What Is A Dotted Journal?
A dotted journal is a diary full of lots of different sections to help you in your day-to-day life. Dotted journals can come in lots of different forms, and you can personalise it to suit your own requirements! For example, you can combine a daily to do list, with your monthly or weekly goals. You can include a log of your habits, or maybe you want a section on reminders.
Your dotted journal doesn’t just have to include structured writing, you can add drawings or use note form to journal your ideas. Be as creative as you want to be! That’s why dotted journals are so popular, you can make it work for you. 😊
Creating a journal should be fun and can even form part of your self-care! It is a chance to personalise something to you and you can spend as little or as much time as you want creating it.
We have a few tips to help you get started! First, you need to get something to write and journal in. We would recommend our nu: dotted journal this has the bullets already on the internal pages which allows you to be creative as possible. Nu: suggest using colours as these are scientifically proven to help you remember your notes – whether it be your gym workouts or revising. Add in some drawings or symbols to really make the diary yours!
5 Ways To Use Your Dotted Journal:
1: Tracking your habits!
A great way to identify patterns in your behaviour – this can help you work out what is going wrong and why you aren’t sticking to your habits. On the other side, this can help you to understand when you are most likely to stick to them!
Tracking your habits will boost your motivation as you can see them outlined out each day. Move closer to your goals by keeping a close eye on what you do daily.
Self-discipline – keep yourself disciplined and made accountable for the habits you are trying to change / break or build 😊
2: Daily Journaling / Jotting down your worries:
This is all about self-reflection – reflecting on yourself, your day and how you have felt. With self-reflection comes self-awareness. Using a dotted journal in this way will help you learn more about yourself.
Another benefit to this is understanding your emotions, triggers, and thoughts. A popular practice is when someone or something has really bothered you or upset you, you can reflect on this to try to understand why this has happened.
3: Goal section – weekly, monthly or daily goals:
Everyone loves to set goals! Whether this is something for you to do daily (a habit), a weekly goal or maybe a monthly goal, journaling can be a great way to progress these goals. Sometimes the best way to reach a goal is to keep reminding yourself of the goal daily. A great idea is to repeatedly write down this goal in shorthand to reinforce it! Another way to do this is by having it written out, and then adding notes to a goal section of the journal about how and why you are working towards it. This is a great way to boost productivity and see real progress.
4: Track your sleep:
Tracking your sleep is a great way to feel more energised in the day. It can be hard to remember to go to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time each day, but it makes such a difference to your overall energy levels. So, to make it easier for yourself, track your sleep! This way, you remind yourself that your sleep is something that you want to improve. You can also go further than this and identify patterns in your sleep routine that take you off track. Maybe on certain days of the week you find it harder to sleep, by keeping a dotted journal you can understand what went wrong – maybe you had a coffee, ate your dinner late or maybe you went to the gym and didn’t feel that tired. Whatever you want to improve, jotting down notes to track your progress can really help!
5: Budgeting
A dotted journal can help you to create a log of your spending habits, in the goal to save money, or improve your budgeting. Many people have used this method of journaling to track daily money savings that they may want to make. You could create a tick box list, and every day that you don’t purchase a coffee or every day that you meal prep instead of buying lunch, you tick it off. This can be a very rewarding way to make savings and motivate yourself to do so.
There are lots of different ways to journal, and lots of ideas you can include but the most important thing is you personalise the methods to you and your goals.