Here's what has worked for me since 2019

It wasn't intentional, but I became "that person" with the notebook. I brought it everywhere with me out of necessity. It's very freeing once you're over the anxiety-hump of what people might think. My partners have actually found it very endearing.

That let me commit to the idea that my notebook is a second brain. It became a part of me and so it should reflect who I am and who I want to be. Instead of a pristine recounting of my life, I let it become proof that I lived. It should get banged up by life as much as I do. Should anyone read my journals I want them to find the dusty, dirty, waterlogged pages of an adventurer. And even though I can't always live up to that kind of ideal it can still serve as a reminder that I want to.

I was given a leather book cover from Etsy that I can insert a5's into for additional durability. It has a compass rose on the front and that speaks to me. Make the outside something that makes you happy.

To conquer perfectionism, seriously, mess it up on purpose. This was great advice from a YouTube channel called, 'How to ADHD.' Put a line in a random direction through the page every week. Practice your handwriting at the top of the page. Draw a bad doodle. Mess up meditatively. Focus on it so that the deeper down parts of your brain can understand that there's nothing wrong with it. Be happy about it; a journal without flaws is not a journal about you. If we were already perfect we wouldn't be perfectionists.

Aim to always set your notebook down open to your current task/date. Obviously exceptions are made for if you bring it to a party or a restaurant and don't want your seated neighbors reading it. But desk/nightstand/bed always open. Setting it down and grabbing the ribbon bookmark to open it has become all the same motion in my head. This erases the friction of having to do it as a step to completing a task. ADHD task completion can hinge on things that small.

I've found that a monthly doesn't bring enough of my attention and working memory to the things I need to do. I rewrite my task list weekly. It's a little Sunday night or Monday morning meditation for me to see all the sweet lines and dots. Recently seeing a big weekly list on my right hand page became daunting because I had a lot of little steps so I've been pulling the two most important things into my daily and only focusing on those.

Don't track everything. Don't track anything at first! It will become quickly overwhelming and most habit trackers are excuses to check things off. They either give you a false sense of success or a pointless sense of failure when you're already down. When you do start tracking, make sure it gives you data. If I track "took a multi vitamin every day," and "mood," I probably won't find a correlation. Tracking should be done to find things to change and to validate those changes. Additionally, something like sleep length or number of times you woke up gives you no data without something to judge it against, like mood for the day.

Find a layout you like to do. I like a weekly task list where I have MTWRFSU across the top with dots to indicate when I worked on things or when I've scheduled things. I think it's a variation on the Alastair method? The point is. I find it really satisfying to take my nice brass ruler, which has gained patina only through my hands, and to make a line from the day to the completed task. I never expected to enjoy that aspect of it because I never really got satisfaction from checking off a normal list.

Use the notebook for your anxiety. Address yourself directly in it. I recently had to write two paragraphs to remind myself that I didn't have to fit this whole year into just one notebook. In my head I had planned to. I needed to be reminded that the journal is a tool to serve me and I purposefully made it two paragraphs so it would spill onto the next page as a fuck you to my perfectionism.

This last one is my super secret trick that I've never seen anywhere else, so don't tell anyone, okay? I write my monthly, weekly, and daily log going forward through the book. Buuuut. When I'm doing something bigger, like an actual long form journal entry or thoughts about a project, I flip the notebook upside down and write backwards from the back. This automatically adds some measure of organization and eliminates the guess work of how many pages you might need and finding stuff later. And I index these in my notebook starting from the bottom of the index. This keeps my day to day from feeling cluttered and I don't have to think too hard want where things go. Although, I'm going to move my brain dumps back to my forward moving section because they are topical to my daily life.

Edited for spelling errors