Is Your System Working, or Just Pretty?

I've always dreamed of starting a beautiful bullet journal YouTube channel. You know exactly what I'm talking about — those ridiculously satisfying notebook spreads with stickers, hand lettering, color coded habit trackers and perfectly ruled margins. However, just like scrapbooking, I love buying the tools and stickers but never quite schedule the time to actually use them. So then I try a "simpler" version and keep it up for about a month before it quietly disappears.

Hand written planners of any kind go through extreme phases with me. I love writing things out, crossing tasks off, brain dumping, and slowly writing out my schedule for the week when it's filled with appointments and meetings — it helps cement things into my head. But that kind of planner only works for certain phases of my life. The rest of the time it becomes one more beautiful thing I'm behind on maintaining.

Here's what I've learned after years of chasing the perfect system: a working system is rarely the Pinterest photo we see of Notion boards, planners and color coded calendars. A working system is easy versus complicated. Boring versus time consuming. Invisible versus impressive.

The System That Finally Worked

My favorite example — and the one that took me the longest to find — is my content creation system.

I downloaded multiple Notion board templates and tried them all. I signed up for social media batch classes. I watched countless videos about the "perfect" content calendar. None of it stuck. Every system was either too complicated to maintain or too rigid to fit how I actually worked.

Then when I wanted to launch my new website I had a burst of creativity. I spent about ten seconds creating two databases — one for blogs and one for social media posts. I connected them together so I could see which posts connected to which blogs, and then went to town dropping ideas, captions and drafts into them.

Sometimes, you just need the bones.

This simple system also helped me stop trying to follow someone else’s content strategy. It gave me permission to just make what worked for me - and stopped my analysis paralysis cold.

The system is basic. Boring. But extremely functional. It focuses me. It keeps me on track. It's easy to pick back up exactly where I left off. It doesn't take any mental energy to re-enter — I just open it and go.

That's what a working system actually feels like. Not impressive. Just reliable.

3 Signs Your System Looks Good But Isn't Working

1. You only use it when life is "perfect." If the system disappears on hard days, busy weeks or low energy moments — it was never really doing its job. A system that only works when you don't need it isn't a system. It's a decoration.

2. Maintaining it takes longer than using it. Sound familiar? If you're spending more time organizing, updating and color coding than you are actually doing the work — the system is the problem, not you.

3. You've rebuilt it more than twice in the last year. Starting over feels productive. Trust me — this is the trap I fall down repeatedly. If you keep rebuilding from scratch the system isn't evolving with you. It's just being replaced by a shinier version of the same thing.

3 Signs Your System Is Actually Working

1. You use it on your worst or busiest day. That's the real test. Not Monday morning with coffee and good intentions — Tuesday at 11pm after a show when you're exhausted and just need to know what's next.

2. It takes seconds to update, not minutes. A working system has low maintenance costs. Bonus points if it stays organized even with quick chaotic brain dumps. If it's high effort to keep alive it will eventually die.

3. You've stopped looking for a better one. The urge to try every new productivity app disappears when your system actually fits. You're not searching anymore because you don't need to. It should feel boring. Use that energy for something else.

Give Yourself Permission to Build the Ugly One

Pretty systems are like our Instagram lives — most often not the full picture. Or there are at least disorganized, chaotic sections hidden just behind the beautiful photo. The Notion dashboard that looks flawless in a screenshot has a graveyard of abandoned pages nobody sees.

My bullet journal dream still exists. Somewhere in a drawer I have stickers I bought three years ago waiting for their moment. And that's okay — because in the meantime I have systems that actually work. Systems that run quietly in the background while I'm managing a Broadway load out, writing a client proposal and working on this blog all in the same week.

That's what a good system does. It doesn't ask to be admired. It just holds everything together so you don't have to.

Give yourself permission to build the boring one. The functional one. The one nobody would ever post on Pinterest. Because the system that releases your energy is worth infinitely more than the one that just looks good.

And if you want help figuring out what that actually looks like for your specific life — the tea chat is a free thirty minutes to start that conversation. And if a mid-year reset is what you need right now, I'm putting something together for July. Stay tuned.