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Hot take: weekly spreads are a waste and I can prove it from my own 3 month test | Bullet Journaling - Thought Shares

Hot take: weekly spreads are a waste and I can prove it from my own 3 month test

I was at a coffee shop in Portland two Fridays ago and this girl at the next table had the prettiest weekly spread I have ever seen, washi tape, a little mood tracker, the works. I asked her how long it took and she said about 40 minutes every Sunday. That number stuck with me. So I ran an experiment on myself for 3 months, half the weeks with a full weekly layout, half with just dailies and a running task list. Side A looked great in photos. Side B actually got stuff done. My open task count dropped from around 22 to 9 and I missed way fewer follow ups. Here is my take: weekly spreads are mostly decoration disguised as planning, but I get why people defend them, they say seeing the week at once keeps them calm. So which side are you on, is the weekly spread pulling its weight or is it just pretty filler? If you dropped weeklies, what did you replace them with?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_lee7d ago

Are you sure the weekly spread was the problem and not just the time it took? Most people who defend weeklies do the setup once and reuse the layout for months, so the 40 minutes your coffee shop girl spent is on the high end. I ran something close to your test and found that a simple weekly page kept my dailies from turning into a pile of random notes, so for me it pulled its weight.

kim.jake7d ago

Your point about setup time is fair but here's a bigger pattern I keep running into. People defend the tool because of the calm it gives them, not because of what it makes them do. Same thing happens with fancy home gym setups, color coded meal prep containers, five step morning routines. The calming part is real, but calm and useful are two different jobs. A weekly page works when it's a simple map you glance at, it turns into decoration the second you start taping things in and drawing boxes. Your dailies plus a running list sounds boring, and boring is usually what actually ships. Maybe the real test is not whether the page looks good on Sunday but whether Tuesday you even remember it exists.