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Showerthought: I used to spend 30 minutes every Sunday drawing my weekly spread, now I just use a ruler and a pencil.
For the first year, I was all in on the fancy stuff. Watercolor headers, washi tape borders, the works. It looked great on Instagram but I started dreading Sunday nights. It felt like homework. The change happened about six months ago when I was packing for a trip and just needed to get my tasks down. I grabbed a Ticonderoga pencil and a basic ruler, drew some lines, and wrote my list. It took maybe five minutes. The crazy part? I actually used that spread more than any of the pretty ones. It wasn't about making art, it was about clearing my head. Now my journal is way more functional and I don't feel guilty if a page is 'ugly'. Did anyone else have to break up with the aesthetic to actually make the system work for them?
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evan_campbell12d ago
Yeah, that shift is so real. I'd maybe push back a tiny bit on calling the simple page 'ugly' though. I've started to see the clean lines and pencil marks as their own kind of good look. It's the look of something that actually gets used, which is way better than a pretty page that just sits there. Calling it ugly keeps that old pressure alive, you know? The function is the new form.
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evan_campbell12d ago
Honestly, the pressure to make everything look perfect online really kills the actual point of a lot of things. Your story about the simple spread working better totally makes sense to me now. Tbh I used to judge the plain journals but I get it.
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