In the front of my Wonderland 222 planner there is this “Yearly” page, with little boxes for each day of the year. The whole year is spelled out over just 2 pages.
These boxes don’t leave a lot of room for writing, but I’ve developed a little code system that allows me to track a BUNCH of things in each tiny box. (I track 6 things per box.)
I like this format for tracking certain things vs. my individual monthly habit tracker, because it’s cool to see all the months together, on one spread.
My “code” is spelled out in the lower section. But I use this to track a couple things I want to keep private, so I covered it up. 🙂 Sorry!
I started doing this last year, too, but only got through mid-March before I fell off using it. This year I’m determined to make it all the way!! So far, so good.
It’s just for fun, really. It only takes less than 10 seconds to fill out the box each day, so time should not be a deterrent. And, it’s just an interesting way to look at the data. I am using this to look for trends on some things I want to monitor to see if I can find any correlations or cause and effect.
Here’s a close up of how it looks:
I will share a couple:
- On the far right, if there is a “dot”, that means I walked outside that day.
- If there is an “I”, that means I walked indoors that day (track or treadmill).
I like being able to glance and see little streaks, or lack of streaks. As you can see, January was not a good walking month for me. But, check out April so far! Looking quite good- lots of dots and/or I’s.
- A date “circled” means I did a formal workout (gym or home) that day. (huge gap in March= vacation)
Mood tracking!
Something new I’ve been trying this year is tracking my overall “mood” for the day. On my tracker above, the mood rating is the third number/letter column.
I rank from 1-5, 1 being bad or lowest mood, 5 being spectacular.
I’m not sure that I’m the best person to do this, because I’m indecisive to a fault. I have an extremely difficult time ranking extremes- so 1 and 5 are almost always off the table. Hahaha.
That usually leaves 2-4.
Yesterday was a 2. I didn’t sleep well, I felt so tired all day that my head was literally bobbing at times during the work day, and I was just cranky/ crabby much of the day after that. So, a definite 2.
But generally, I feel like I default a lot to “3” if it was a pretty average day where I didn’t feel exceptionally great or enthusiastic, but nothing bad happened, either. To me, 3 is just a mostly neutral day. Solid, content, pretty decent day. 3/5.
4 is often an average day, but one that felt like it was just a pretty darn good day overall! Even if it was just a regular workday, I’d rank it a 4 if life just felt nice and smooth that day. Or particularly enjoyable for whatever reason. Just a good mood day.
Like I said, I always feel I have to reserve “5” for something….truly exceptional. Which is silly. What can I say, I’m not a good number ranker.
*Note- I didn’t take this on our trip, so I filled it out after, and had to guess at my mood on those days in March. I decided to just default the entire vacation to a 4. In hindsight, a lot/most of those days definitely deserved to be a 5!! For simplicity’s sake, though, and to not leave any blanks, I just decided to list 4’s all the way down.
It’s a fun little exercise.
I think on the whole I’m a pretty content/ happy person, but I think this could be especially useful for some people. Say, if you noticed that you rank every single workday only a 1 or 2, maybe….you hate your job? Or something about your work/life balance? Or if you never rank any day above a 3, ever, maybe something deeper is going on that you’d want to look at.
Similarly, on a bad day, it could be useful to skim this over and see that just last week you actually had all high ranking days- so maybe life isn’t as grey as it seems today.
Anyone else track their mood?
Thought of the Day:
You cannot go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. 🙂
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful for Google. Not sure how we lived without it. lol.
GRATEFUL KAE 
This is a good idea for how to use this space. I was going to use it to track meals I made but decided there is not nearly enough space to write a meal out unless I write in teeny tiny handwriting! So now I am writing down meals I made on the quarterly pages to get an idea of trends/help me think of things we’ve eaten recently/somewhat recently and liked. But I can see the benefit of tracking moods or other things all in one place where you can see trends. I track days I workout and days I walk 10k steps or more, and then I graph the totals for the months on a page in the back of the planner, so I get a trend that way as the gantt charts only give you a feel for the month.
I do not track my mood… I think it might be a little depressing in this stage of life because my mood is often determined by sleep or at least heavily influenced and sleep has been crappy on and off for a good 4+ months! And then I’ve been sick so much (I’m sick again – thought I was getting better and now seem to be getting a 2nd round of the URI). But in a different stage of life, I think it would be useful to track my moods. I am trying to pay attention to the positive things or have more of a sense of perspective about things not always being like they currently are… I sound really negative in this comment! I love my children but I feel like the early years of parenting are super taxing! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel w/ Paul as things have gotten easier with him as he’s gotten older so I know that in 3 years or so, parenting will look a lot different – and of course we’ll have different challenges, but hopefully will be dealing with them as more healthy parents that are getting more sleep!
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You don’t sound negative- it just sounds like life right now! I can’t believe you’re sick AGAIN!! Noooo……
The quarterly pages are nice for things like recipes! I haven’t used those a ton, personally, but played around with them last year. One thing I really like about this planner is that it has several different options of places you can track things, but they are all very flexible. So you can really use them however you want! Cool idea to make an actual chart! I’ve never done anything like that.
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Ooh, I love this!
I use the annual tracking in my Hobonichi to track family illnesses! 5 designated columns and a code for illness: upper respiratory, migraine, etc. Helps me when I am telling myself the story that everyone is always sick, and to see patterns.
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Thankfully, we are past the age where our kids are getting sick constantly! But otherwise, yeah- that’s a perfect use for that! 🙂
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Hi! I’m attempting to reply here (not sure if this goes to you!) because I’ve left a few comments on the blog since the transition to wordpress and they haven’t been published… maybe they got stuck in spam? Who knows! Anyway, wanted to try to let you know in case other comments are getting lost too!
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Weird!! I am definitely getting this one… I’m so sorry! I love comments and would be sad if any don’t get through! I have it set to automatízale approve “all” comments, so I’m not sure… I am going to investigate though! Please let me know if it ever happens again- thank you!!!
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Just checked my spam folder and had several from you!! Ugh!! So sorry! I replied back on those now 🙂 Thanks again for the heads up on this!
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Phew! Glad you found them!! I thought I was going crazy 🙂
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I LOVE THIS. What a brilliant use of this space.
I have done this at various times (with mixed success of sticking with it), but LOVE having a tracker.
Last year I “tracked” my mood by putting stickers on the days I had a low mood. It really helped me see patterns (especially hormonally), and it added a note of whimsy to a bad day. I would literally think on a terrible day: this DEFINITELY requires a sticker and it did add a bit of a light point to a dark day.
I started out tracking my mood every day in 2022, but it got to feel like too much, but I will make a note if I have an especially tough day. I also think my Line-a-Day journal has really helped as I now have a space to record the main highlights (or lowlights if they’re noteworthy) from the day and I do this like clockwork every evening before bed.
I do track lots of other things in the calendar view of my daytimer (mostly private stuff…but includes useful information like when my cycle starts/ends). That said, the only thing I record daily at this point is my exercise distance/workouts; if I do two walks and a run I record all this info. I don’t need to as I collate this at the end of every month into a spreadsheet, but it’s fun and I like having that column updated.
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Yes I track my mood and energy daily. I find it useful to reflect and see patterns. If I’m stressed out one week due to too much in my plate then I’ll try to schedule a freer week next to recoup. I also like to track my digestion, sleep, exercise, meditation, walk, etc. i find it useful to be able to find patterns and make changes.
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