Minimalist Journal in Notion template

What do you get when you combine a minimalist journaling system with Notion? Magic, that’s what! Well, not really. But it’s still pretty awesome. I recently got inspired by Michal Korzonek’s minimalistic journaling system which he writes about here and here. As soon as I saw the simple square geometry and its black & white colours, I immediately thought of Notion. This looks like just another perfect candidate to be integrated into Notion. Before we jump into in let's get a quick rundown of the system.

The principles of the system are:

• Each day is represented by a square.
• In the middle of the square, you briefly record what you would like to remember from that day.
• Using little different icons and glyphs to represent different aspects of your life that you care about and would like to track daily (for example, drawing a heart could represent if you acted from a place of compassion that day).

Other common but not essential parts of the system are:

• Recording what day of your life each day is (the actual number of days between today and your birth)
• Recording the time you woke up and went to bed

Other than that you are pretty much free to make the journal however you like.

Just some of the journals people have made based on Michal’s system

So, without further to do I present to you the template.

Left: Calendar view of the Journal Right: Gallery view

You can use the Journal in either two views: Gallery or Calendar view.

Within each block/day I record the following:

1. In the title, in short, I write what do I want to remember from that day.
2. The date

3. The day of my life (what day of my life is it?) this is done automatically with a formula (more, on how to set this up below).

4. The time I wake up and the time I went to sleep the previous night.

5. The number of hours slept based on the previous input

6. A number of emojis with checkboxes represent things that I would like to track daily.

I use a toggle Key to define the emojis which represent the things I want to track

In the writing area of the template, I’ve included a Month Template. At beginning of each month, I duplicate the Month Template and fill it in. Actions 1,2 and 3 (in decreasing importance) are the 3 key actions that will bring me closer to my Main Goal for the Month.

Left: Month Template Right: Example Month Template for October

How to set up the # day of my life

For the formula to tell you the number of days between your birth and the date of the journal entry, you need to put in your date of birth into the formula as a timestamp. Specifically, it needs to be a Timestamp in milliseconds

Example: the date 1 Nov, 2020 would be 1604188801000 in Timestamp

To convert your date of birth into a timestamp you can use this website and then simply copy the “Timestamp in milliseconds” value into the formula in Notion.

Paste the timestamp into the “fromTimestamp()“ function and click Done

Other views

At end of each month, you can reflect on your progress with the “Month Reflection view”.

The Month Reflection view

This allows you to reflect on the average number of hours you’ve slept and how effective you have been in tracking what’s important to you, completing habits, and making progress on the 3 main actions which will lead you towards your goals.

Advantages of putting the system in Notion:

• You save more time but not having to draw squares and icons
• You have access to the journal across many devices
• With the use of different reflection views, you can more easily and efficiently reflect on the past week, month, year…
• The reflection views give you a bevy of information (you can tally up, sum up, average, and make percentages)
• You can automate some inputs with formulas like the what day of your life is it property
• Adaptable to your changing needs: if you no longer want to track some property, but don’t want to delete the data, then you can simply use Notion’s latest feature which allows you to hide properties.
• Fully customizable: include as many or as few properties as you like (other options include: a property which records the location of places you visited, or a select property which records the type of exercise you did on that day).

The square is the core of the Minimalist journaling system. A square is a two-dimensional shape. Notion’s icon is a cube which is a three-dimensional shape. And this is exactly what I see as the benefit of integrating the Minimalist journaling system into Notion: It is like adding a third dimension to it. The use of different views in Notion adds these extra insightful layers which could not be done with pen and paper alone.

You can download the template here.