On her YouTube channel, Rachelle In Theory speaks about using a Hobonichi Techo A6 as her evening reflections journal.

I have already spoken about my evening reflections journal search and choice here in this post.

I have only been doing an evening reflection for a little over a week at this point.

I am already looking to expand the process.

This journal is not my brain dump journal, although I might note I need to brain dump about a certain topic or a certain project for a particular reason so I won’t forget to do it the next day.

This journal is not my prayer journal because I already have a notebook I use for prayers and wishes and other things. I do program my dreams in this journal if I want or need to do that before I go to bed. I used to sit and think about the programming before I went to bed. Now I write it in this journal as I need to before bed.

This is not a space where I make to-do lists of things. I might jot a few things down so I remember them, but overall, this is not the purpose of this journal.

Now, the notebook I use is an A6. So, it’s not large in any way. When I started to use this journal, I narrowed myself down to using a single page at a time. My notebook is undated. No pages are numbered. I can do what I want in this journal.

Since my original thought process necessitated an A6 Hobonichi Techo, I thought I would train myself to have a single page a day.

That didn’t last for two days. Not because I hate to be boxed in by rules, but because I was pondering a topic and it happened to hit me before bed, so I had to take some notes and expand upon those ideas enough that it would mean something to me the next day.

Now, this is a plain Archer and Olive dot-grid notebook. I can do whatever I want on and to these pages. I can paint, collage, doodle, whatever.

The first night I used the notebook, I wrote a single page of reflection. The second page I turned into a quote page because the quote is something that resonated with me and keeps resonating with me. All I did was draw in the letters and then doodle inside the letters in certain spaces. No markers. No color. Not a lot of time spent. That’s how I like that.

I have been adding a bit of washi tape to the pages, some at the top of the pages and some at the bottom. Just something to delineate one page from another. I started doing it because I liked the washi tape that was sitting on my desk and wanted to use it, to have it highlighted somewhere in one of my notebooks or planners.

Now, after using the reflection journal for about a week, something else began to creep into my mind.

Morning reflection pages.

This is not the morning pages of Julia Cameron,

It is also not going through my planners and whatnot to create the mandatory to-do list for the day.
It is a gentle come-to-focus moment in my journal where I reflect on how I feel right then, what I feel capable of accomplishing in the day, or what I must accomplish that day.

Again, this is something that I am limiting myself to a single A6 page to write. It is not overly detailed. It doesn’t have to be.

Currently, I am simply using the same notebook for evening and morning reflection. We’ll have to see if that changes at some point down the road.

I’ll keep you updated.