A mood tracker works when each day’s entry records four things: how much your mood interfered with what you had to do, how many hours you slept, one line on what happened, and one word for how irritable you were. The rating is the smallest part. The three fields beside it are what turn a column of numbers into something you can read. Almost every mood tracker template online asks you to shade a box from one to ten, or …
Category: Journal Templates
A weekly review is a clearing pass, not a reflection session. Once a week you empty everything that has accumulated, look at what is actually in front of you for the next fortnight, and then let yourself think about what you might do next. It is closer to tidying a workshop than to writing in a diary. The original checklist is published free by the David Allen Company. It is eleven items, it fits on one page, and one of …
Six months into anything – a renovation, a thesis, a side business, a long repair – you can usually remember what you did. What you cannot remember is why you chose it over the other option, what the result actually was, and what you had decided to do next before the project went quiet. There is a published specification for exactly this problem. The National Institutes of Health issued Guidelines for Scientific Record Keeping in the Intramural Research Program at …
A goal journal entry needs two things, and neither of them is a vision board. Write one goal specific enough that you could not fake having reached it, and hard enough that you are not sure you will. Then, underneath it, write the sentence that begins with “if” – the plan for the exact moment you would otherwise stop. That second line is the part with evidence behind it. The two statistics that hold up most goal-setting writing do not …
The grid is nine boxes by nine boxes. Your goal goes in the centre. The eight boxes around it are the conditions that have to be true for the goal to happen. Then each of those eight becomes the centre of its own nine-box square, and you fill in eight concrete actions for each. One goal, eight conditions, sixty-four actions. Shohei Ohtani filled one of these in as a high-school student in Japan. His centre box was to become the …
Free journal templates for daily journaling, work, gratitude, goals, and yearly reflection - pick the format that fits your life. …
Philosophical Meditation is a practice that assumes that a good chunk of the troubles in our minds comes from thoughts and feelings that have not been untangled, examined, and confronted with sufficient attention. Journaling about these unexamined thoughts and feelings allows us to better grasp our minds by becoming aware. The goal is not to fix the mind but to experience the relief that comes from being aware and feeling in control of our minds. We attempt to move from …
The end of the year brings about an opportunity for us to reflect on the past year and use that for the year ahead. The Stoics, from Seneca to Epictetus, reflected daily and encouraged their students to do the same: “I will keep constant watch over myself and — most usefully — will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil—that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that …
A decision journal is a short written record of the choice you face, the options you considered, and why you picked one – so you can learn from the outcome later. Your journal is a very effective companion in helping you to make critical decisions. Using a journal will save you from mental overload, fears, mindless wandering and other unpleasant experiences of decision-making. In this blog post, I want to share how I have been making decisions using my journal. …
An audio journal is a spoken diary you record on a phone or app when typing feels slow or thoughts move faster than your hands. You capture reflections out loud, then optionally transcribe, replay, or leave the entries as voice notes. Keeping an audio journal is a convenient way to capture and articulate your thoughts. These days, you can easily press record on your mobile device to start your audio journal entry. Below, I share what I have learned from …