Appreciation post: my cheap grid stencil beat my fancy dotted notebook for daily logs
I grabbed a $3 plastic grid stencil from a craft store in Dallas because my dotted journal kept making me space my rows all weird. Turns out tracing 5 quick lines with the stencil gets me the same neat layout in half the time, and now my daily logs actually stay on one page instead of drifting. So tell me, do you all use a stencil or ruler for your grids, or do you just freehand it and hope for the best?
Calling a stencil "beating" dotted paper makes it sound like one wins over the other, but you're really just swapping tools for a different job. Dotted notebooks are made for people who want to freehand their layout and use the dots as light guides, not for tracing straight lines every day. Nothing wrong with your stencil trick if speed and neat rows matter most to you, and 5 traced lines does sound way faster. Just don't toss the dotted book in a drawer thinking it lost the fight, because those dots still work great for charts, boxes, and spacing stuff by eye. A stencil gives you fixed spacing whether you want it or not, so you trade some freedom for speed. Both have a place depending on what the page needs.