I’m thrilled to share a special guest post by my wife, Lauren Valdez. Lauren approaches productivity in a way that’s refreshingly different from my digital-first philosophy. She’s deeply rooted in the tactile and intentional, favoring physical tools like journals over digital systems. 

Journaling has been her cornerstone for reflection, decision-making, and creativity. I’m excited for her to share her journaling practice with you, not as a “how-to,” but as an inspiring example of how to customize systems that resonate with your life and values. You can find more of her ideas, thinking, and work on her Substack newsletter.

Over to Lauren!

For a decade, I bounced between task managers like a serial dater afraid of commitment. Asana to Things, Todoist back to Things, Apple Reminders… Each new app promised to fix my life, but left me more overwhelmed than before. My digital task lists grew into monsters that paralyzed me with anxiety, so I would dump them and start again.

Then my husband Tiago hit me with a truth bomb: ‘I think the problem is you, not the tool.’

Damn him for being right. What I really needed wasn’t another sleek productivity app – I needed a way to face the mess in my head.

I needed a simpler, more intentional way to manage not just my tasks, but my emotions. I needed a way to manage my anxiety that gets in the way of starting a task. I needed a way to simplify overwhelming amounts of information. I needed to find pleasure in my productivity system, rather than it feeling like a burden. 

That’s when I turned to pen and paper.

Lauren’s Journaling Practice: Intentionality, Flexibility, and Joy

Journaling isn’t just something I do—it’s a way I make sense of life and stay true to my values. My journals help me slow down, reflect on highs and lows, and make more intentional decisions. They’re my tools for staying present and navigating life with purpose.

Here’s a look at how I use journaling, organized around the rhythms of daily, weekly, monthly, and annual reviews. Each journal has a unique purpose, and together, they form a system that’s messy, intuitive, and deeply personal.

1. Morning Pages: Daily Reflection (3–5x per Week, 15–30 Minutes)

I use a cheap school notebook for this nearly daily practice inspired by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Morning Pages are simple: write three pages by hand about whatever is on your mind. It’s messy, unfiltered, and deeply cathartic.

This practice is my brain dump—a space to clear my head of thoughts, reflections, and feelings. I often write about what happened the day before, including funny things my kids said or little moments we didn’t photograph but I want to remember. I also confront my anxieties, writing out absurd thoughts and reframing them as though I were compassionately giving advice to a friend with the same worries. Some days, I plan my day or draft ideas for work. Other days, big emotions surface, and I rage write–raging my complaints or my pains on the page. It’s my space to get things I would never say aloud out of my head and let them go. It’s always a surprise.

At the end of the year, I reread these pages. It’s humbling and inspiring to see how much I’ve grown, and I rediscover moments of joy and resilience I’d forgotten. When I skip this practice, my day is often less intentional and more chaotic—but that’s okay too.

2. Bullet Journal: Task Management and Notes (3–5x per Week, 15 Minutes)

It’s funny that the feature that makes digital tasks managers so great – quick capture, it the reason I can’t use them. I’m a people pleaser who defaults to saying yes. When I’m quickly capturing tasks, I’m not intentional about what I want to do. My digital lists eventually became so bloated that I spent more time organizing the lists than taking action. It was hard to find, organize, and prioritize what really mattered. I also an indecisive Libra; the more tasks on my list, the more paralyzed I become trying to figure out what to work on.  On top of that, I didn’t have consistent habits for maintaining those systems—like daily or weekly reviews—to keep things up to date.

Eventually, I discovered Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal system for managing my tasks and notes by hand in a paper notebook. I plan out my day and write out my tasks for the day by hand. I also carry my notebook around and take handwritten notes in meetings and even take notes on books I am reading by hand. 

What I love about the bullet journal system is how it makes me feel more deliberate about what I say yes to in my life. 

My #1 productivity principle is: what is simple is sustainable. Writing tasks by hand keeps things simple. It also makes me pause and think. If I don’t want to bother rewriting a task, I have to ask myself, “Does this really matter?” That moment of hesitation often helps me let go of things that don’t align with my priorities.

On most days, I average only about three tasks, and that’s enough. I don’t always do exactly what I set out to do, but I always update my bullet journal with what I actually did and see that all the tasks I used to not track digitally like doing laundry, going to yoga, and cooking dinner are big tasks that need to be celebrated too. There is also something that feels so good about crossing off a task physically with a pen. 

Ryder writes in his book, “Everything on your list has to fight for its life to stay there. More accurately, each item needs to fight for the opportunity to become part of your life.” That principle has transformed how I manage my time and energy.

Even though my bullet journal is primarily for tasks, it’s also where I take notes and plan projects. I create messy, functional spreads to brainstorm ideas, plan trips, or track habits like my sleep. Writing by hand takes longer than using an app, but it saves me time in the long run. Digital tools can be distracting—if I open my phone to track a habit, there’s a 90% chance I’ll get sucked into notifications and forget why I picked it up in the first place. By staying analog, I avoid that entirely.

You’ll notice my bullet journal isn’t cute or Instagram-worthy. For me, it’s about processing and getting things out quickly. The messiness is the beauty.

Above: I managed a mini hallway and living room remodel just using my bullet journal, planning my ideas, tracking the budget, and staying on top of the vendors. 

3. Weekly Review Journal: Reflecting on the Week (1x per Week, 45 Minutes)

For a decade, I struggled to maintain a weekly review practice. I knew it was important, but it always felt like a chore. Reviewing my week on a Sunday felt boring, and by Monday or Friday, I rarely had the time or motivation to sit down and do it.

That changed this past year when I found a weekly review system that I actually enjoy. My second productivity principle is, what is pleasurable is motivating. By making my weekly review pleasurable, it’s become a ritual I look forward to.

Most Sunday evenings, after the kids are asleep, I take out my weekly review journal. First, I flip through my phone’s photos from the week and pick 2–4 favorites to print using my sticker printer. Then, I go through my bullet journal to jog my memory and write a one-page summary of the week. I capture funny quotes from my kids, moments of joy, and even the harder things I experienced.

Life moves so fast, that I’m surprised by how much I forgot by Sunday. Sometimes I sit down feeling like I didn’t do enough or that the week was full of challenges. But as I reflect and write, my perspective shifts. I start to see how much I accomplished and am reminded of how beautiful life is, even in the hard moments.

My favorite part of this practice is how much I revisit this journal. Unlike a traditional scrapbook that might sit on a shelf, this journal becomes a living document I flip through regularly. Each page tells the story of a week, creating a wonderful summary of the year as a whole.

This ritual started because I failed to make a scrapbook as part of my 2023/2024 annual review. I had printed over 100 photos, bought stickers, stencils, and gel pens, and spent hours trying to create something perfect. But I bit off more than I could chew, and the project felt overwhelming.

That failure inspired this simpler practice—small, consistent reflections captured in real time. My weekly review journal is messy and imperfect, but it’s become one of my favorite ways to savor life and stay grounded.

The journal itself is nothing fancy—just an affordable notebook from Amazon. It holds up well to photos and marker pens, and my sticker printer makes it easy to capture memories. The photo quality isn’t great, but it gets the job done.

4. My Spell Book: Manifesting Goals and Intentions (Monthly & Annually)

Okay this is where I get a bit woo and may lose some of yall, but this practice is how I make something like goal-setting fun and playful. I like to call this my Spell Book because it feels magical! It’s where I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and write out my hopes, dreams, and visions for the future.

If you have ever set out to create a project, you have dared to put something into existence that never existed before.

That’s magic.

Creating something from nothing is one of the greatest powers we possess as humans.

Whether it’s sending out a newsletter, cooking a meal, hosting a dinner party, or bringing humans into the world, that’s creation.

It’s easy to forget all the things we accomplish and my monthly and annual review rituals are how I remind myself of how magical I am.

Some might call this goal-setting, but that term doesn’t resonate with me. Traditional goal-setting has often felt rigid and intimidating—like I’m setting myself up for failure if I don’t achieve something exactly as planned.

Instead, my Spell Book is about flowing with life’s cycles. My cousin introduced me to moon rituals, and they completely transformed how I approach reflection and intention-setting. Now, every new moon feels like a mini New Year’s celebration for me. We often associate rituals with religion. But a ritual is just a rite, practice, or consistent series of steps. There is something that makes me more motivated to perform a ritual where I light candles and put on a reflective playlist. I feel more enlivened practicing my new moon ritual, rather than a monthly review. The former feels spiritual, a practice I honor for myself, while the latter feels like something I’m supposed to do.

Here’s how it works: I use the new moon to reflect on the past moon cycle. I ask myself questions like, What were the highs and lows? What lessons did I learn? What do I want to let go of? Then, I set an intention for the next moon cycle—something I want to create, embody, or grow into.

On the full moon, I revisit my intention and recalibrate if needed. This practice reframes goals for me, turning them into a cyclical, embodied process. Instead of feeling like I’ve failed if I don’t meet a rigid target, I’m reminded that life ebbs and flows. Each moon cycle is an opportunity to start fresh.

This journal also serves as the home for my annual and birthday reflections. When I sit down for my birthday review, I flip through the past year’s moon reflections. It’s amazing how easy it is to see patterns, growth, and recurring themes. What used to feel overwhelming—looking back on an entire year—now feels manageable and even joyful.

I love choosing a special notebook for my Spell Book. Right now, I’m using one I found on Etsy, and I had it engraved to make it feel even more personal. The journal is both functional and beautiful, and that adds to the sense of ceremony and ritual I bring to this practice.

For me, this isn’t just about setting goals—it’s about connecting with myself, aligning with my values, and embracing the natural rhythms of life.

Big Picture Thoughts

Journal AND Digital

Journaling works for me because it matches how I process life. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned digital tools entirely—I still use my second brain systems like my calendar, Evernote, and Notion. These tools are indispensable for managing complex projects or tracking long-term details.

When something important comes up in my journals, it often transitions to my digital tools. Conversely, when my digital tools feel too overwhelming or disconnected, I come back to pen and paper. Writing by hand grounds me, especially when fear or paralysis sets in. Journaling helps me clarify what I’m doing and regain my momentum.

Systems Change as You Change

Over the years, my systems have evolved with me. Early in my career, when I was focused on execution, digital tools helped me manage a high volume of tasks and details. As my responsibilities shifted to leadership and decision-making, I needed a different approach. That’s when my moon rituals became essential—they gave me space to think strategically and navigate tough conversations.

Motherhood was another turning point. During my postpartum years, my brain often felt fractured, like a horcrux split into pieces. Journaling became my lifeline. It gave me uninterrupted time to process my thoughts, and my morning pages habit finally stuck.

And now, I’m moving into a space where I am journaling less and using more embodied practices like meditation to clear the gunk or move me past my fears. 

If you’ve tried and failed to start a journaling practice, it might not have been the right season of life for you. That’s okay. Systems aren’t static—they should adapt to your needs as they change.

Making Time and Saving Time

People often ask how I make time for all of this. The truth is, these practices bring me so much relief and joy that I crave them. I look forward to journaling, so I naturally make time for it.

Journaling also saves me time. Without it, I’d waste hours working on the wrong things, burning myself out, or spiraling in fear and anxiety. There have been countless moments when I was completely stuck on a project. After just 15 minutes of journaling, the answer became clear, and I eliminated 80% of what felt overwhelming.

I also keep things simple. I don’t try to make my journals pretty or perfect. If anything, the messiness ensures privacy—it discourages nosy people from reading what I write. Logistically, most of my journaling happens after the kids are asleep. Sometimes that means waking up early or skipping TV at night, but the payoff is worth it.

Staying Flexible

I’ve learned that I fail at any system that’s too rigid. Life isn’t predictable, and my journaling practice reflects that. There are weeks when I journal a lot and weeks when I barely touch my notebooks. Sometimes I miss my weekly reviews for two or three weeks. That’s okay. There’s no one “right” way to do this.

Make it Simple and Pleasurable

If you want journaling to become a habit, start small and keep it simple. Maybe set a 15-minute timer or decide to journal only when you’re traveling. Experiment until you find something that sticks.

And make it pleasurable! Invest in beautiful notebooks and pens that inspire you. Take your journal on a hike and reflect during a break. Treat yourself to a journaling date with a lavender latte at your favorite café. When you associate journaling with joy, it becomes less of a task and more of a ritual you look forward to.

Journaling has been my companion through the seasons of life—helping me reflect, navigate challenges, and celebrate the moments that matter. Whether you’re drawn to pen and paper or prefer a digital system, what matters most is finding a practice that feels true to you. 

Start small, experiment, and let your journaling evolve with you. It doesn’t need to be perfect or pretty—just something that helps you stay connected to yourself and your values.

You can find more of Lauren’s ideas, thinking, and work on her Substack newsletter.

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.

Like so many others, I’ve spent the past year exploring and experimenting with emerging AI tools. 

Throughout that time, there has been one question I’ve been trying to answer: Will AI replace the need for Second Brains entirely?

A lot of people seem to think so, and I admittedly have a self-interested motivation: to decide whether I should continue advising people to build a Second Brain at all, or just tell them to rely on AI and save all that effort. 

After many dozens of hours of experimentation, my conclusion is that AI is not going to replace the need for a Second Brain anytime soon.

Here’s why: no matter how powerful AI becomes, the data we put into it has to come from somewhere, and the AI’s outputs have to go somewhere. A Second Brain (or whatever you want to call it) is still needed both as the repository of all those inputs and as a staging area for storing those outputs until they’re ready to be used.

What’s Changed – Organize and Distill

There is no doubt that AI is going to radically change what we think of today as the creative process.

Looking at my CODE framework representing the creative process, however, it is mostly the middle stages of Organizing and Distilling that AI is transforming.

Organizing (step #2) is the stage of the creative process that inherently adds the least value – it is only needed to prepare the ground for the subsequent stages. Thus it’s no surprise that it’s the first one to be automated by AI. 

No longer does it make sense to meticulously format your data in a perfectly organized database – instead you can just dump a morass of text into a prompt window, and AI is smart enough to understand what you intended. 

As an example, Notion has added AI to its software, allowing you to interact with and “talk to” your notes without having to spend a lot of time adding structure.

Distillation (step #3) is also a perfect fit for the rapid, emotionless decision-making of AI. Large Language Models excel at rapidly summarizing huge amounts of text at whatever level of detail you desire.

For example, in my video on using ChatGPT to summarize books, I showed how AI was able to save me dozens of hours of formerly manual work to end up with a concise, actionable book summary.

What Hasn’t Changed – Capture and Express

The first stage of the creative process – capturing information in the first place – has still hardly been touched on the other hand.

New apps like Rewind allow you to record everything that happens on your computer, but in my experience that just creates a lot of recordings to wade through.

Although some capture tasks like digitizing handwritten text have been automated, we still have to write down our thoughts and ideas in the first place!

The quality of an AI chatbot’s response is always dependent on the quality of the inputs you provide it. AI cannot (yet) go out into the world and collect its own data, so we have to do that ourselves by capturing notes, highlighting passages in books, taking pictures, and saving our favorite ideas.

The fourth and final stage of creativity, expression, also still requires a human to decide what to do with the outputs of ChatGPT and other AI tools. Someone has to put the finishing touches on the final product via their own voice, style, taste, or perspective.

My wife Lauren’s video about creating a children’s storybook using AI perfectly illustrates this point: although every major component of the final product was created by ChatGPT, it was Lauren’s direction, synthesis, and creative nudges that allowed all the parts to come together in a cohesive, meaningful whole.

AI Concentrates Human Creativity at the Initial and Final Stages

AI doesn’t make human creativity unnecessary – it concentrates our creativity at the beginning and end of the creative process.

For a concrete example, in my video on Google’s new AI platform NotebookLM, I demonstrate how I can import the entire history of my reading highlights, and then freely make associations and connections out of that vast collection of text totaling 594,379 words from 719 sources.

While that capability seems almost superhuman, notice what it still required of me: to do the reading in the first place and save the excerpts I found valuable (capturing), and then to take NotebookLM’s responses and turn them into my own creation (expressing). In other words, the first and last steps of creativity haven’t been touched.

I can effectively skip from the first step to the last step, barely touching the steps in between. But that means I still need to take the first and last steps, to give the AI a starting point and an endpoint.

The relevant question has become: what do we do now that the “cost” of intermediate steps like organizing and distilling has plummeted?

Tasks that formerly required expensive human effort can now be completed with cheap computer effort, in fractions of the time. What kinds of goals, outcomes, and creative projects have suddenly become far more feasible than they were just a couple years ago?

For an example of what it might look like to work with AI as a real-time creative partner in this way, check out my in-depth interview (Part 1 and Part 2) with Srini Rao on the AI-powered noteaking app Mem (which by the way is the only notetaking app that OpenAI has invested in).

Follow us for the latest updates and insights around productivity and Building a Second Brain on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And if you’re ready to start building your Second Brain, get the book and learn the proven method to organize your digital life and unlock your creative potential.