In this video, Matt Ragland reviews the Clear Habit Journal, a collaborative product by James Clear and Baron Fig. He highlights the journal’s core features: templated short‑form daily logs, over a dozen pages of habit‑tracking templates that can span a full year, and built‑in toolkits that provide mental‑model frameworks for goal achievement. Ragland praises the physical design elements such as a back‑cover pocket, multiple bookmarks, and visual page‑section guides (dash and plus markers) that help users divide pages. He contrasts the Clear Habit Journal’s semi‑structured approach with more rigid products like the Self Journal and fully blank notebooks like the Leuchtturm Bullet Journal, emphasizing its balance of guidance and flexibility. Ragland also shares his personal involvement—receiving early drafts from James Clear, offering feedback, and using the journal in his own bullet‑journal practice. He strongly recommends the journal, ties it to Clear’s book Atomic Habits, and encourages viewers to like, comment, subscribe, and explore his other journal reviews and productivity videos.
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Hi everyone, and welcome to another Bullet Journal productivity video. My name is Matt, and in this episode, I'm going to be showing you and reviewing for you the Clear Habit Journal from Baron Fig and my friend James Clear. I have been looking forward to this journal for a very long time for multiple reasons, which I will share with you. But let's go ahead, and I want to show you why this might be the best journal that you could possibly buy. Now a few things jump out to me about the Clear Habit Journal right from the beginning. One is that it combines a lot of things that I love doing anyway in my bullet journal. So short-form daily logs or journal entries. This notebook makes it really easy by having a template and a structure already in place for you. Another thing that James does really well, because it's such a big part of his life and something that I do a ton of as well, which is habit tracking. So there are over a dozen pages of templated habit trackers that you can use. It would most likely, unless you're tracking just a ton of habits, take you an entire year to work through all of them. Even if you do accomplish all those things, and super thumbs up to you for doing so, it's really easy to just create additional habit trackers in all the blank pages that the journal has. One other thing that I love about the Clear Habit Journal that I don't know why more notebook or journal creators don't do this, and it's something that I've been thinking about a lot for any journal or notebook that I may create in the future, stay tuned for that, is the Clear Journal includes different toolkits. So they give you mental models and structures, frameworks for thinking through how you're going to implement the systems and achieve the goals that you have in your life. Most notebooks don't do this. It's just a blank notebook. It's either totally blank or incredibly structured and detailed like the Self Journal is. But something that, again, I do really like about the Clear Habit Journal is it gives you just enough structure and framework for giving you a starting point, but then tons of blank pages for you to actually do the work in a way that makes the most sense to you. A couple other small wins that I love about this journal. One is that there's a pocket on the back cover. That was one, if you see my original like Baron Fig reviews, it was something that I missed between the Leuchtturm Bullet Journal and the Baron Fig Confidant. I love having a little pocket or envelope in the back. Now I know a ton of you, and you don't have to put in the comments, you'll probably still put in the comments, that you can just tape an envelope, but I just never got around to that, and I don't— I didn't want to do it. I just, I just want it to be there. Is that so much to ask? I just want it to be there. It's here in this one, so I really appreciate that. Thank you, James. Thank you, Baron Fig. Another little small win is that there are multiple bookmarks so that you can have easy tracking and flipping to different primary sections of the notebook. Another thing you'll see is that this notebook gives really smart ways to divide up the sections of the page so you can see this little dash right here and a little plus right here. This is so you can see this is where the halfway marks of the pages would be, and even if you wanted to split the page into thirds. I will routinely like make little notes at the front of the journals in the first couple of pages, like this is how many dots, this is where the midline of the journal would be, just so in the Baron Fig Confidant that I used in 2018 that actually took a Sharpie and drew these lines on the outside so that I could see them when I was sectioning off different pages. All in all, this is a fantastic journal notebook that I can't recommend enough. It's probably my favorite, like, semi-structured journal notebook right now. Like I said, the Self Journal one is fantastic, but it is very structured, very detailed, not a lot of room for putting in your own notes and thoughts. I really like how James and Baron Fig put this notebook together that gives you a minimal amount of guidance and structure and some methods for thinking through problems or habits that you want to create in your life. I love the toolkits. I love how the pages are sectioned off, all of those things. So highly, highly, highly recommend picking this up. And you know that I've referenced James's book Atomic Habits a few times already in the past few videos.. So make sure you check out that book, The Notebook. I can't recommend them enough. It's also really cool for me to see this journal live and in person. I was fortunate that James sent me some early drafts and sketches and mockups of the journal itself, and I was able to like just share a little bit of feedback and how I could see it being used in real life by real people like you. So thanks to James for giving me that opportunity to work on it a little bit. And it's, it's an amazing, it's amazing notebook. It's probably my favorite. I'll be getting it for friends, family. I'll definitely be going through some months now and some seasons where the Clear Habit Journal is going to be my primary journal because it gives me that structure, but it also gives me that lots of open, clear, you know, blank pages to still create whatever I want, do whatever framework or layout that I want to have on a given day, week, or month. Thanks so much for watching this video. It was a pleasure to make it for you. Shout out to James and the Baron Fig team for creating an amazing journal. If you want to watch some other journal reviews that I have, you can check out the Self Journal and some other Baron Fig and Bullet Journal products that I'll list in the description below. If you like these kind of journal reviews, make sure you drop a note in the comments because I have a few more companies that have reached out to me about reviewing their journals. So if you like them, I'm happy to do them. And the other great thing is that it gives me some journals to give away, you know, give away to y'all, because I don't, I don't need all of these. I have others. I have others here that I still have to, I still have to go over. And when I'm done, I can, I can give them away to you. So if you like these, go ahead and let me know because I enjoy doing them. I like showing you different journals and methods through thinking through your problems and challenges and habits, goals that you have in your life. Make sure you check out my Getting Started with a Bullet Journal video and the yearly planner planning video that I did recently. I think you'll love both of those. But this channel is focused on analog productivity so that you can get your head out of your apps and start focusing on the things that matter to you. Thanks again, and I'll see you in the next video. Oh, give this a thumbs up and subscribe if you're new, if you liked this. If you didn't like any of it, there's no way that you're still watching at this point. So you probably— if you probably like it, give it a thumbs up, leave a comment, and and subscribe because you're going to like other things that are happening. Okay, that's enough. Peace.
