Guest post: Millie's Moleskine weekly notebook as journal!

Huge thanks to Millie (aka MsLogica) from Planet Millie (which you must go read and see her beautiful photographs) for this excellent guest post on how she uses her Moleskine weekly notebook as a journal!  What a brilliant idea!

I remember when I announced that I had bought a new planner on Twitter, and I got tweets to ask if that meant I was abandoning my Filofax. I use a Malden in the personal size for my everyday planning needs, and people thought I might be leaving the Filofax club. Certainly not! I bought a Moleskine planner to use as a daily journal, and Laurie has kindly let me come on Plannerisms to discuss this.

I bought the large weekly planner in red from Moleskine, which has a similar format to the week on one page with notes from Filofax.

My only gripe with this layout is that Saturday and Sunday have only got half the space of the other weekdays. I want equal rights for Saturdays and Sundays! I have just as much stuff to write in their sections. This is especially true given my reason for buying the Moleskine.

I keep a regular journal, which is a blank notebook where I can ramble on about whatever takes my fancy. However, I decided to supplement this with a daily journal that specifically recorded what I'd been up to, anything amusing I'd seen that week and other such things that make up daily life. I jot down a few sentences on my day, and occasionally write down quotes. The blank notes page is used for larger prose I want to write - for example at the end of the month I do a quick analysis with some facts and figures for the month. I go into this in more detail in my normal journal, but this planner gives a quick snapshot of my life.

I know that some of you keep your planners from previous years, and so you think you already have a snapshot of your life. However, I would argue with this - what you have (or, what I would have if I kept old Filofax pages) is a snapshot of work meetings, appointments, deadlines. It's not a snapshot of what I thought, saw, did, read, etc. I don't have room to record this in my Filofax, and I'm not sure I'd want to. These are personal details, after all, whereas my Filofax is literally what I use to organise my time. Would I want to be sat in a meeting with my Filofax open on the day, with a note that says “Very amused to see David Hasselhoff on TV. Remember Baywatch?”

I keep my planner next to my bed, in my bedside table. It has a pen attached so that there is no excuse for me not writing in it every evening. It usually takes less than 5 minutes to jot down a couple of sentences.

If you'd like to keep a journal, but struggle whenever you start, I'd recommend keeping a daily journal in a planner format instead. The layout forces you to write something for each day, and the extra space in the Moleskine weekly planner means you can write more if you get the urge to do so. It's an easy way to get into a journalling habit, and it will give you something to look back on in the future.