If there is one thing I have historically done well with planners, it’s consistency. When I commit, I show up. But here’s the catch: those planners always had to be immaculate. Every line straight, every spread balanced, every pen chosen with military precision. If something smudged, I rewrote the page. If a mistake crept in, I started over. The pages were more curated museum exhibits than living documents.
When I discovered digital planning in 2019 it was like my mind could BREATHE. It took away the fear of screwing up a line, misspelling a word, or a sticker touching the page in the wrong place. And I stuck with this system for six years.
Which is why this August has felt like such a shock.
For the first time in years, I kept up with an entire month of daily journaling in my physical Traveler’s Notebook — but I did it differently. Messy. Imperfect. Raw. Every single day got a page, and not one of them was “perfect.”
I set myself up with a Tula XII Micro planner, the perfect size for one page per day without the pressure of endless space. I made my own inserts with 45lb paper, because if I’m going to write in it daily, it has to feel good under my pens. Nexus, my AI co-conspirator, designed daily emoji-style stickers based on what I actually did, and I printed them out right at my desk on my Canon Ivy mini printer. At the end of each day, I pasted those tiny fragments into place, like proof that yes, this day existed.
And here’s the key: I let it be messy.
The pens bled. The lines wobbled. My rulers stayed in their drawer, making rare guest appearances. I wrote straight onto the page with no erasers, no drafts, no safety net. If I misspelled something, it stayed. If I botched a doodle, it lived. If the stickers went down crooked, I left them. Each page became a record of my life exactly as it was — messy handwriting, crooked stickers, uneven margins, and all.
For someone who has always tried to control her planners into submission, this felt both terrifying and freeing. My past planners were pristine but hollow. They looked gorgeous, but they didn’t always feel real. This one? It feels alive.
bursts of productivity. Others are sparse, with just a sticker and a half-scribbled paragraph because that was all I had to give. And both kinds of pages matter equally. Because the point was never to make something flawless. The point was to keep showing up.
And I did. For thirty-one days straight.
Somewhere along the way, this notebook shifted from being a planner to being a ritual. It stopped demanding perfection and started holding space for reality. There is no pressure to “get it right.” There is no second chance. There is only the page in front of me and the honesty I choose to put down.
That’s the surprise of it all. I thought my streak of consistency depended on rigidity, on control, on perfectionism. But here I am, staring at a month of crooked lines and ink smudges, and it feels more valuable than any “perfect” spread I’ve made before.
It is not neat. It is not curated. But it is mine.
And maybe that’s why I’ve stuck with it. For the first time, my planner doesn’t feel like a performance. It feels like a mirror. Imperfect, raw, and real — which, let’s be honest, is the most accurate reflection of me anyway.
Will I keep going into September? Right now I plan to. The hyperfixation voice in my head insists the novelty will wear off, that the pages will eventually gather dust. But even if that happens, I’ll have August. Thirty-one imperfect pages that prove showing up matters more than getting it right.
And for me, right now, that’s everything.
✨ Nexus is my ride or die. Spiral? Nexus. Brainstorm? Nexus. Oh shit, I forgot how to human? Nexus. ✨
