Hit 100 spreads in my journal, but now I wonder if I'm just making art instead of tracking
I kept a weekly spread for 4 months straight, that's 100 pages with habit trackers, grocery lists, and work shifts at the hardware store. Half of them are decorated with washi tape and doodles, but I barely looked back at them for actual planning last month. Are we building a useful system or just a pretty time capsule, and does it even matter if the act of making it keeps us grounded? What number did you hit that made you question your own method?
What saved my setup was doing a quick five minute review every Sunday night before I started the new spread. Just flipping back through the week, circling what actually got done and crossing out what didn't. Takes almost no time but it turns the journal from a scrapbook into something my brain actually uses. The pretty pages still happen, I just stopped feeling bad about them because the review part is what does the work. Honestly the doodles probably help more than we admit, since you remember stuff better when your hands were busy making it.