Getting My Own Historical Data for A Better Me: Self Upgrading Journal
What do you think about the title above? Are you curious enough? Do you have questions yet? Let me tell you from the beginning of the idea where I decided to write this article.
It began with a self upgrading journal advertisement on Instagram in early 2020. I was attracted for the first time when I saw the further catalog. There were many interesting features inside the book, we could fill it as creative as we need and we want. One hour later, I decided to buy the journal. I thought it will be amazing if I could write data about myself, and may it will help me in the future.
If I looked back to 2019 when I was a college student, I used a weekly planner to help me manage time and tasks. At that time, I was in the 7th semester of college, which means I have to finish my lectures and a final project at the same time. And … I did it. I thought I would not make it well if I did not have that helpful planner at that time, although the planner was very disorganized and full of scribbles. Based on this true experience, I am more and more convinced to buy the journal.
First of all … here’s the amazing book!
(I do apologize, it was a one-year-old dusty book).
Disclaimer, due to privacy issues I could not share my real journal, instead, I will give an example of how to fill the journal.
The main features inside the journal are a monthly planner, 3 in 1 tracker, weekly planner, and monthly review. Next, I would like to share how I used the journal.
1) MONTHLY PLANNER
In this planner, I only add the important schedule without any detail just to remark the date. I set the goals of the month and tasks in order to reach those goals.
2) 3 IN 1 TRACKER
This is my favorite feature! I could track my habits, hobbies, moods, what caused my mood changes, and my sleep hours.
a) Habit tracker
In my journal I put three habits (or hobbies), those are watching K-drama, reading articles on the Medium platform, and learning English from youtube videos.
For K-drama tracking, I used numbers to describe how many episodes I have watched in a day. For your information, there are two types of K-drama based on the broadcast, ongoing K-drama, and complete K-drama. Personally, I prefer ongoing K-drama, in one week I could watch 2–3 titles of the drama. Usually, ongoing K-drama broadcasts 2 episodes per week. As you can see, for example on 24 August 2021 I watched 3 episodes from 2 titles drama.
For the article and learning videos I only use triangle and circle symbols if I do the activity, and dash symbols If I missed it. I set a target of one article and one video every day.
b) Mood tracker
To make my journal more fun and has statistical visuals, I decided to use a line chart to track my mood in a month. As you can see below, I used some notes if the mood was extremely bad or extremely good. The notes are about what things caused that mood. The purpose is could reflect on my emotional stability and learn from it to be better self-control. Otherwise, I did not add any notes if the line remains stable.
c) Sleep tracker
I think the bar chart is the most suitable chart to describe the hours of sleep. We could calculate the mean, determine the minimum and the maximum hour (also the causes). The sleep tracker could show us our sleep quality, does it reach a healthy sleep time? National Sleep Foundation guidelines advise that healthy adults need between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per night. Are you sure your sleep hours have met these criteria? If not, then start using this sleep tracker.
3) WEEKLY PLANNER
In this planner, I added more details than a monthly planner, such as a daily agenda or a list of activities I should do on that day. Besides the list, I also added a weekly wisdom quote.
4) MONTHLY REVIEW
On the last day of the month, I wrote a narrative review about what I have going through, what was the best thing, the worst thing even the unique thing I have encountered in that month. Besides I added achievements, progresses, and lessons for the next month.
Besides the main features above, these are the interesting features at the beginning of the journal, we could set the goals, vision of life, mood boosters, wishlists, and many more. For your information, I bought this wonderful journal from rokata.id. If you are interested you could go further to their catalog. They already provide good features and you just have to fill it as you like.
By writing self upgrading journal, you generate your own historical data, just about you. Historical data is so important, don’t you believe it?
In business analytics, there are two methods that interpret historical data: descriptive analysis to identify trends and patterns (what happened), and diagnostic to determine why something has happened. Why don’t we apply this concept to ourselves? If we already have our own historical data through the journal, we could analyze it in order to know what happen to us, and why those things happened. Furthermore, we can learn how to prevent bad things from happening again and make good things even better in the future. In other words, we do self-upgrading!
In addition, journaling or writing a planner will make you more organized, more focused to reach your goals, and it will help you to step closer to your dreams.
As the old quote says “If you never try, you’ll never know”. Let’s get it!
