So when I said I was addicted to journals on Monday, I really meant it. I’m excited to share my thoughts on several of my journals with you, starting today with my Moleskine Passions Wellness Journal. I probably use this journal the second most after my daily writing journal.
Like all of the Moleskine Passions journals, the cover has images of wellness, like people exercising and meditating. Not my favorite cover for the Passions journal, I think they could have gone with something a little bit more simple.
The front of the journal has a section for event planning, which is nice because it gives me an opportunity to quickly glance at everything I have coming up. This section is only a couple of pages long and I do wish it had a couple more pages, but this isn’t a big deal because I can always create more of these pages at the end of the journal.
One of my favorite sections is at the beginning where you can write in your weekly goals. There are 54 spaces, so only enough for just a little more than a year of goals, but they are very customizable. If you don’t have any goals to write down one week you could skip over and have more to use later. One of my favorite things about this journal is that you can really decide how you want to use things.
It comes with two pages of stickers that you can use to mark important achievements or items you don’t want to forget. I used one to mark my century ride in the “Breakthrough Moments” section. This is one of my favorite sections! I love having a place to write really big wellness moments. Most of these are related to exercise right now, but I hope to change that in the near future!
After an event there is a section to write down your results. I really like that there is a section to write down participants. I use this to write how many people participated in a race, which gives me a good idea of how large an event it was and helps me measure events against each other. It’s also nice to be able to see all of my racing time together, since I don’t write them all down in the breakthrough moments section.
The “Inspirations” section is nice, and I use it to keep interesting photos or short articles from running and fitness magazines. I think I’d get a lot more out of this section if I didn’t use Pinterest for a Running/Fitness board.
The last half of the journal has six sections you can put your own labels on. Right now I’m only using three to keep gear reviews, workout ideas (like swimming sets), and charts and graphs. I’ll probably start using more of these sections as I continue using the journal.
I’ve talked a lot about the sections at the end, but I realize use these sections a lot. There are extra pages at the end of the book to use for whatever you want. I went to Moleskine’s website and printed off a daily calendar. Each 8.5×11 page has four months on it, and I use these to write down my tentative training schedule. This changes all the time, but I like to have a good idea of what kinds of workouts I should get in every week. I just folded the page in half and attached it to a blank page in my journal with a glue stick. I also added a permanent bookmarker to that page using a sticker and some cardstock. This makes it easy for me to find my training schedule, which is great since I look at it almost every day.
The journal also has an exercise log where you can write all your workouts down, a diet section where you can keep your daily food intake, and a general health section to keep doctor and medical info. I’ve used the general health section a little bit, but I don’t take any medications or go to doctor very much so I haven’t gotten a lot of use out of it. I don’t really use the Exercise Log or Diet section either, because I just Dailymile and SparkPeople for both of those. I do think that once I’m done losing weight I might use the Diet section to write down what I eat rather than continue using SparkPeople.
There are some parts of this book that are very useful and some that are not so much. I use the journal frequently, but I’m also training for quite a few athletic events. If you’re not already very active and aren’t interested in becoming very active, I’m not sure you’d get a lot of use out of this journal. I do love how customizable it is though, and because of that I’d recommend it to anyone interested in wellness.
Thank you so much for writing about this journal! I bought one a few weeks back and have been pondering how to best use it; much of it is so open-ended, and your ideas are a gentle push in the right direction for what I want to do with mine. Thank you and enjoy creating a great resource for yourself!
I’m glad you found it useful!