I Tried 5 Different Productivity Journals
Do they work?
A few years back, I became obsessed with everything related to personal productivity. Before that, I was a master procrastinator. I was constantly falling behind my schedule at work and getting nothing done when it came to my personal projects.
My failure to organise my time and my tasks culminated when I had to stay at work until the late evening hours for the fourth week in a row. I had just switched jobs, which meant that I moved from working in a team with administrative support to being largely dependent only on myself. I had no idea how to cope with the additional workload.
Suddenly, everything became urgent and I only managed to get things done on the day of the deadline. The last straw was when I had to chase the 9PM closing time of the only post office that was still open in the vicinity to deliver a vital claim to the court. I knew it was time for a change.
Thus began my journey of personal productivity. Any spare free time I had, I would dedicate to learning about various productivity systems and try to make them work for me.
Over the next 5 years, I would try out (and spend copious amounts of money on) a zillion of to-do applications and every book about getting things done. While I find the idea of paperless systems very appealing, I also have a soft spot for putting pen to paper. This led me to trying out a huge number of personal planners and productivity journals.
The following is a not-very-comprehensive review of the productivity planners that made the biggest impact on my work and my personal system of getting stuff done, in order of purchase.
Weekview Business Planner (2018–2019)
To sum it up in one sentence: this is your parents’ planner. It’s big. It’s bulky. It contains one whole year’s worth of every calendar view imaginable, complete with project and habit trackers, quarterly and monthly overviews, as well as 2 bookmarks and separate sections dedicated to project planning, lists and freedom pages for doodling.
The Good: There’s a “big picture” section at the beginning where you can plan out every segment of your life’s goals. The “daily grind” section is organised into 2-page spreads for the whole week, where you can jot down your agenda, tasks, notes and a few lines for review. If you’re a customisation freak, this planner is for you. You can shape it to accommodate you in any way you like.
The Bad: The downside of this planner is that it is dated, and if you take a longer break from it, you might find that you’ll have wasted a lot of paper. For me, while containing every possible productivity angle, this planner was just too much. Because of its unlimited capabilities, I struggled to keep the important stuff at the centre of my attention.
This journal will only benefit you if you spend enough time learning about its contents and work out a very robust system to make it work for you. To draw parallels to the digital world, this planner reminded me most of OmniFocus app.
The other downsides I found were that it contains relatively thin paper that allows ink to bleed through, and it doesn’t lay flat. It’s also the biggest of the ones reviewed here, which makes carrying it around a burden.
After buying two of these and finding out that I had left out a significant portion of the year empty, I decided to focus to other options. Nevertheless, I was slowly improving at shuffling my priorities.
The BestSelf Self Journal (Summer 2019)
This 13-week journal focuses on setting 3 big goals for yourself to complete in the next 3 months. The goal-setting instructions are easy to follow, there’s even a page dedicated to making a signed promise to yourself to fulfil the goals you’ve written down by the time you reach the end of the journal.
The Contents: The journal is completely undated, which makes it easy to take a break from it and pick up where you left off. I started this one in the Summer of 2019 and finished it only in early 2020.
It’s divided into three main sections: the monthly overview, with space left to jot down your main milestones and notes, a weekly section and a daily grind section.
The weekly section allows you to put down the milestone tasks that will lead you to completing your goals, a small weekly agenda, a habit tracker, and a review section with prompts.
The daily grind section is a 2-page spread dedicated to planning out your day in detail, including your agenda by the hour, your 3 main tasks for the day, space to write down your main goal for the day in free-form and a notes section.
There are also two gratitude prompts for each day, one for the morning and one for the evening, and a daily review where you can jot down your wins and the lessons you learned that day.
There are freedom pages at the end of the journal, and it has 3 bookmarks, which makes jumping between the three main sections easy, so you never lose track of where you are on the map.
The Good: Overall, I found that the journal is focused as much on your agenda as it is on daily and weekly reflection. Every day, you have the option to write down what worked, what didn’t and what you can do to improve. This, as I found out, is one of the most crucial aspects of personal productivity, and laid down the foundation on which I based my article about Bruce Lee.
The journal is reasonably sized, opens flat and has paper thick enough to not let any pigment inks bleed through, which I found a blessing.
The Bad: The only downside I found with this journal is that it’s easy to skimp out on planning for the weekends, which often leads to leaving 4 pages per week empty, and the spaces reserved for daily and weekly reviews only accommodate a few lines.
I should note here that the review is based on an older version of the BestSelf Journal, which has since been revamped. I have yet to try out the revamped version.
Leuchtturm Bullet Journal (late 2019)
This one is an outlier. Not necessarily a productivity planner per-se, it’s a simple dot-gridded journal that you can customise to your heart’s content. It has numbered pages, 3 bookmarks and an index section for easy navigation. There’s a crash course for bullet journaling at the beginning, and a “Future Log” section dedicated to your “someday” projects.
The journal opens flat and, while fairly thin, the paper doesn’t let much ink bleed or ghost through to the other sides.
I decided to use this journal as a reference for any self-reflection lessons, quotes, notes on productivity and personal development.
Klarheit (January 2020)
Klarheit, or Clarity, is a one-year journal focused even more on self-reflection and less so on your projects and to-dos.
The Contents: There is a sizeable coaching section where you assess exactly where you are in each area of your life, and a thorough Q&A section where you discover which areas you want to improve. The journal guides you through these sections with well-thought-out prompts and explanations.
The rest of the journal is divided into three main sections: the monthly (p)reviews, weekly reviews, and freedom pages.
Each monthly section contains a 2-page spread, the first page dedicated to the preview of the following month where you set down your goals, the obstacles standing in your way and solutions you will use to overcome them. The second page is dedicated to assessing your wins, your lessons and noting down how you will improve next month.
The weekly section is a 2-page spread where you will write down your agenda for the week, your goals and tasks and any good things that happened. A third of the page is reserved for notes and ideas.
The Good: The journal itself is undated and, like the BestSelf Journal, easy to pick up where you left off. It has 2 bookmarks, which makes jumping between the monthly and weekly sections a breeze, and the freedom pages are completely plain.
The Bad: On the downside, the paper is fairly thin and prone to bleeding with heavier ink pens, and it doesn’t lay flat. Because this is a one-year journal in the A5 format, it’s cramped pretty tight. I found that there was very little space for me to write down all my to-dos for the whole week and I would often run out of space when writing down notes and the positive insights.
Overall, if self-reflection is the most important aspect of your planning process, this might be the journal for you. If not, I would focus on other options. I quit using this journal after just two months.
Baronfig Do Journal (Summer 2020)
This was the one that changed it for me. The best way to describe this one is productivity minimalism.
The Contents: The Baronfig Do is similar to the BestSelf Journal in that it is a 13-week undated work log, dedicated to completing 3 goals in 3 months. The coaching part is only 4 pages long, and the journal is divided into 3 main sections: the quarterly overview, a weekly overview and a daily grind section. The last part of the journal contains dot-gridded freedom pages and an index.
The quarterly overview is a 2-page spread where you set down your 3 main goals for the next 3 months, and the 3 main milestones that will lead to the completion of those goals. The second page is dedicated to writing down any highlights you expect to happen in the following months.
Each week begins with a 2-page weekly overview, where you set your 3 main tasks for the week, your agenda, and a third of the page is reserved for notes.
The daily grind section contains five (yes, five) 2-page spreads for each week, one page dedicated to your daily tasks and the other page is a blank dot-grid for your notes and insights.
The Good: The beauty of this journal lies in its simplicity and clever use of icons. Contrary to the logic of other productivity journals, this one focuses exclusively on a 5-day workweek, leaving out your weekends entirely (because rest is important, too).
Each section has placeholders for milestone tasks that are clearly marked with a star, so you never lose track of your priorities. On each side of every page, there are fast-review icons that allow you to simply tick off your success for each day, week and quarter, track hours, mood, insights etc.
The Not-So-Good: This journal only has one bookmark, which is unusual for most calendar-based planners. This is remedied by the journal having no dedicated monthly overview, and the weekly overviews are sequential — contrary to the BestSelf Journal which groups the weekly overviews into its own section, the Baronfig Do has weekly overviews occurring at the end of each 5-day section. This makes tracking your weekly goals a breeze, and the lack of a monthly overview can be easily fixed by using the dot-grid freedom pages to draw out each month if you need it.
This was the first productivity journal that I actually filled out from start to finish, never skipping a single day. I owe a lot of that to the no-frills design of the journal, but also to the lessons I picked up from using other journals over the years. And with that, comes a significant lesson about using productivity journals.
Conclusion — Do They Work?
The most straightforward answer is yes and no. A productivity journal will do many things — it will help you visualise your time and it will help you break down your projects into more manageable tasks, but no journal will replace the main thing you have to always keep in mind: you will only feel productive if you know what your priorities are and actually dedicate time to fulfilling them.
You need to make your priorities a habit.
The only way to do that is to sit down each morning and make sure you have written down your milestone tasks for that day. Milestones are not just tasks that move you closer to your goals, but are important only to you. They have meaning.
At the end of the day, you should be able to assess whether you have completed your milestones and, if not, why you didn’t succeed. Your failures should translate into lessons that you can use to get better at getting stuff done the next day. The next day, you do the same thing all over again.
A productivity journal will help you by guiding you through the process daily, and most productivity journals on the market will fulfil that job to a certain degree. It will, however, not teach you consistency if you don’t use it regularly.
As with all productivity systems, the question is how deep you want or need to go to make sure you get your daily grind in order. For some, having every detail filled out is the way to go. For me, it turned out that minimalism was key.
I don’t pretend to be a productivity guru in any way, but finally being consistent with planning my milestones has helped me stay on top of my work. My evening office hours have since been replaced with a number of side-hustles, and I feel much better about myself.
Wherever you are on your productivity journey, I hope that this review will help you get you closer to your goals.
