Next up on our Notion Tour series is the journal! I was never much of a journaler, but I had heard about all of the benefits and I wanted to be a journaler. Another snag in the plan though, is that I hate accumulating physical items. So my Notion habit tracker + my automated Notion journal became the process that clicked for me and turned me into a full blown write-out-my-thoughts-process-my-emotions journaler. And I’m going to share it all with you!
Habit Tracker
I plan to cover my habit tracker in a future post, so I won’t dive too deeply into it here. But every year I select 6 different habits I want to incorporate into my life. I add them to a database in Notion and create a new entry every morning. Then I check things off throughout the day or at night as I complete each habit. I don’t really have a great reward system because I don’t find very much more motivating than checking off a box. My favorite “rewards” are money related and I don’t really want to spend just because I “earned it.” So if you have a habit reward system you like, let me know in the comments!
Journal Template
Now, let’s get into the template before we get into my prompts and process. If you’re completely new to Notion and “template” is a foreign word to you, fear not, it’s much easier than it sounds. Almost all of my Notion templates and databases are reworked versions of ones I got for free from the Notion template website. But whether you’re familiar with Notion or not, my journal template is actually super simple – The journal I use is essentially entirely run by a button!
Notion makes it extremely easy to design beautiful dashboards without needing any sort of coding knowledge. With this button, I’m able to design my entire template. And then just click it every morning when I’m ready to start a new entry!
So you can see that when the button is clicked, it creates a new drop down. The drop down is always titled with today’s date using the “@today” formula. And then everything below that is just simple text.
Journal Prompts
If you clicked on this blog post for the prompts and not the Notion nuances, I totally get it. And I’m happy to dive into that! To preface, 1. I’m definitely no journal expert and 2. my prompts are very specific to my human experience. Currently, I am working through body image issues and shifting to a body neutrality lens. So if that’s of interest to you, these prompts may be perfect! I used to just write what happened during my day because digging into my thoughts felt too crunchy for me. But now, I do a lot of digging and I do it twice a day now! So here are my prompts:
Morning Journal
1. Intention
2. Negative Thought Reframe
3. Body Functionality Appreciation
4. Grateful For
- xyz
- xyz
- xyz
5. Affirmations
- xyz
- xyz
- xyz
Evening Journal
1. Reflection on Thoughts I Had Today
- Negative:
- Neutral:
- Positive:
2. What Did My Body Do For Me Today
3. What Happened Today
Let me know if it would be helpful to dive into what I typically write or my processes for each line item.
Last plug I’ll make for journaling in Notion is that I have so much historical information! I can look back easily into old entries and I’ve been thinking about taking all of my affirmations and turning them into a word cloud chart haha.
Journaling Process
As mentioned, I really started journaling consistently when I put it in my habit tracker, set a reminder on my phone and made the journal very easy to use through automation. But of course, I still have to actually do the work myself haha. So I do a couple things:
- Set a time constrained reminder on my phone.
- I do this so that I get a notification when it’s past 9:00 and this either incentivizes me to get it done early so I don’t get the alert OR it incentivizes me to do it ASAP and get rid of the notification haha. But I think you have to be somewhat anal for this type of thing to motivate you.
- I broke up the journaling into morning and evening.
- At first, I was journaling all at once at like 3:00 in the afternoon. So I wasn’t setting myself up for success in the AM, but I also wasn’t going to bed with all my thoughts down on paper.
- Splitting up prompts also just makes the actual journaling time shorter and reduces the barriers to completion.
- Lastly, I adjust my prompts over time!
- If I’m finding I’m not getting anything out of my journaling or I’m repeating myself from one prompt to the next, it’s totally okay to switch things up! If you’ve read my goal setting post, you know I’m big into “reassessing” my goals throughout the year. This helps me to stick to my goals and habits because I’m allowing myself to make these processes work for me and not the other way around!
Final Thoughts
My final note on my process, I do have days where I just simply don’t feel like it. Maybe once a month or so, I’ll just fill out the “what happened today” section because I don’t have the emotional space to dive into my body image issues or negative thoughts from the day. Or sometimes I can’t keep my eyes open and go to bed without journaling in the evening, but I always write something down for everyday. Keeping up the practice, even if it’s C- effort is still enforcing the habit!
Let me know if this was helpful and what you may like to see in the future (Notion related or not!). Keep up the good work, you’re doing great <3
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