A Year of Stories

Short post today: I formed an accidental habit over the past year. I’m hoping I keep it for 2025. 

---

In high school I was diligent about writing in a journal every night. But around college, I fell out of the habit. I’ve tried several times to get back into it, but with life, little kids, and about a million other things, it’s fallen by the wayside. 

But I have kept all my planners over the years, and now have a large stack of them. It’s fun to flip through and see what I wrote out for each day and notes I’d made. In a lot of ways, my planners have ended up as my journals.

Last December, I started posting stories as a way to push through some stupid anxieties I had over sharing things online. It worked. But I was a little sad that they disappeared after twenty-four hours, and after that, they went into the archive. I wanted to keep them, especially the ones I spent fiddling with in Canva.

I’d bought a little printer for my phone a year or two back. I’d used it now and then, but I kept forgetting about it. The pictures weren’t the best quality and they were fairly small (2x3”), and came out as basically peelable stickers. I decided to pull it out and print some of my stories and slap them down on the days they’d happened. For the first couple weeks, I told myself not to get my hopes up–I’d be unlikely to keep up the pace and commitment of printing off all the “stories” (plus any extras I didn’t share on social media) and that I’d eventually forget to keep doing it. Maybe it would be a “sometimes-thing” I did. 

It turns out, I actually did stick with it. I may have gotten behind sometimes, and then had to print off two weeks or so all at once, but for the most part, I stayed on top of it.

I’m very pleased with the end result. I actually like it considerably more than when my planners were just written. I’ve loved looking back and having a visual representation of the entire year. It’s been like scrapbooking and journaling rolled into one and I really hope I can keep it up. It’s been my favorite accidental habit to date.

It’s also been interesting because the stories have helped me take more pictures. I’ve never been a big picture taker, but knowing that I wanted to post–both to get over a lot of my anxiety and to put another picture down for that day–helped me keep the habit up. It was a good little reinforcement loop: more pictures, less anxiety, more journaling/tracking. Repeat.

But I’m proud of this habit. I like sharing stories on Facebook with everyone, and I like knowing even more so the full stories behind them when I stick the print-outs to the pages of my planner. And I love flipping through the whole thing and having the thought, "Wow. I really did do a lot."

For those wondering what I used, here you go:

I'm on my second Sprocket (the first one died halfway through the year–though now I question if it just needed a hard reset).

Here’s the paper it uses: HP 2x3" Sticky-backed photo sheets (in packs of 10)

This year, and for 2025, I used the “Passion Planner,” but I’ve also used the “Commit30” planner as well. They run sales all the time, and I’m pretty sure if you go through the checkout process and then abandon your cart (but not before giving them your email) at the last minute, you’ll likely get a discount code in the next 24 hours. I might be wrong though, but it's always worth a shot.