• Get things done – more dopamine :)
• Pleasure from the process – more serotonins :)
• Now I always put a date before writing something down.

I would also descirbe it as :

• Habits Tracker + One Line a Day - ECG (electrocardiogram)
• Morning Pages - Antihypertensives

It is important to start simple and don’t invest too much into tools and “furniture” just to get a feel for the process and in what way it suits more and progressively add new things if they are needed.

My notebooks from 2025