I tracked my habits for 300 days and it changed my life

here's the thing writing stuff down it's kind of like a superpower science backs it up too people who track their progress are 42% more likely to smash their goals just putting pen to paper can boost productivity by 33% and get this journaling actually improves memory by up to 50% if you're tracking habits whether it's hitting the gym eating better or just drinking more water you're way more likely to stay consistent it's like having a personal coach but instead of it yelling at you it just sits there looking classy on your desk but here's where it

gets even crazier writing things down doesn't just help you get stuff done it actually makes you feel better journaling has been linked to a 30% drop in anxiety and depression better immune function even fewer doctor visits seeing your progress on paper that's like a cheat code for motivation it keeps you accountable focused fired up so whether it's a to-do list deep thoughts or just random Doodles of your next big idea grabbing a notebook might just be the easiest way to level up your life [Music] science what's up everybody Peter mckinn here welcome back to yet

another video now notebooks and filling in logs and habit trackers and all things pertaining to this world has become a staple part of my everyday life life it's more than routine it's ingrained into the fibers of my being now I wake up I make coffee I sit down with it usually somewhere quiet if I can and I'll just start writing and there's a multitude of things that I'll write over the last few years I've documented my journey in trying to get into journaling and then becoming a fan of it and how I still use it

and this is kind of like the culmination of all of these years to the point now where I can confidently say it has changed my life for the better it is Absol absolutely part of my routine and I would never not make it part of my routine because the changes and how it's implemented different things into my life and improved it it's not worth going back so today in this video I want to dive into several things from how habit tracking has absolutely changed the game My Fitness and my mental state how continuing to journal

has made me more creative how I've actually improved my handwriting considerably my favorite pant the notebooks that I prefer to use big and small how I tackle this when I'm on the road travel a lot do I still journal or write in a notebook when I'm on the road the accessories that I use to keep all of this stuff in and organized and trust me I have tried many and many of them suck I found a few that are very good simple as best these are actually systems and implementations that can 100% change your life

forever and I know that and I can say that because it did mine I always have two notebooks going at all times big notebook little notebook the little one is more of like a mobile on the go back pocket hoodie pocket camera bag I toss this thing literally anywhere this I I don't care about it it is merely a tool to get the job done this big boy here I care about how neat and organized the pages are and I use this specifically for habit tracking so let's go over the brand of notebooks this is

my favorite brand of large notebooks it's like a mle skin but I find it to be a little bit better quality it's soft cover it's got the elastic closure the paper is perfect it's super thick creamy soft great for fountain pens the GSM count or whatever you call it GM 80 GM I don't know what that means I don't even think I can pronounce the brand Luke term it's German if you don't like soft cover you can also get them in hard cover they're actually a little bit thicker so I don't like the hard cover

ones cuz I want the thinner notebook because after you start using this filling it up with stuff and writing in it constantly it will double in size I like taping stuff in like drawings from my kids that I can look back on and I'll even stick photos in here that's stuck in an airport trying to memorize a deck of cards a nice letter from someone written on a typewriter but the satisfaction when a full book like this is done practicing my cursive I remember one day I heard someone say perfect is boring you don't want

to do that I wrote that down like a hundred times on this page like a psycho a little fun thing about these ones too at the back they have like a little folder here's the picture when I can see the Northern Light light from my backyard here's a little playing card I [Music] found that was my food credit when uh I was shooting the C show at Red Rocks you know you're pasting stuff in there letters that people sent you you start to kind of just get attached to it and then you don't want to

mess it up this was the this was January 19th when they banned Tik Tok and then unbanned it like a few hours later that's funny I always like to put a start date and an end date and then the total of days it took me to finish this notebook this took 96 days to finish they also make small versions of these if you're not a big notebook person at all but I feel like by the end of this video you'll want the A5 size and you'll want a field not size now the field notes come

in three packs I usually fill up about one field notes a month if I'm really ripping I can do one and a half a month but that's just kind of a lot of unnecessary writing and the whole goal here is to not make it not fun it's to make a system here that improves your life and that you get used to this isn't I should also say this isn't something that I just make self do I enjoy doing this like my favorite part of the day is usually having coffee in the morning first thing and

writing in my notebooks it's also without saying as the day progresses and I check back into to-do lists and scratch things off I get immense satisfaction out of that as well so the notebook's role throughout my day is always very enjoyable and it was always my plan and goal to keep it that way I think the second something becomes a chore or a bit of a grind it's not fun things start off that way but once you pass the hump that's when like things start to open up like they unlock I guess you could say

look at Fitness for example I hate working out it sucks I cannot get into it I just I don't get excited I don't like it and that's because I haven't given it enough consistency to get to the point where I have unlocked it and gotten over that hump running was the same at the beginning it was hard it wasn't something that I enjoyed doing but I continued doing it I passed that hump I unlocked it and now I'll find myself sitting in the studio or doing something somewhere and just thinking I would rather be running

right now and that is mindblowing for Peter McKinnon who would have thought November kilom at five runs a total of 28 km in December I had one run a total of 5 km in January I was like nah that I want to fill more of that back page that's the game it became I want the satisfaction of seeing more than half that page filled with runs from just 1 month January total 124 km that's missing five runs too that gets me fired up for febrary now I want to see the whole page full of runs

that's crossing the hump I've unlocked it it did take that certain amount of time to form that habit but once that habit is there it's now an enjoyable part of the process I've got ADHD it's undiagnosed but it's by God there when I have a simple task it takes me at least 10 other tasks to get back to the original task I'm so unbelievably sidetracked so these types of tools that I've made Staples they help calm the storm that's up here and that's in valuable for someone like me I'm sure if you're watching this someone

like [Music] you I shouldn't have done it that way now it's all [Music] disorganized these are my favorite pens we could probably end the segment right there this is a 38 fine point I love fine point it's sharp it's crisp you have more control over the pen when you're writing stuff in a book you can write way neat than you think you probably can if you're one of those people that thinks I have horrible writing it's chicken scratch I promise if you just spend some time make an effort and use a fine point like a

38 you will have nicer writing than even you imagin guaranteed if it still sucks I can't help you like when's the last time you finished a pen from Full to empty you think finishing a notebook is satisfying finishing a pen now I have those in like all different colors so turquoise royal blue green red even purple if I if I want to get wild I think highlighting and underlining certain things makes a huge difference when I'm writing notes if a quote that I don't want to forget is written in red amongst an entire page of

black text it stands out so I like using different colors to accent and highlight different parts of my story different parts of my journal or different parts of my video planning to really emphasize different points so I don't forget them I have a marker for that too but this isn't just any ordinary marker this is a Japanese brush marker it's kind of like a calligraphy pen where as you press harder on like an upstroke or a downstroke you're going to get a different thickness from this marker and the same thing if I want to emphasize

a point or a quote or if I want to fill in a progress tracker sometimes I like doing little graphs and I'll show you how I do that soon I like using red green and yellow to show no progress some progress good progress two absolute favorites here Micron pens now we're talking fine point these are the finest of points if you press even remotely too hard marker's trashed it's done I can't I I wish I could just show you how like you can't I can't I can barely see it with my own eyes right there's

no chance fountain pens these are two of my favorites that are very affordable the Lamy Safari this is like 30 40 bucks or something and then this is the twis be fountain pen and I think this is around the same probably 50 60 bucks maybe this is a little a little more expensive and I got to be honest I've had fountain pens my whole life I've been collecting them I mean back in the day I've got M Block pens here uh I remember in my everyday carry video a few weeks ago some people were like

you should buy a m block pen and I have some I have the classic 149 which is arguably like the most popular Mt Blanc fountain pen to ever exist it's like a big cigar when you're holding it but I've also got a calligraphy version of this same pen I keep them in this little special leather poach I'm super nostalgic and I romanticize the idea of like my son finding these in my old desk one day dad's pens sick I'm going to pawn them here's the thing this like $50 pen feels just as good and in

some instances smoother than like these luxur y m Blan like Prestige oh excuse me sir might I have your signature would you like it I could just give you the most beautiful Penman this is just as good Amazon like 50 bucks if you're looking to get into fountain pens or you want to try your hand of calligraphy or like having better handwriting this is what I would do I would get one of these I wouldn't even bother with this this is if you just stick with it in like 5 years down the road you're like

no I want like I'm going to a wedding and I don't know maybe you never need these I can't even think of a reason why you would need them other than just like absolutely blowing money of the two twis is my favorite this is a little too harsh and sharp for me get a twis pen you'll be absolutely stoked mechanical pencil I never use it okay let's talk accessories pencil cases this is just a cheap 155 $20 pencil case I got on Amazon it is exactly what it is I got it and was kind of

just like me I'm big into aesthetic and I'm big into like a a very specific aesthetic and this just wasn't hitting it for me so I did some searching around the internet and I came up it's a little more costly I apologize this company called Peg and all and they have this thing called the Sendak now its biggest sin is that it has this monstrosity of a leather patch riveted to the front with their name and logo and what they call this thing entirely unnecessary I would have paid more to not have this Abomination I

get that you want to Brand things but like that's what the tip of your belt is for get your buckles made where it just it's engraved into the Buckle there's a million ways to do this better had it just been a little engraving it's just a tiny rivet engraved on the rivet is a Peg and an all just to go on a little rant here I would say nine times out of 10 the biggest transgression that companies or cool Brands make is their logos are too freaking big everyone wants to just plaster the name or

the logo I want it to be the whole thing look at the real estate and now I'm now now we're here okay now we can open it up strap is great Buckle is great waxed canvas is great just mere months this thing is going to look incredible and inside you've got like room for everything what's nice is it fits the notebooks too you've got a zipper pouch here pencil sharpener eraser some tiny Post-it notes you've got interior Pockets 1 2 3 4 one of them two of them which fit a field notes like a glove

yep that's money fold this thing down in the back there's two huge pockets and that fits the giant notebook perfectly fold this over fold that over again do up your leather strap and it fits everything in like a perfect just little bundle I'm going to a coffee shop I want to work outside in the cafe here I just grab this it's all there if I'm going to work or I'm going home for the weekend and I don't want to bring any of my stuff I'll just bring this and I'll just walk to my truck like

this and just toss it on my front seat it's perfect and everything's inside opens up nice nice and easy all my stuff's there I might only use this bust this out and I just piece that off write what I need to put it back in Bobs your uncle friends your aunt we're laughing we're making moves bud what do you think of that eh ready to just hit the licko for a quick two4 cuz we all know there ain't enough juice in a Mickey you want to go for a rip there bud it's expensive I'm not

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no excuse you should pause and just do it your website could just say LOL that's fine it could just be a picture of me that's also fine use the link in the bio sign up thanks for letting me do this I appreciate it okay I'll let you go back I'll let you go back and do your that was for you figured I'd bring them back he been waiting long enough now when we're talking habit trackers it took several months of making these to really start to identify different patterns within my life I wanted to see

how much alcohol was being consumed what my weight was every single day was I drinking water every day was I drinking coffee every day was I spending money that day and when you go back through one of these habit trackers and you just look at all the months that you've marked down for these different categories you're shocked at how much or how little some of them can be when you look at the fact that man I didn't drink a full bottle of water for 18 days in a row but I hit coffee at least every

single day it really holds you accountable and it puts that data right into your face and the fact that you are manually inputting it not relying on an app to input it it makes it stick then it becomes a game then you want to update it you want to see that habit tracker grow you want to see it filled out here is a little explanation on how I set up one of my habit trackers a blank notebook ready to go and never used the first page so I would probably start it here you are going

to need a ruler the rough idea is a graph down the side where I like to track all the individual habits and then I like to do a graph down this side sideways tracking all my sleep sometimes what I like to do is correspond it with something on this left Page 31 days kind of like a story of the day so now you've got your numbers going all the way down the left side these numbers will also affect what's on this side of the page I like graph paper for this very reason and you're going

to go all the way down I don't have a ruler that's long enough but you'll get the idea run down every line for however many categories of things you want to track okay perfect tap those off but now when you look across the 31st is this box the 30th is here so on and so forth now you got to make your grid all the way up it's safe to say too when I actually do this and I'm setting it up for myself I take way more time to not go through the lines cuz that kind

of stuff drives me crazy in those little details doesn't matter to me you have your grid now we're going to write down our categories for what we're going to track let's Track Coffee water sugar alcohol a workout a run let's do weight and last but not least money spent now we're going to go into the Sleep graph which I like to put here I'll draw the number of boxes for however many hours I want to track let's say 10 hours of sleep this is the graph we're building 10 hours of sleep 9 8 7 6

5 4 and three each of these days is also the same as all of these days 1 2 3 4 and the idea is to fill this in every single day for the month while you're using it so we can write at the top here daily tracker this is an example of what I would do if I woke up and it's the first I would write down on this page one thing that's memorable that I did this day you need a video about notebooks and then on this side I would mark down did I have

coffee today I did drink water do you have sugar no alcohol no do you work out no did you go for a run yes whatever your weight is let's just write X yes I spent money today I bought two extra memory cards because I keep losing my SDS then I'd come down here and I slept 8 hours last night and I just draw a DOT and that's it that's your day now you just move on you write your entries you write your notes you do whatever you're going to do tomorrow you're going to come back

and you're going to make another entry the same with like let's say oh I slept 5 hours last night 7 hours 10 hours cuz that's insane 6 hours of sleep 8 hours of sleep 8 hours of sleep 5 hours of sleep up here was 9 hours of sleep and then when you connect the dots so what does that tell me right away that my sleep is absolutely erratic it's all over the place there is absolutely no pattern so you can really average out at the end of the month after seeing this visually and I know

there's apps that do this but there's something satisfying about filling it out yourself you can see your patterns of spending money how many days you had sugar and you can just see this at a glance and you can go over to this side and see a little snapshot at what happened that day on the 15th you hung out in San Diego at James coffee and you absolutely had coffee that day it's just such a good snapshot system at being able to identify patterns see what you're good at see what you're bad at and it's fun

as it starts to fill out it looks insane and then I make one of these for every single month but that is essentially how I filled them out you don't want to do the full month could do 10 days here is a small version that I did in a field notes book that graph in the bottom is kind of cool because it shows how much social media I did how much photography I did it gives me a good Snapshot not much happened with pirate life and I used this one because I was on the move

going to Iceland you throw one of the bookmarks in it and then this goes for your normal entries and you my friend are good to go the way I treat these two books when it really comes down to it because I understand the notion of carrying two notebooks or using two notebooks can be kind of like well what do I choose goes in one versus the other this one I focus more on aesthetic this one is just practical I don't care I care but together it's the full picture now recently I have been told by

some of my friends who are big into Tech that I would like an e in reader remarkable I think makes something that's like a digital notebook I'm interested in trying that and maybe there's a version four of this video where we dive into doing this exact same practice but on a a digital eink notepad I'm not even sure what that means but they say it feels like paper but I would just rather write on paper so maybe that's the fourth video compiling all of these things into one digital eink reader sounds kind of exhausting so

that concludes my thoughts my processes on using notebooks tracking your habits setting goals and mostly building routines sticking with something long enough until it's unlocked to the point where it becomes a very fabric of your being you cannot exist without it it is just what you do you never miss it is now who you are and I can honestly say after all these years of making all these notebook videos this is who I am I'm a bit of a nerd at heart I love stationary I love writing I love using notebooks and they make my

life better and I implore you to give it a shot once you fill one it's easier to fill two but so many people and I've heard this so many times they get a fresh pack of field notes you crack open that first page you write in your details I put a little pirate stamp on mine you sit there and you're like what do I even say what do I even write what do I do with this like there's so many it's so overwhelming just a full blank book I absolutely agree it's overwhelming but once you

finish that first book then you want the second then you want the third then it actually just becomes easy then a few months into the year you're just crushing books I think what I like about field notes as well is the fact that they do theme the books so every month they're coming out with new ones it makes it easy to keep track of and it kind of keeps it fresh and exciting it's not just like the same black notebook over and over and over and over and over and over this is just a little

bit more fun a little side note too just if you're kind of like a nostalgic person they are so much fun to look back on and to just read what your mindset was that day or even read some of the issues you were having that day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 months and you read something and it's an issue that you're having and it's exactly the same as the current month's issue you're having you can say to yourself how am I having the same problem for 10 months what am I

doing that's persisting you've got the data right here so not only is it nostalgic but it's like it's very helpful and informative to go back and track all of these things not to mention it just looks sick on your shelf if you just have a huge huge library or archive of notebooks and the reason I wanted to make this video early on in 2025 is so that you had all the rest of the months to try this out and see if it's something that you can make stick because I promise you it makes a difference

and if you're anything like me and your brain is like a fireworks show and you can't focus on anything and one task turns into a million tasks you have too many things to do so you end up doing none of them you don't use a calendar you don't check your texts things just get out of control The Notebook can really be the calm in the storm oh youing hurt my ears dude I've had this on five minutes and I've got like a pressure headache behind my skull how do you wear wear these all day do

you have indentations back there like do they is it like your foot in a boot do they just go on and they hunk they just sink into the divot that's in the back of your skull just G I'm just asking as a non- glasses guy like I don't I don't know oh it's awful it's awful I'd never get lasic though that I just deal with this