Moleskine Pro Notebook

I am a man who thrives within set routine and lots of planning. I do not work well in loose environments, which unfortunately is my “default” mode. The younger version of myself was laid back and lived fairly “at the moment” and I can’t say that was my best life. I often didn’t get things done, and the things I did get done weren’t that great of quality. Instead, I’ve found that establishing routines saves a lot of the energy I used to expend figuring out the small aspects of life that weren’t that important in the long run. Things like deciding what to eat, what to wear, when to get up, when to go to bed, what to watch etc. were just things that weighed me down.

I am also a man who likes to set goals and achieve them. I think it’s fun to see what I can accomplish. For me not everything has to be some enormous goal, sometimes little things like creating an organized basement storage area or shooting better at the trap range are good enough. In fact, I have a lot of goals that are not career related that I am trying to accomplish now. Unfortunately I don’t seem to make much progress on them. Like I said, my “default” mode isn’t terribly proactive, so I needed to find a way to get them done too.

Most people utilize some app or website to help them in this process but I wanted something low tech, something I could hold in my hand, something without a subscription. I love the Moleskine line of notebooks as I use their 5.5″ hard cover notebook as my daily journal, so I decided to see what they offered for this project. I ultimately chose their Pro version, which is kind of setup like a daily project planner. As such I am going to adapt it to my needs and I have found it exceptionally valuable since I adopted this method at the beginning of the year. Here is how I set it up.

Daily planner pages – there are 156 pages here, so if I use each one for a week there are three years available. That’s a lot of planning! On each page there are three sections. The top section that you can see below is where I put the week’s big events, like a birthday, or personal appointment, or something else that week like a big game. Below that I section line out all of the goals I have for that week and what I want to do to accomplish them by writing them down on one single line and skipping a space. Then I put the date next to it so I can verify that that they were accomplished.

For my goals I chose 16 different items to work towards every week. These are the groupings of them in general.

Blog – what I wan to write for the week. I am tired of getting behind on writing and having to bust out like five articles over a holiday or vacation.

Read – progress on my non-fiction reading. I want this dedicated to my “self improvement” type books.

Play – video games. I don’t want to play like nine video games at a time, so I write down the one I am doing for the week (I often play big RPGs). Right now it is Cyberpunk 2077.

Learn – progress on my learning. Right now my skills are based on learning Python.

Swim/Bike/Run – I set individual goals for each to progress for this year’s races.

Social – someone I can reach out to this week and catch up with. Need to keep relationships growing.

Kids/wife – I just want to set something aside to do with them every week so they are getting time with me.

Home project – what I am doing in the house and what can I focus on to make better. Right now it is my basement.

Fly fishing – I don’t put much time towards this hobby with my other commitments so I am trying to set aside just a little time a week to do something with it.

Dutchman – my shooting club and what I am going to do that week with them

Health – some health metric I am tracking

Financial – some financial goal I am tracking

Other than that I am using pages in different ways to track the books I am reading, the games I am playing, the places I want to go with my family, house projects, and my subscriptions. These are on different pages. I also have my big goals that I am tracking based on metrics for triathlon racing and other projects.

I hope someone reading this decides to adopt this program or use it as a basis to create their own. It’s your life, enjoy it!

Thanks for reading!