This Journal Keeps Me Productive (& Maybe You Too)

This is the theme system journal. It's something I helped design for me and maybe for you to help improve my life in a practical way. It's a very flexible tool; there are intentionally almost no labels of what has to go where, so it can be adaptable. But people ask exactly how I use mine, so let me show you the specifics, and then you can see if this journal, exactly, or just the system in general on anything, might work for you.

Rather than start at the beginning, which contains the actual theme part, I usually start at the back with these boxes and circles, which are daily trackers of what you want to improve upon, or, as is often the case with me at least, what you want to be more consistent about. So this is where what you want to track happens. But you don't know what's on your mind before you think about it, so there are these blank pages next door to brainstorm on what you might want to improve and test out how to phrase what to put in the daily tracker slots.

Personally, I find the process of thinking about what needs to be improved, or changed, or constantified, one of the most directly helpful parts of the process—identifying vague feelings of dissatisfaction and turning them into actionable, tractionable, checklistable items. For me, the brainstorm pages usually end up with the big four that can go wrong: sleep, exercise, diet, work, plus a few other things on my mind at the time.

For example, I realized over the past couple of years, I've gotten really terrible at human communications. I mean, I've always been bad at responding to messages, but it's at new abysmal lows. Next, the idea is to translate these pages into trackable items. For these pages, I think about the list as top down in order of importance. I'm not going to be successful at all things at all times, so a rank-ordered list is helpful. When things aren't going great, the circles are for filling in progress, and they have a little line in them so you can give yourself partial credit if you want.

I really recommend setting easy peasy partial credit. For example, for writing, I set the hilariously low "write anything at all" as partial credit. This is motivation to not completely bounce off a day's work. The full credit is a more reasonable but still easy two full writing sessions in a day. For exercise, partial credit is five minutes of strength shortly after waking up, and the full credit is 20 minutes later.

What I've been toying with so far about that communications problem is to give myself partial credit for something like “reply to one message from anyone today,” which is something I currently frequently fail to do. That might sound like a comically low threshold depending on what your life is like, but I think it also communicates just how bad I've gotten that communication. I actually suspect this is still going to be quite hard for me.

I then fill in the circles as I go and be sure to look at it all over at the end of the day. You can track the dates at the top and if you really want, count up the circle sections for bonus points if you like, but I find the circles themselves pleasingly visual enough. One of the really helpful things about having a physical journal is to act as a reminder and nudge at the end of the day that you're going to want to see more circles filled in than not.

Alright, so that's the daily trackers, but there are also a lot of pages like this. So how do I use these? This is the main part of the theme system journal, and it's the most flexible and open-ended. I use this at the start of the day, writing down where I am in the header and the top two boxes to write two things I'm grateful for, which I know exactly how that sounds, but it really is frustrating how effective this is at mood elevation.

I really should make a whole other video about gratitude journaling at some point, but for now, I'll just say the trick is to be really specific. So don't write "I'm grateful for my family"; write something exactly about one person in particular. And the real pro trick, if you're using the journal when you're feeling down, is to leave this bottom box empty until the end of the day to write in one thing that went well during the day. This forces your brain to start to pay attention to all the good things in life because it has to remember to save one for later.

Anyway, most of the time I don't feel the need for that extra step, so I use the bottom box as a place to write the one absolutely critical action item for the day. The big box in the middle for me is where I write down whatever is on my mind in the morning. This box is by far the least actionable part in some ways, though it helps over time to see what are reoccurring patterns that you might want to incorporate into future tracking questions or into an overarching theme itself.

This brings me to the theme part of the theme system journal, where you can set a high-level theme for the year or the season, like "year of intentionality" or "the spring of novelty." Set ideal outcomes you'd like to aim for and align your journaling and questions at the back toward that. Again, like any single part, it's not necessary or required to use it exactly like this, though this is the one place where there are labels because it's a strong recommendation.

A lot of work has gone into making this journal the absolute finest it can be. I would love if any of this sounded helpful for you to buy one and give it a try. Though I also want to be clear, you don't have to buy this. I've shown you all the parts; there aren't secrets paywalled in the physical product. So you can just do this on your own, and if because of this video you try some parts of this system on a pad of paper and it improves your life, I will be very happy.

I'll just say that if you do want to have a nice physical object that has been lovingly designed and tweaked over the years, I cannot tell you how much time was spent making sure the edges of this progress tab tear just right—so satisfying. If you'd like something to sit on your desk or in your bag to help nudge you in the right direction, then do give the theme system journal a try. You can order yours now by clicking here.