One Year With Silk+Sonder

What I love, what I add, and where I still have room to grow

One year ago, as we looked ahead into 2023, I not-so-casually snarked to a coworker that I expected to have “a year.” That was it. I couldn’t, at that time, imagine anything much worse than my 2022 had ended, and I certainly wasn’t in a place to imagine having anything better. This is what I often refer to as being “in the hole,” and I’d been stuck at the bottom for a while at that point. Getting Silk+Sonder (as well as literally any other self-help program I could throw money at, I was willing to try anything) was my attempt to, if not pull myself out, at least stop myself from continuing to sink. And, amazingly, it worked.

(I know, that sarcastic 2022 voice is saying; I’m as surprised as you are. But I swear this isn’t marketing, and this isn’t, uh, one big pile of poop. The tools contained within Silk+Sonder and other similar journal practices are rooted in science and cognitive behavior therapy, and while I am not a professional and I don’t think a blog and a planner should be a substitute for professional help, if this is the tool that you have access to and my experience can help you use it, well, that’s what I consider work worth doing.)

Pictured: What I know advice like “just think positive” can sound like when you’re battling depression.

One of the first things I wrote down in that planner was three goals for the first week: to actually use the planner, to return to the habit of logging and tracking my emotions, and to spend more time writing. The future that I couldn’t see for myself then is here in front of you now; this blog, and how the planner helped me get to this point where I am able to objectively look at my experience and use it to create and to, hopefully, help others. So if you’ve found yourself here because you too are seeking help with depression, anxiety, managing ADD/ADHD or other neurodiverse tendencies, or just because you’re interested in exploring a new planner with a pretty layout, let’s get into it.

One of the most frequently asked question in see in the Sonder Club app or in the chat at a Sonder Social is “How do I…?” So excuse me while I get one thing out of the way:

There is no singular “right” way to journal.

That said, what you’ll find below is a look at how I use my journals each month, what’s working for me and what I’ve learned after year of use. If these inspirations work for you as well, great! And if they don’t, consider them a jumping off point to imagine how you might repurpose some of the tools to make them your own in the same way.

Yearly Reflection

This page is only in the January planners, however if you start your S+S journey at any other point in the year, you can build this onto one of your blank pages. The reflection consists of: things I achieved, people I met, places I went, and books I read. While all of these are important to me, you can of course retitle any of these boxes with ideas like family I visited, things I learned, or Goals I met. Since this is a reflection over your entire year, I recommend tying these reflections into your core values in order to get the most out of this exercise.

Last year this was something I… won’t say struggled with, but could have done better. This year? I had the benefit of being able to review my past S+S journals to refresh myself on what I’d been doing over the course of the year! That was also helpful in December when one of the journal prompts was identifying the best parts of your year.

Monthly Reflection

Look back and journal on the past month’s wins, challenges, and favorite moments. As a reminder, a challenge does not necessarily need to be something negative; it can absolutely be a good thing and something that shows up as a challenge might still be a favorite moment. As an artist, I’ve definitely had that a couple times over the course of the year. After going through that reflection is a good time to look at what you would like to start, stop, and continue as to go into the next month.

Monthly Intentions

I discuss the difference between a goal and an intention more in depth in my previous post 5 Ways to Set and Achieve Your Goals with Silk+Sonder, but here is the TL;DR on how I use this page: “I intend to… I will challenge myself to…” This gives me both the ultimate, usually loftier intention of how I want to feel, as well as an actionable goal that will help get me there, and that I can craft my habits around.

Mood Tracker

This is a key part of my daily mindfulness check ins, and I mostly use it as intended, with one little twist. Instead of putting six separate emotions on my key, and thus narrowing myself, the last few months I’ve made myself a sliding scale related to the monthly theme. In the case of January ’24, that looks like complacent and tired on one end, and ambitious and energized on the other. You can read more about this practice in Mood Trackers: What, How, Why?

Habit Tracker

For the most part, I’ve used this as intended, but this month brought me something different. Instead of habits, I set up the tracker to help me build and maintain a morning and evening routine. Mostly this looks the same as my past habit trackers, except that I’ve included some timeframes for myself, and I’ve marked out the weekends as days when I might make exceptions.

Sleep Tracker

And now we come to my first fully repurposed page! Not that healthy sleep habits aren’t important, but after a couple of months of using it I simply found that tracking sleep wasn’t useful to me. Why? Because one of my primary depression symptoms is sleeping too much, and what I found in tracking was that it simply reinforced a negative habit instead of telling me anything I didn’t already know. I needed something that would reinforce a positive habit, something that I both enjoyed doing but also still needed the push to do; sleep wasn’t on that list, but getting back into a consistent workout routine was. So for most of 2023, my sleep tracker became a workout tracker as I prepared for a half marathon… where I of course hurt myself. No sense in keeping a workout log when I couldn’t work out, ‘eh? And anyway, now that I’m back on a steady schedule, I don’t really need a full page for that motivation anymore. So, what to put there?

December I did a cozy reading log — which I liked so much I kept, but I did move it. We’ll come back to that. For January, and the new bar graph-style format, I took the one habit that had been on every tracker I’d had in 2023 and gave it its own page.

The top row along the top is marked out in increments of 50 to track my word count, then I’ve given myself a column for Time Spent Writing and what project I worked on. This has proven incredibly helpful because it encourages me to log something every day, even if it’s a bare minimum of 50 words. I could also see this being great for number of pages read, time spent on art,  macro goals if nutrition is important, or even tracking time you’d like to stop spending, like screen time, television, or overtime at the office.

Gratitude Log

Another staple in my daily practice, this one for me goes back past Silk+Sonder. As a non-professional, I can’t explain this better than Dr. Laurie Santos does in her (completely free and really wonderful) course at Yale University The Science of Well-Being. I can, however speak to its effectiveness. The simple act of reminding yourself of the good things in your day, however small they may be, helps keep them front of mind, and thus notice more of them. And I do mean small; some days my gratitude is just a hot coffee, or my cat being cute and cuddly. These are things that happen every day, but it doesn’t hurt to remind yourself that they bring you joy, and that’s why you keep them.

Journal Prompts

These are more weekly practice for me than daily. On a day off, when I can take a little extra time with my journal, I’ll fill out a journal prompt. These go along with the monthly theme. Some of my favorites over the past year have included:

As a writer, I’m usually quite wordy in these. I like to add lines to write on, or sometimes I think about buying some lined paper to paste in scrapbook style. And on that note, if you’re not very wordy in your internal monologue but still want to explore the benefits of journaling, well, that’s where the fact that Silk+Sonder does not provide lined pages by default really shines. Some pages like the Vision Board even lead with “draw” as their primary instruction. One friend of mine prints out photos for these pages. They’re also a great place for stickers or creating hand-lettered word art.

Coloring Page

I don’t have a lot to say about this one except that it’s fun. Some people color the whole thing in one go. I’ve seen some wonderful examples from people who use only one color, or monochrome black. I like to work with one palette of my Tombow Dual Brush Pens — I usually pick a new one for each month. You could use fine pens and stencils to draw in patterns. The important part is really just to give yourself a few moments to not think, and just breathe and enjoy.

Blank Pages

These are space throughout the journal, with a few after the journal prompts, some in the weekly spreads, and some at the end of the journal. You can use these for anything you’d like, but if you’d like some guidance, I’d turn to the Sonder Club.

Throughout the month, Silk+Sonder hosts a number of Sonder Socials, online gatherings that allow you to take time with other planners and explore the monthly theme in a little more detail. Or, if you’re like me, they provide the service of body doubling, having another person around to do things with you as a means of motivation. It’s great for ADHD.

One of the first things I set aside blank pages for, usually the side by side spread in the middle of the journal, is daily affirmations, which can be found in the Silk+Sonder companion app. This doubles as a place to practice my handwriting and hand-lettering, serving a similar purpose as the coloring pages. When I write down my daily affirmations, I typically use a standard monoline pen for the majority of the sentence and a brush pen for key words that I can review at a glance. At the end of the month I have a centerfold spread that’s worthy of a poster print.

Monthly Expense Tracker

Or, in my case, Monthly Savings Tracker. If you’re looking to starting building or adding to your savings, I’m a big fan of the small, regular contributions method. I started with a breakdown that left me putting away $100 over the course of a month in somewhere between $1 and $5 increments. Now, as a means of keeping myself interested, I’ve turned it into a sort of game, adding a random amount up to an additional $1 determined by rolling a percentage d10. It doesn’t feel like a lot, but just to put it in perspective, as I write this on the 13th I’d normally have put away $21, and this month I’ve put away $27.80.

Savings, like habits, are built a little bit at a time. The key is in the repetition, and finding ways to keep yourself interested.

This Week I Want to Feel & Weekly Major Three Goals

I use these in conjunction with each other, similar to how I use the Monthly Intentions to craft my habits. In general, I will try to tie my intentions to the monthly theme as a way to keep myself connected to it. “I want to feel ambitious in the pursuit of my goals.” Then I will center my goals around this framework, and around the intentions I set at the beginning of the month.

Weekly To-Dos

When I don’t have a list of steps I need to tick off for a project, I turn this box into my weekly reading log, with a column for how many pages and what title I read each day. This isn’t necessarily about meeting a goal, but a way to track and look back on what I read during the course of a year.

Habit / Activity

Now that my Monthly Habit Tracker is more a Routine Tracker, this is where I keep the habits I’m working on building or projects I want to make sure I work on. If you use the Monthly Habit Tracker in the traditional way, this can also be a great way to supplement it. Take that writing habit I mentioned having on just about every tracker during 2023: my monthly goal might be simply to write every day. My weekly goals might be to hit a particular word count, or to write fiction three days during the week and do non-fiction work the other four.

Meal Plan

I tried this, really I did. I’ve even written a past blog post on my best practices for meal planning with ADHD, and I admit that ultimately I wasn’t able to take my own advice. I did, however, find a new use for this section in my planner, which has now become a chores plan. At the beginning of the week I’ll schedule myself two-three chores each day, leaving myself room for one or two additional things that might pop up during the week.

In the water section to the side of each box, I color code the drops to track each water bottle, tea, and coffee I drink during the day. This is mostly a means of keeping an eye on my caffeine intake. One or two cuppa is medicinal. More than that keeps me from sleeping.

Mind/Body Health Plan

This is where my workout log migrated to now that it doesn’t require a full page. One of the advantages for me putting it here instead of a full page spread is that I’m not so inclined to feel that I have to have a complete log. Rest days are just as important as your active ones, both physically as a chance for your body to recover and build muscle and mentally as a way to prevent yourself burning out. It’s also much easier to indicate swaps on a smaller, single week view than it is a full month.

Shopping List

Very rarely I have used this as is. I probably should use this as is because I have a habit of either impulse buying or only remembering to buy the thing I need when I’m not in a position to get online and take care of it. But in the meantime, this has become a fun place to put a mini-bingo board. Some weeks it’s project related: WFH mini-bingo, or con-crunch mini-bingo. I’m also a fan of things like self-care mini-bingo, or you could once again turn to the Sonder Club app and grab ideas off their larger bingo boards if the full size is too intimidating.

I Am Loving

I’m only just starting to use this. Like several other spaces in my planner, I’ll fill it in with key words using my brush pens, and then some more specific items around it. I’ve mentioned this a couple times and often highlight it in my instagram photos, but in addition to being social media appropriate, they make it more accessible for me to review my journals and reap the most benefit from them. I won’t always want to close read my entries. But even if I just flip through my past journals at a glance I can see where I was at the time I wrote them, what I found most important.

Currently

This is one of my favorite reflection pages, even if it poses a significant challenge to me every time I go to fill it out. This page sits halfway through the weekly spreads, and asks you to reflect on what you are currently LOVING, FEELING, ENJOYING, ANTICIPATING, WISHING, READING, WATCHING, and PLANNING, though I’ve been known to retitle some from time to time. I take in a lot more Podcasts than TV, and I also love an audiobook, so either of those categories have sometimes become LISTENING. Other regular hobbies would be a great thing to record here, under the original titles or not. What you’re currently cooking or baking, sewing, knitting, the new favorite snack, where you’re traveling to; this page is all about you and what you love, so embrace what stands out and grabs your attention in that moment.

Daily Spreads

Each daily spread contains a long column of grid-lined space, as well as a space to record weather (great if you’re working on a project like a weather blanket or scarf but prefer to work in long sessions instead of daily bursts) and a box for one thing; this could be a place for daily affirmations, favorite quotations, holidays, intentions, or just a decorative sticker that speaks to you. As for the long part of the daily spread, I like to use it as a place to brain dump and work out my plans at the beginning of the day. Sometimes I make myself checklists. Sometimes it’s the day’s menu plans. Sometimes it’s blank because I finish with my trackers and just get right to work.

The Monday-Friday spread also contains a scratch pad, which I oddly enough find a better place to jot down a shopping list than the shopping list, probably because those kinds of thoughts float to the surface again while I’m in the brain dump mode and then it’s on the same page. Since it’s unlined, it’s also a good place for a doodle.

Rose-Bud-Thorn

Found on the Saturday-Sunday page of the daily spread, this is your weekly reflection on a highlight (rose), an emerging opportunity (bud), and a challenge (thorn). As a reminder, a challenge does not necessarily have to be a negative experience. In fact, the rose, bud, and thorn can even all be the same thing, that came up a lot for me while I was moving apartments last year. I find these to be a helpful part of my weekly setup as I look at what I want my goals for the upcoming week to be.

And that’s it. I hope this in depth tour of the January journal has been helpful to you. If you’d like to know more about any of the pages I’ve gone over above or the CBT techniques they are rooted in, or have any other questions, send me a DM on social media, and don’t forget to follow for more inspiration and community discussion. I’m excited to keep sharing this journey with you.