Finally figured out why my monthly spreads kept falling apart at 3 weeks

I've been bullet journaling since about January and every single month I'd set up a gorgeous monthly spread with a habit tracker and a big calendar block. Around the 3 week mark I'd stop using it entirely and go back to rapid logging scattered all over the place. Last Tuesday I looked back at my April spread and realized I was trying to track 11 habits at once plus a full schedule, but my actual daily pages only had like 4 tasks a day. The monthly spread was basically a decoy that made me feel productive instead of actually helping me see my week. I also noticed I kept copying info from my daily log into the monthly tracker, which doubled my work and made me resent opening the journal. What tipped me off was when I forgot to fill in the tracker for 4 days straight and felt guilty instead of just moving on. I'm thinking of scaling way down to just a simple week overview and dropping the habit grid entirely. Has anyone else hit this wall where your fancy setup becomes the enemy of your actual logging?

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bell.taylor1mo ago

...so my buddy actually went through this exact thing. He bought one of those fancy dotted notebooks and spent a whole weekend designing this insane monthly layout with color coded habit rings and a mood mandala. By week two he was already skipping days because filling in the stupid mandala took longer than the actual tasks he was tracking. He finally just ripped the whole monthly section out and taped a blank calendar page in there, said it was the most freeing thing he's done all year. Now he literally just writes the date, three bullets, done. I swear half the battle is realizing the journal is a tool, not a hobby project lol.