Progress Report

Example of mood tracker using bullet journal system, photo from Pinterest.

As promised at the end of my last post, this week I will be discussing how I track my progress. Around the turn of the new year I was seeing a lot of blog posts and Instagrams about bullet journals. I'm aware that the concept has been around for a while but it seems to have taken off recently. If you search for 'bullet journals' on Pinterest you'll see dozens of beautifully illustrated pages that have been painstakingly planned ahead of time. People go to town on their journals using various pens, fonts, doodles and numbering the pages. Despite being a creative person myself, I couldn't get my head around spending hours on setting up the structure of the journal. I respond best to simple plans with some kind of easy to read visual scheme, which is exactly what I created for myself. I decided to take the general concept of the bullet journal; using a dot paged journal and creating a code to easily decipher progress in various topics.

My main areas that I wanted to track included my mood, quality of sleep and daily activities in terms of fitness. Each page contains a view of the entire year ahead, each square represents a day and is coloured in at the end of day according to how it went, whether I had insomnia and how active I was. Over time I can see patterns emerging such as how my activity levels drop if I've had a period of insomnia or a number of low days in a row. I decided to also created a two page view of each month to show how many steps I was wracking up and summarising what I got up to each day. I have to make a note of what I've been up to as my short term memory is terrible. If I forget to sit down and fill the pages in, I really struggle to think back on what I did a few days ago. For the step count pages I've been writing down the numbers provided by my Fitbit. At the end of each month I total up the steps and compare how well I've done against previous months. So far the total monthly step count has increased each month which is brilliant.

Using this type of journal has been a great way for me to track my progress. It also shows how well I'm doing in terms of meeting my fitness goals. I've always known that I experience a particularly bad period of insomnia each month and this has helped to outline when it happens. I love that I can see so much information from month to month on one page. I also find these tables a great way of keeping track of various chores I need to keep on top of such as when did I last change the bedding or clean the bathroom as well as things like when I last gave the pets their flea treatments or whether it's time I changed my toothbrush! I definitely recommend giving it a go, it isn't too late to set one up either!