Why I Quit My Reading Journal (and What I Do Now)

At the start of this year I sat down with the most beautiful notebook I have ever bought for the purpose of a reading journal. I started setting it up. I filmed myself doing it. And then I never opened it again. I also bought a backup, a Hobonichi Weeks, because somewhere deep down past me knew exactly what present me was going to do. And I filmed that setup too!

Guess what? Zero reading journal pages in either one. Not one page, in six months.

I have been using a reading journal since my planner girly era more than a decade ago and I have filled them cover to cover. So we are halfway through the year and I sat down to work out what actually changed. I came to the conclusion it was not what I assumed originally. Let’s talk about why I quit my reading journal.

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I Used to Fill Reading Journals Cover to Cover

Bullet journals, reading journals, Hobonichis, traveler’s notebooks, discbound, ringbound. You name it, I did it, and I filled them all year, every year, cover to cover. I have the YouTube videos to show for it!

This was in my late 20s to mid-30s. I had a job, the blog, family, friends. My life was always full, basically it was never not busy, and I still filled those planners and journals. The Hobonichi pages are some of my favorites, because for years I used the back of a Hobonichi Weeks as my reading journal, and I used the Weeks Mega. When those are done they get so thick and chunky, and I genuinely think that’s gorgeous.

So when I tell you a notebook beat me this year, understand that I have the receipts to show it’s not because I can’t do it, or I don’t like it. I’ve always said reading and tracking your reading are two separate hobbies. And I love the tracking. I was good at this! But something shifted, and it took me a long time to work out what it was.

Busy Was Never the Problem

Here’s the honest version. Yes, part of it is that the pandemic hit and roughly at the same time my life also changed pretty significantly. I became a full time caregiver for my mother, who now lives with me. We also moved to another state without closing our company, so now I get to run two companies plus the blog, and I’ve since started a second YouTube channel.

So yes, there are more things to do. But this was never a problem for me before. Busy didn’t stop me. And I filled those journals during years that were just as full.

What actually changed is what rest started to mean for me. When I have real downtime now, I need it to feel like downtime. So I’ve taken up other things like coloring, cozy games on my iPad, getting completely lost in a historical C-drama. Sometimes just genuinely starting at the wall, which is an underrated de-stressor and I fully stand by that.

And a good journal spread does not magically happen. I don’t want it to be half ass. Think about it, you’re making decisions, building something and that takes creative mental effort. Right now I want to put that effort into making content instead, and I want downtime to be low pressure fun. That might change, I genuinely don’t know. That’s just where I am.

Unfollowing Every Planner Creator I Loved Was the Right Call

There is one thing I did on purpose, about a year before everything else started shifting, that helped me stop fighting this change. I unfollowed all of my favorite planner and journaling creators. Instagram, YouTube, all of it.

It wasn’t because I stopped liking their content. It’s because there is a lot of FOMO in that community, and I experience it constantly. I had already overconsumed significantly by that point. I have so much washing tape, stickers, stamps, markers, paper. What I consider my basics from my planner girly era is still objectively a lot of stuff.

It’s just the way that space works. You see beautiful things. You want the beautiful things. The beautiful things arrive. Then the beautiful things become clutter.

Removing myself from all of it worked. For that year and a half before everything started changing around me, I just used what I had and I stopped buying, which was really great. But then I started looking at everything I owned and realized I had to maintain it, organize it, and make space for it. What I actually want is to work out of one pouch. Everything in there, and that’s it. I still haven’t done that full purge, but my friends are definitely going to be receiving some very good goodie bags soon.

That whole shift in how I relate to the stuff is exactly where my reading journal story starts to make sense.

Tracking My Reading Matters More Now, Not Less

Something that really matters to me is that I don’t think tracking what I read matters less now. I actually think it matters more.

Here’s what I realized about memory. When it works, it’s great. When it doesn’t, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to get it back. I was recently putting together a post about my reading journey and how I got myself back into reading, and I remembered a whole year of reading Harlequin category romances when I was 19. I could not tell you one single book I read in that time. Not one title. Not one hero. Not one author. Nothing. That is an entire reading era that is just gone from existence, and it bothers me now in a way it never used to.

So some record is better than no record, right? That part is not negotiable for me anymore. I know that.

What I was actually doing, for years, was confusing the record with the format. My reading journal was a creative pursuit that happens to involve tracking my reading and it lives in a notebook. I never separated the two, so when one of them stopped working, I assumed I’d lost both.

I Tried Digital, and It Wasn’t the Medium

While I was trying to meet myself in the middle, I thought maybe paper specifically was the problem. Digital could be an option. I see all the iPad girlies with their journals and planners.

To be clear, I don’t mean digital as in an app or Notion for this part. I’ve always had a version of that since starting on Goodreads, so there was always a spreadsheet or database somewhere along the way. What I mean is actually setting up a digital reading journal in GoodNotes.

I tried it. I enjoyed doing it and I think it looked really cute. But what I learned from that experiment is that it wasn’t paper versus digital at all. It was the act of building something decorative around the data of reading. That’s the part I have a block with right now. The pressure of creating the perfect spread.

Think about the actual process. You finish a book, and then you spend maybe 20 minutes picking the right font color, finding the right sticker placement, choosing a palette for the spread. The washi tape problem, all of it was still there. It had just moved to a screen.

What My Reading Record Actually Looks Like Now

Here is where I landed, and it is much less exciting than a two-page spread.

My tracker lives in Notion, in a template I built myself, and it’s the thing I actually keep up with. If you want to see the inside of it, I walked through how I organize my whole reading life in Notion earlier this year. I also track everything on Storygraph, because I love the stats on that app and I want the charts at the end of the year.

Besides that, I’m trying to build a digital mind garden in Capacities. That’s a test right now, a genuine project if you will that I’m exploring and having fun with rather than maintaining.

If you’re wondering how this squares with the eight tracking systems I started the year with, it doesn’t entirely. That’s fine. Some of them stuck and some of them didn’t, which is roughly what I expected when I setup all eight book tracking methods back in January.

Those Parts of Me Didn’t Go Anywhere

At the beginning of this year I made a video about all the different apps I was using to track my reading, and even then I had figured out that they were each feeding a different part of my personality. I wasn’t looking for a reading tracker. I was looking for a reading tracker that scratched a specific itch.

So one app was there purely to feed the gamer side of me. Instead of doing that, I switched to actually playing cozy games on my iPad, which turns out to be much better at filling that void. The design and creative side that wanted a physical reading journal? I can pick up a coloring page once in a while and feel completely satisfied.

Those parts of me didn’t go anywhere. I’m just feeding them through something else now and I’ve stopped feeling guilty about it. Honestly, this is the one change that has helped me feel more rested and more fulfilled than the reading journals and the apps ever did probably because it’s not pretending to be a system.

So Did I Fail at Reading Journaling?

Maybe you can see it that way. I bought the notebook, filmed the setup, bought a backup, filmed that setup, and produced nothing.

But the goal was never the reading journal. The goal was the record of what I was reading and I did that. I just finally stopped forcing those two things to be the same.

Trying to start it again this year was actually a really enlightening process because it’s how I figured out that this is simply not the season of my life where a creative reading journal and fancy spread is compatible with how I rest. It has taken me all these months to be okay with that, and I am now.

If any of this landed for you, whether you used to keep reading journals and stopped, or you’ve never been able to make one work and you’ve been quietly feeling bad about it because you really wanted to, I hope it helps to hear that the record and the craft project are two separate things. You are allowed to keep one and put down the other. If you want to record your reading without a spread, I’ve got some tips on how to actually remember what you read which covers low-effort versions of a reading journal but not. None of it involves a sticker.

Now I want to hear from you. Are you still a reading journal person? Did you used to be one and you’ve moved on? Tell me in the comments, because I’m genuinely curious where everyone lands on this.

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