One thing I have learned in the last two years is that I am much more likely to write in my journal each day if it has a pre-designated space for each day.

In my Recurring Journals I split each open spread of two-pages into quadrants and then put corresponding dates from each 13-week “quarter” in them. So, the first page of 2024 had the Mondays: January 1 and April 1 on the left-hand side and July 1 and September 30 on the right-hand side. The next two-page spread had the Tuesdays: January 2, April 2, July 2, and October 1. I explained why I do this in My Year in Weeks, but the important thing is that every day had a space.

Having a space for each day made it much more likely that I would write something in that space. Even if I missed a day, I went back and recreated it. I did this even when I missed a few days. And because it was a recurring journal, when I got to the end of The First 13 Weeks, I went back to the first page and went through each spread again for The Second 13 Weeks. If I noticed a blank space in the past, I would see if I had any way to recreate what happened that day (from my calendar, git logs, blogs, etc).

This year (2025), I am not going to be using a recurring format, but I am still using pre-dated pages. I will have to be more diligent about checking the previous days, but my weekly retro pages will probably be good enough to make me do that.