I'll be honest with you - I've started more journals than I've finished.
Fancy leather notebooks bought with good intentions. Apps downloaded, used for a fortnight, then quietly deleted. Notes scattered across scraps of paper, phone memos, and half-finished Google Docs. The desire to journal was always there. The habit never quite stuck.
Sound familiar?
The problem, I realised, wasn't motivation. It was friction. Every journalling system I tried either asked too much of me or gave too little back. So I built something different. Something that lives where I already spend my time, works without any setup faff, and — crucially — gets more valuable the longer you use it.
Today, I'm releasing My Journal, a Notion template that I've been using myself and that I genuinely think could change how you reflect on your life.
What Makes This Different
There are hundreds of journalling apps out there. Most of them want a monthly subscription. Most of them lock your data inside their own ecosystem. And most of them are, frankly, more complicated than they need to be.
This template lives entirely inside Notion - your workspace, your data, your rules. If you're already a Notion user, there's zero learning curve. If you're not, this might just be the best reason to start.
But the feature that genuinely surprised me when I built it wasn't the mood tracking or the clean entry database. It was something much simpler.
The "On This Day" Feature Is a Bit Magic
One of the three views in the template is called On This Day in Previous Years. Filter it by today's date and it surfaces every journal entry you wrote on this same day in years gone by.
The first time I used it properly, I sat reading an entry I'd written on this exact date two years ago. I'd completely forgotten about that period of my life — the worries I had, the things I was working through, the small wins I'd celebrated. Reading it back felt like finding an old letter from a past version of myself.
That kind of perspective is rare. And it's completely automatic — the template handles all of it behind the scenes with a formula that extracts the month and day from every entry. You don't need to configure a thing.
Tracking Your Mood Without Thinking About It
The other feature I use daily is the Mood Overview. Every time you write an entry, you pick one of eight moods: Happy, Calm, Excited, Grateful, Tired, Sad, Anxious, or Frustrated. That's it — one click, ten seconds.
Over time, those clicks become a picture. The Mood Overview groups every entry by emotional state, so you can see at a glance which moods have dominated a particular period, which ones barely show up, and whether patterns are shifting. It's lightweight mood tracking that doesn't feel like tracking at all.
Who This Is Really For
I built this for people like me — busy, slightly disorganised, full of good intentions — who want the benefits of journalling without the performance of it.
You don't need to write beautifully. You don't need to write a lot. Some of my most useful entries are three sentences long. The template doesn't care. It just holds whatever you give it, dates it, tags it with a mood, and files it away until you're ready to look back.
It's also for anyone who's tired of paying monthly fees for the privilege of writing in an app. This is a one-time purchase. Duplicate it into your Notion workspace and it's yours forever.
Get It Now
My Journal is available now on Gumroad, along with my other Notion templates — each one built around the same philosophy: thoughtful design, zero unnecessary complexity, and tools that actually get used.
👉 Browse all templates at robmathermedia.gumroad.com
If you've been putting off starting a journal because you haven't found the right system, this is your sign. Your future self will thank you for starting today.
Cheers.
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