I've been journaling for a hot minute. If I cared enough* I would go take a pic or two of all my old paper ones. But mid last year I decided to go digital and bought a ReMarkable2 and took my journaling online. I did it for reasons that will probably make some of you think I am actually Patrick Bateman, but hopefully after this I think* it'll make more sense. One of my weekly tasks is to wipe the previous 7 days of journaling, so just assume for now that this works (because it has for going on a year). I load 7 versions of the same 3 page PDF into my ReMarkable tablet, one for each day of the week.
First off, I am no therapist. But I do see one monthly (suggest you do the same if you can find the means to do it. If you cannot, there are lots of free ways to get close and if you are in a position to need to know about that - please do reach out). Anyway, my daily routine is an adaptation of CBT (new window). I basically want to do 3 main things (in order of how they show up, not importance):
Rate myself in some important categories. Page 1 is a simple box that has 6 columns: the thing to rate and then a 0,2,4,6,8,10 place to scribble how I feel like I did. There are 7 rows I rate myself on: (CBT to start) thoughts, feelings, behaviors, [then] balance, spirit, diet, and routine (if you came from daily, you know routine has some feelings behind it. The nice thing about ReMarkable is that you can do whatever you want on top of a PDF - so you can scribble as you see fit. See notes after the next 2 sections.
Suss out my thoughts/feelings/behaviors. These are kind of the base principles of CBT - your thoughts inform your feelings, which inform your behaviors, which inform your thoughts. I like it - it's not a hammer I wield looking for nails, but it is personally helpful to see how these are in fact tightly coupled. After all, the only person in your head...is you.
Make notes about my day, be thankful, and acknowledge God. I added this later. Notes is just a nice way to sprawl out what happened since I last journaled, and what I expect. I have a spot specifically to be thankful: can be mundane in that I had a road trip without incident, or more profound. I also have a spot where I imagine what it would be like if I had a talk with God. Sometimes God is talking and something God is listening.
When I am done I email this to myself...but by myself I mean Postmark (a transactional email service) so it ends up processing in an interesting way. This has been, to date, my most recent change. Most of this step is just archiving: I convert the first page into actual data and then just store the journal. Maybe one day AI will be able to actually read my handwriting. But the interesting part is the next part...
I decided to try to determine if a day was a success or not. I defined that as the following: by default the day is a success - however it is not if either of the following are true. If any of those 7 rows are a 4 or less, that is a failure. Also if the average of all 7 rows is less than an 8, that is a failure. Now, what does a failure mean? Jack shit**. Honestly - like I picked 7 things and only a couple can I fully control. BUT, I then pivoted to scan the rolling previous month and if we had more than 20% failures - that in fact is a problem. That means there is enough of an issue where the thing(s) I want to do are not happening, and we need to figure out why. So now that issues a command that I must take a day off from work to reset.
I also, which hopefully is not too surprising, having a metabase (a data reporting tool) that sits on top of all of this data. This makes querying and alterting easier. Like most people I went too hard in the paint at first: I tried to store all my Apple health data - all the data. I feel good about the current state of affairs.
*I don't
**cursing again, shit
If you came here from my daily routine, then head next to weekly via: https://blog.therosebunch.com/weekly-biweekly
Hello there - glad (why?) are you still here? At least things get easier (until we get to annual stuff). So this runs on Sundays at 6am.
So weekly is interesting - lets split this into cleanup and planning.
Cleanup. This is that weekly part where we clean up 'Done', send a brief email, and basically Wall-E this thing.
Planning. This part is a little more interesting. [to do is fill this out]