I know exactly what I did 28 days ago
In an effort to be more mindful and have a record of how I’m spending my days, I’ve been keeping a new journal. The template for it is simple and requires me to write a few categorized lists of what I have to show for my day.
The current breakdown looks like this:
-what was the most important thing about today
feeling: morning, afternoon, evening
reading:
music:Ideas:
Business:
Personal:
Thanks:
More:
In the evening, I can run through filling it out in 5 minutes. I use http://www.evernote.com/ and create a new note for each day.
A few interesting things that have come from this so far:
1) Searchability. Evernote has great search functionality so I can do something like lookup the word “lazy” or “excited” and find out exactly which days of the week I was feeling that way.
2) “Thanks” – The thanks section is something I added during my second week. It consists of specific details that I enjoyed about my day. Ever since I added this, I’ve been much more aware of transient moments that I’m getting a kick out of (“the sound of a ball hitting a fence”). I had a conversation with a friend about this who was telling me every since she started her blog, she’s had “blog-o-vision” and has been framing her world to fit into that format. I feel like something similar is happening with this “thanks” section where I’ve been enjoying details more since I’m actively looking for them.
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I’m 54 entries in with this journal. Right now, I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to be doing with all the data but I’m hoping to be able to identify some patterns with another couple months of entries. In the short term, the process is helping me be more aware of how I’m spending my time on a daily basis.
