Why I still use a hard cover diary

You may ask, why use a hard cover diary when you can store important dates and meetings in your smartphone?

Call me a luddite but I adore my diary.

I enjoy the connection to the tangible object. I love opening my diary and writing down my appointments on each page rather than typing them into the calendar on my phone.

I also tend to jot down bits and bobs I might want to recall later on at some point, like inspirational quotes or phone numbers and addresses, podcast titles and recommended books.

Likewise with goals and achievements. I can tell you exactly how many Pilates classes I’ve completed this year because they’re noted in my diary. The same with swims and walks. It’s fun to gloat over how achieved I am. 🙂

I prefer to have all that information in one place, rather than stored in different folders in my phone such as Notes, Calendar and Reminders.

If I want to remember something I did two months ago, I can flick back through my diary. For example, on Thursday, March 26, the outdoor pool where I sometimes teach swimming closed its doors to the public because of COVID-19. That’s a fact. I wrote it in my diary. The day after, a play my friend and I were going to see at the theatre was cancelled. The pandemic had begun its ruthless march of destruction in earnest by late March, 2020.

What makes a good diary?

This year, I bought the best ever diary. I used to prefer a page-a-day diary but I’m a convert to the miGOALS 2020 Hard Cover Diary.

The bonuses of this diary make up for the quarter-page-a-day format.

It’s more than a diary. It’s a motivational tool that contains a weekly focus, goals, a quote per week, ‘how I want to feel this week’, and a weekly section for ‘habits’ and ‘weekly wins’.

The diary also contains a monthly planner and goals (which I haven’t used as much as I should).

There are ‘Mi Core Values’ and ‘purpose’ sections, along with a ‘toolkit for success’. If you want to dive deep (I waded in), there’s also pages to record where you see yourself in three years and vision board pages.

A good diary feels sturdy and has a firm spine and hard cover. It has to have good quality paper and an attached ribbon bookmark to keep the right page.

On a nostalgic note, a hard cover diary is a reminder of how time flies (if that’s the way you view time).

My diary had a pristine pale pink cover and hundreds of pages waiting to be filled when I bought it in January. Now it’s September – the pink is faded and marked and the pages are filling fast. Small daily achievements and more mundane activities have been written down, struck out (that’s COVID-19 for you – what a party pooper) and highlighted.

MiGOALS was designed in Melbourne. How cool is that?