The Systems Are There for When They're Hard, Not When They're Easy

I'm super stressed at the moment, and I haven't felt like I've had time to do a bunch of my tracking or daily check-ins, so I've just kind of dropped the ball a lot for about two weeks now (but more heavily this last week). Today (Saturday 28th March 2026) I had a realisation that those systems are in place for times like these, when I'm really stressed.

I have a system that feels a little overkill, and it's these four things:

1. There's a morning manifesto, which is checking in the morning about what's the most important thing to do that day — it centres around work, but it's really about checking in with my energy levels.
2. Then I have a debrief log, which I do at the end of my workday while I'm still in the zone. I have the context of the day fresh, I know exactly what I need to pick up tomorrow and what I didn't get done — it's like the equivalent of sending out a daily message to the team about what you've done, but just for yourself.
3. The other thing I do is a habit tracker, which is basically just a notebook with a bunch of checks to tick off. Because it's a physical item, it can sometimes feel more of a barrier than just doing it on your phone, but on the phone there are obviously so many distractions.
4. And then the final thing is my daily highlight, which I do in Day One. It started as just one really cool thing from the day, and it's kind of become a longer check-in with the key points I feel are worthwhile mentioning. It started as a positive thing, and now some more negative things make their way in there too. So obviously, there's a lot to do each day.

I really enjoy doing all of this when I'm having a good day, and a lot of the time it can feel really great — specifically the debrief log, the payoff on that is night and day. Obviously on days where I'm having a really hard time and I've got a bunch of daily highlights to catch up on from days I missed, it just feels like a really big burden. But I've had an epiphany.

I've been struggling a lot the past two weeks with a big creative freelance project, work in general, and personal admin my nervous system seems to be alergic to. And sometimes it's just the flow of life, that all these core areas get rocky at once. I'd been feeling a bit behind in more than one area, and probably not really looking after myself mentally and health-wise either. It's just felt a bit chaotic and overwhelming, and all of these four habits have dropped. I've been able to maintain maybe one each day, but that's kind of been about it. (and just for reference, I don't do all four consistently, on average I probably do 3 a day.)

But it kind of hit me when I was catching up on daily highlights. I realised I felt so much better about my week when I actually looked back at it — because I had been feeling awful about it this whole time. The stress had been living in my body; that was my memory of it. But when I went back and looked at each of the days, jogged my memory with my calendar and scrolled through my photos, there were things that were actually really positive. I'd been so stuck in these feelings of negativity and spiralling that it completely switched how I felt about my week — just in a couple of minutes, from a very simple practice.

It made me realise that I need to push through when these things feel like a burden on hard days, because they have the ability to do mental switches that are really important for my mental wellbeing. I'd been feeling like I'd had a really hard time at work all week and I had a weekend creative project I knew I needed to do and was dreading. I just felt like I needed time to myself. But I spent my Saturday morning catching up on some of these things and everything felt so much lighter after. It was just such an epiphany.

And I feel like it comes from somewhere much deeper. I always feel like the systems I have in place work for me and I find them really fun, but they feel overkill. I can picture people being shocked about this daily process and feeling a lot of judgment and shame about that. I often think 'what I'm doing is crazy', 'I'm doing it just because it's fun', 'there's no real value to it'. And sometimes I probably am doing it just for the sake of it, but it brings me joy, so that's enough.

But also, it just really proved itself this week in a really clear way. I'm sure there are other times this daily process has helped me, and I haven't even noticed. But going forward, I don't want to feel any shame about this. It felt overkill before. Now it just feels good.

This creative project will be taking up my bandwidth until the end of June, so I haven't been expecting to do any writing on this site, but it just felt so powerful that I wanted to share.

Speak soon,
Will