Tracking In Your Planner
In a world full of apps and smartwatches, there’s something refreshingly grounding about using a paper planner to track things. For example, I track my daily wellness in my planner. Although I do track my meals in an app (so it can calculate macros for me), I find that writing the other little things I like to track on a daily basis in my planner by hand helps me to build awareness.
I like to keep it very simple, so I use the notes section to jot down the weather conditions and how I'm feeling physically and mentally. Since I also have my daily tasks written down on that day's page, it's always interesting for me to see how my physical & mental health affected my productivity. I enjoy looking back on these small daily entries to reveal patterns.
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| Brief wellness tracking on my daily page |
The act of writing daily in my planner doesn’t just keep me organized, it also helps me stay more mindful of my body’s needs. And unlike an app, my planner never runs out of battery or has a data outage!
Do you track anything in your planner? As always on Fridays, feel free to discuss anything planner related.
I came back to Filofax from using simple notebook as a Bullet Journal. People using this organisational system often use trackers and you see some really fancy designs too. You also read about journal burnout when the stress of keeping a bullet journal turns people away from it.
ReplyDeleteI always think that this burnout comes from effectively doing too much in the bullet journal. I guess the pre-printed nature of filofax systems makes it easier to do tracking and things like that but I believe the same advice applies as with bullet journalling. If you have not intention to the tracking, why do it?
Put simply what point does just recording data or information have if you do nothing with it? I think all trackers have purpose if they are to find your current situation or monitor a change you have made, i.e. tracked to improve something or check a change has been positive. It is about getting worthwhile data that you need to use and make decisions. Just recording something does nothing without purpose IMHO.
I was chatting with a friend last night, and 'gratitude' came up; which meant that she writes down nice things that have happened that day. An idea that came from a stress management/CBT book. That seemed like writing a 'happy diary'. I imagine there's a 'wellness' benefit from focussing on nice things at the end of each day. And writing it down as a paper record, rather than relying on memory; a journal.
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