I have bought a lot of day planners over the years. Every one of them ended the same way. I would use it hard for a few weeks, miss a couple of days, and then flip past a run of blank boxes with dates preprinted on them that I did not fill in. Those empty spaces bothered me more than they should have. It felt like the planner was keeping score, and I was losing.
TL;DR: Preprinted planners guilt-trip you into quitting. A bullet journal doesn't, because the pages don't exist until you write them. I use mine for scheduling and as a log of every weigh-in, workout, and shot — and the old entries turn out to matter more than the blank ones ahead.
So I quit buying them. Now I use a bullet journal, and I have used it long enough to say it has changed both my professional and my personal life.
What a bullet journal is
It was created by a guy named Ryder Carroll. Before you do anything else, watch his video explaining the system. It runs about five minutes and it lays the whole thing out better than anyone else can. Watch that first. I am not going to try to out-teach the man who invented it.
The short version is that a bullet journal is a daily, monthly, and yearly calendar all in one notebook. The difference is that it is free-flowing. Nothing is preprinted. Nothing is waiting on you.
That is the whole reason it works for me. There are no blank boxes to feel guilty about, because the pages do not exist until I write them. Miss three days and the notebook does not care. You pick up the pen and start where you are.
What I actually put in it
Two things, and they serve different purposes.
The first is what you would expect from any planner. Events I need to remember down the road. Important dates. Times I need to be somewhere. That side of it keeps me from getting blindsided by something I agreed to two months ago.
The second is the part I did not expect to matter as much as it does. I use it as a journal.
I log every weigh-in. I log every workout. I log when I take my shots.
If you have not figured it out from my other videos, I am on peptides. Four different ones right now, and I am still experimenting to see what does what. I am not on a GLP-1. There is nothing wrong with them, and if that is the road you are on, go back and watch my video on GLP-1s, because there are things you need to be doing alongside them that most people are not.
Either way, the point is the same. If you are putting something in your body and changing how you train and eat, you had better be writing down what happens. Otherwise you are just guessing and calling it a plan.
The real payoff is looking backward
Everybody thinks a planner is about the future. The part that surprised me is how much value is in the past pages.
You start something new and you are unsure about it. That is normal. You are three weeks in, the scale has not moved much, you feel about the same, and the doubt starts talking. Am I wasting my time here?
Then you flip back. There it is in your own handwriting, April the 7th, where you wrote down exactly what you weighed and exactly how the workout went and exactly how you felt about it. Now it is July the 1st, and you can read the two entries side by side.
That is affirmation you cannot argue with. It is not a memory, and memory is unreliable and generous with itself. It is a record. Either the numbers moved or they did not.
It also catches the wins you would otherwise let slide past. Most progress is too slow to feel day to day. Written down, it stacks up where you can see it.
Pick a format and hold yourself to it
I am not telling you it has to be a bullet journal. It does not have to be a notebook at all. Use a spiral from the grocery store, a notes app, a spreadsheet, whatever you will actually open.
What I am telling you is to journal something. Pick a format and use it to hold yourself accountable, because nobody else is going to do it for you. Not at our age. The people who are going to check on your workouts and your weigh-ins and whether you did what you said you were going to do are you and nobody.
How to start this week
Do not overthink the setup. That is where most people quit, before they have written a single useful line.
Get a notebook. Open to the first blank page. Write today's date at the top. Underneath it write what you need to do today and what you actually did. If you are tracking your health, write the number. Write the workout. Write one line about how you felt.
Do that for seven days. That is the whole assignment. If it holds, go watch Carroll's video and add the monthly and future pages, and the rest of the system will make sense on its own.
One notebook, one pen, five minutes a day. Go check it out.
What are you using to keep yourself accountable? Tell me in the comments.
Want the next one when it's out? I post updates on YouTube and Instagram, and you can always reach me at ron@reclaimdiscipline.com.