Celebrating New Journaling Habits

Taking a quick moment to celebrate some positive habits that have landed for me.

For the last 6 weeks, I’ve been building out weekly plans to keep me focused on the things I need to do to move important personal and professional projects forward. I’ve been doing quarterly plans on and off for the last few years, but this is the first time I’ve been able to keep up with weekly plans. In addition to planning the week ahead, these also give me space to celebrate the accomplishments of the week that has passed (which I think is important for mental health).

Those are practices that come out of the MacSparky Productive Field Guide, which recommends a process of doing deep internal introspection in understanding your roles and the person you want to be, ultimately resulting in projects (and plans) that support those roles. I think it’s a great way to think about yourself, and over the last few years I’ve been incorporating it more and more into my normal flow. There are some things David recommends, like hyper-scheduling your day, that I have not implemented (and I doubt I ever will, since I don’t work like that), but getting more specific with my weekly plan has helped keep me centered as random distractions grab me day to day.

Also, for the last 4 weeks, I’ve been keeping a signal log to track consulting outreach initiatives, cataloging numbers across a range of platforms and spaces. With intent, I am not treating these as vanity numbers but as a way to understand over time what topics people are most interested in and which community spaces are drawing the most visits (and thus might be worth more of my time as a participant). Some venues, like Reddit, have been curiously high. I generate the report via Claude Code through a mix of API calls to my Plausible account and manual screenshots of the places it has trouble seeing. It feels like a good tool choice given the wide scope of sites whose numbers I want to see week to week. Not sure I’ll keep this going forever. Ideally I land consulting work that demands more of my time, in which case I still hope to blog but with less concern of converting traffic into leads.

To close, if you are not journaling I do encourage you to experiment. I think it can really help you defog ideas and conversations and keep you focused on your long-term goals against an ever-distracting world.

About the Author. Mike Zornek is a developer and teacher focusing on product design and development with a heavy focus on Elixir and LiveView. In between his projects, Mike helps other teams through consulting. During off hours, he enjoyed watching Phillies baseball and playing relaxing video games.

Hopefully, you found interest in my scribbles. If you have commentary or a response, I'd love to hear it.