Adapt a One Line A Day for your Life Timeline

I love the concept of a one line a day journal, but I’ve never really been great at keeping one. Then, the amazing Jill Metcalfe commented on my essay about keeping a life timeline which is a part of my annual planning process. A literal lightbulb went off over my head.

I mocked up a quick sample in my journal in Notion and realized that I can add this to my Good Morning/Good Evening planning routines which I’ll be back with in another article and video probably later this week. I already have very strong habits built around entering information in Notion every morning and every evening and so adding another line to fill in will be easy and quickly become a part of my already existing habit.

“The easier a behavior is to do, the more likely the behavior will become habit.” — Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, image created with Readwise.io

What you add to Notion?

If you keep a Journal or Daily Log in Notion, I think that this is the ideal place to add your One Line A Day (OLAD) field. If you don’t have that then think of a place in your site that you already go every day and add this field here. In addition to a simple text field, I suggest you add a multi-select property that allows you to quickly and easily categorize this into things like Life, Work, World, or any other categories you like. For example, I added a category for Kona, my dog. This gives you the ability to quickly filter on any of these categories to see a timeline just for that specific category.