I am a professional artist and my journals* are almost entirely free of decoration. There's drawings when I need one to explain something in a rare freeform text segment but there's none of the complex multi-colored stuff that people love to share. Mostly it's just dates and lists of checkboxes.
* they are not actually in the "bullet journal" format, but rather in my own personal variant of "the Pomodoro method" where one checkbox = one half an hour I'd like to spend on a task, except when it's part of a shopping list or something.
I love that my job is sitting on my ass drawing stuff but there are definitely times when it is still Work that I have to force myself to keep doing. Sometimes I sort of sit there watching art fall out of my stylus. Sometimes I am Sisyphus muttering and cursing as I push this fucking stone up this fucking mountain for the millionth time.
"Flow" is overrated IMHO. It's certainly worth building working methods that make it more likely to happen but if it's your job then you need to be able to make yourself do it even if it's not coming.
I do a very informal version of the Pomodoro method, mostly I keep an eye on how long Time Sink[1] says I've spent on whatever I'm working on today and try to make sure it's a round half hour. If it's fighting me then I'll get up and take a break as soon as I get a half hour in. If it's not then I find my body usually wants to get up and move around after about an hour's work anyway.
And I am a lazy old lady who feels like 2 hours of work in a day is good, 3 is great, and 4 is amazing. Having spent a lot of time figuring out how to make my tools do a lot of work for me helps make this a schedule that pays my bills.
* they are not actually in the "bullet journal" format, but rather in my own personal variant of "the Pomodoro method" where one checkbox = one half an hour I'd like to spend on a task, except when it's part of a shopping list or something.