Hey {{ first name | there }}! Welcome back to The Flow by Flocus. If you’re new around here, welcome! 👋  You can catch up on our previous editions right here.

This week: We’re breaking down where traditional habit tracking falls short, and how to make journaling, tracking, and planning feel more human (and actually helpful). Let’s talk about it!

Another January, another avalanche of journals, planners, and trackers to try.

As much as we love a solid system, too much of a good thing can also be a bad thing.

What happens when you look back at that pixel-perfect habit tracker and you can’t remember what you actually did every day?

Look, drinking water and keeping up with your skincare routine are important. If logging them daily helps you, keep doing your thing.

But so many things in life need texture, too, not just data. Your biggest memories, epiphanies, growing pains. Stuff that can’t be reduced to a single checkbox or color.

And if you’re feeling stuck in a track ↔ review spiral, you don’t need to quit tracking. You just need to add texture alongside it.

But more on that in a sec. For now, let’s look at 3 major pitfalls of data-focused habit tracking:

Now that you know some cons of the actual tracking part, let’s talk about the other side of this coin: reviewing all those logs!

How often do you actually review your trackers? And with every review, do you draw meaningful conclusions, and then actually apply them to your life? Chances are probably not.

Also, how often do you beat yourself up for not getting that “perfect” score and ticking off all your habits?

That pressure downplays your progress and growth, and makes you focus on the wrong things.

That’s a lot of energy to spend every day, week, month, only to land back in the same a cycle of track → review → guilt-trip yourself for falling short.

Instead of uplifting and empowering you, reviewing your tracker might make you feel inadequate and incapable — the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to do.

Fortunately, weaving texture into your planning routines can turn things around.

Let’s explore what texture is, and when to prioritize it over data.

Although it can be useful and you shouldn’t discount it totally, data without texture is just numbers, stats, charts. To strengthen your journaling practices, here are 3 “big” things in life that benefit far more from texture vs. pure data.

Then we’ll get into some fun, low-effort ways to bring more texture into your system.

Most mood tracking templates reduce each day into a single color or emotion group. While this approach can be super creative and quick, it’s also inflexible and insufficient for those emotional rollercoaster days.

You can log that you were “aggravated” in January, but come December, chances are you won’t even remember what upset you if you didn’t explore it elsewhere.

Examples:

As much as we love a solid contacts list, relationships are far too complicated to capture in figures alone.

Think about how many selfies you’ve taken with loved ones to capture special moments. Or cards you’ve held onto that meant a lot to you. Incorporate these into your journaling practices to add some (literal) texture.

Examples:

Seeing that meditation streak in your tracker is super satisfying. And we’re definitely not saying you should abandon it, especially if it’s working for you.

We are saying that your spiritual practices will resonate and reverberate so much stronger throughout your life with added texture.

Examples:

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Now, here’s how to work texture into your journaling and tracking!

Popularized by Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, morning pages are meant to be handwritten, long-form, stream-of-consciousness entries where anything goes.

You can do your “morning” pages at any time, of course. We actually prefer night pages, since our brains take a bit of time to wake up.

Who says journaling needs to be limited to words on a page? Add some literal texture using everyday stuff: receipts, snack wrappers, product tags.

This “trend” of keeping a catch-all notebook for anything and everything might feel new, but people have kept commonplace books for centuries.

Commonplace books were how people managed vast amounts of information before computers. And now, they’re a way to unplug from digital spaces and reconnect with offline activities.

Your commonplace book can take any form, but people often use them to store quotes, memories, and notes on the go.

You’re a Flocus user, so you already have your own “digital garden”, in a way: a space online where you can plant the seeds you want to grow.

Whether it’s ideas, tasks, notes, or anything in between, your digital garden can be whatever you want it to be. It’s a more whimsical way of curating things and gives you more freedom to personalize a space you’ll love spending time in.

Don’t be afraid to “deface” any physical books or art (that you own, of course!) by adding your thoughts in the margins or whitespace.

We know some folks might clutch their pearls at the idea, but annotation is a great way to boost recall and memory, while also expressing your creativity and flexing your critical thinking skills.

A curated list of things worth sharing.

If you’re reflecting on your habits or trying to add more texture to your year, it helps to have a calm space that makes you want to sit down with your thoughts.

Flocus is the cozy home base for your planning sessions, review days, and soft resets with a customizable dashboard, timer, and ambience that makes reflection feel a little less intense.

Go to Flocus

We know this was one of our heftier ones, so thanks for reading this far!

What are your thoughts on habit trackers and similar kinds of data-heavy journaling? We’d love to hear ‘em.

Until next Sunday,

Flocus Team