Transcription
This Is The Life tracker system, a journaling method to help you track your habits and goals, capture your thoughts and ideas, and make it easy for you to reflect on the highlights of your life. It's a journaling method not primarily based for planning, productivity, or complex spreads, but instead is something super simple to set up, takes maybe a few minutes, and is what I found to be the most sustainable form of journaling. Personally, I've been doing this for 6 years now and I've just started my seventh journal. I like to get a new journal every year on my birthday. That way, I can easily just pull off a journal to see what I was thinking at any given age. I find it to be super fulfilling to look back and see what I was focused on and what I was doing on any given day, and it's also helped me be more consistent with my habits and achieve all my goals.
As someone who makes videos about different ways to optimize your life, I found that journaling is consistently one of the best ways to really analyze and improve your life on a monthly or even a daily basis. So, I've made a few videos about different parts of the life track system in the past, but in this video, I want to give a complete overview and breakdown of the life tracker system, which is segmented into four parts: track, reflect, apply, and capture.
Here's an overview of the life tracker system. You have a monthly page, which is two pages long. On the left, you can write down the highlights of the day and also track your habits here. Personally, I find that it's super satisfying to keep a physical written and streak-like compared to different apps that I use. I still come back to just tracking my habits on an analog medium. It also keeps me focused because I can't have like a million different habits here, so every month I'm only focused on three or at most four of the most important habits of that month. It's super customizable. You can have habits that you check off, or you can also draw a line to fill out a number, like for example, a sleep score or your weight. On the right, you can write your monthly goals on the top, and on the bottom, you can write your reflections based on the previous month, but I'll get more into that later.
Then, after the monthly page, you have your journal entries. And journal entries follow a pretty simple format as well. So, you have your date, day of the week, and time. And below that, you have a prompt or question that you're trying to answer. For me, most of my journal entries are about reflections of the past, of how I can improve, um, reflecting on my different goals, or what I like to do better in the next month. But they can really depend on what you're interested in or what you're thinking about. A lot of times, I like to think out on paper too when I have some ideas or if I feel like I don't have a lot of clarity. Journaling, especially really focused journaling where I write down specifically what I'm writing about, has been super helpful in helping me think clearly and overall just reduce any sort of anxiety. And I will say, they also don't even have to be journal entries either. Like, sometimes I like to just doodle. Um, I'm not an artist, but you can see like, sometimes I draw here, sometimes I graph out some of the data from my habits to see if there are any other correlations, or if I'm taking notes on something and I really want to capture that for the future, then I'll write it in this notebook. But it's really up to you how creative you want to be here. My favorite notebook is the Lamy, which is a a German notebook, and I find this to be the perfect size and weight for this system. It's 260 pages and I use one notebook per year, which I think fits perfectly.
But now I want to get into the four parts of the life tracker system. So, starting with the first part, track. One of the key characteristics of the life track system is this monthly page, which is two pages long. Initially, this was inspired by the bullet journaling system. But the difference between the life track system and the bullet journaling method is that the bullet journaling method is a productivity system to help you plan for the future, for events that are coming up, or to-dos that are coming up. Whereas this is to track your highlights and track the habits that you have done or already accomplished. So, I would say that the bullet journal system is fundamentally just a productivity system, whereas the life track system is one for self-optimization and fulfillment.
So, on the left, you have the days of the week and the dates, and then in the middle, you write down daily highlights. So, for me, I like to write down something that made that day memorable, like maybe hanging out with a friend or going to a concert, something that makes it easy to reflect on that day, something that made that day remarkable. And then on the right, you have your habits. So, I usually just like to track maybe three or four different habits. I find that that's kind of the sweet spot for the most amount of focus, so I'm not having like a million different habits I want to track or just one, which might be too easy. One distinction I like to make with habits is that I don't just track the habits I I want to do every day or I want to avoid doing every day. There are also some habits that I just track to see how frequently I'm doing them throughout the month. So, they could be things like how much caffeine I'm drinking, or if I'm drinking alcohol, and I can easily see the correlation between that and my weight or my sleep. Sleep, and it's really nice to be able to see everything on a one-pager. Maybe you'll find that generally you're happier, or you're more social when you drink coffee every day, or um, your sleep score is worse when you drink alcohol. I mean, these are pretty obvious things, but you could see some correlations that you otherwise wouldn't see by tracking it in a format like this.
And on the right side of the page, I like to have goals and some reflection for the month. So, for the goals, I found that it's best to have it in a checkbox form. And the reason for this is because to fulfill something called SMART goals, which is a goal-making framework. So, a lot of times we make goals that are a little bit too vague or too lofty, and it's really hard to achieve. And the benefit of writing a goal in a way where you can just check it off once you have accomplished it is that it makes it something very specific and realistic for you to achieve in the month. So, rather than having a goal that's something like, "become super fit," which is really hard to check off, you could have a goal like, "work out 20 times this month," and check it off once you've reached it. I think even compared to yearly goals, having monthly goals that you are trying to achieve at the end of the month make it so that you break down a really lofty goal into smaller parts, and it makes it more attainable and more realistic.
Below the goals for the month is a reflection for the month. And this leads me to the next part of the life tracking system, which is reflect. So, after you've been tracking your highlights, habits, and goals for a while, you'll find that it's really easy to reflect on to see where you could have improved, or if there's anything you want to change for the next month. I also think it's super cool and fulfilling. I like to look back and see the different things I was doing and whether or not I was consistent with my habits and goals. So, below the goals is when I'll reflect on what I should do for this month. So, it's kind of like a game plan, and it's usually just one or two different paragraphs. So, it could be the main focus for this month, or what I want to prioritize for this month. Also, I will say that not everything has to be productivity-oriented. That just really depends on what you're focused on and your personality type. Like for me, I just find it to be the most fun to kind of see my life as a video game, to see where I can improve different metrics and minimax different areas of my life. And once you're done with this, you basically have a nice one-pager for your month that you can flip back at any time, no matter what age you are, to see what you were focused on in this year, in this month of your life, which I think is really cool.
A lot of times when you're just living day-to-day, you're not really thinking about how you're spending each day, or whether or not you're actually making progress toward your goals. It's really easy to lose sight and have a lot of blind spots and just really lose track of time. So, these first two steps of tracking and reflecting, I find is really useful in becoming more mindful of how you're living day-to-day. You can also expand more on your reflection in the next few pages of your journal as a full-on journal entry. I also compiled 100 of my favorite journaling prompts, which is on sale on my website in a Notion template, if you want to check that out. I'll link it in the description.
So, the third part of the life track system is to apply changes. As you write the monthly page for the next month, you really want to look back on all of your entries and your habits to apply changes based on your reflections. That could mean entirely new habits and new goals for the month, or it can mean the same habits and the same goals, but you're going to implement a completely new system to help you achieve them better. Like I said earlier, it doesn't always have to be super productivity or optimization-oriented. Like, you could use the habit tracking template to remind yourself to call your parents more often, or hang out with friends more often. It all really just depends on what you want to focus on. The life tracker system is meant to be adaptable for anyone, and at its core, it's just a way to track and optimize your life. For me, tracking my life and applying changes is really motivating for me because I can actually have empirical data to show that I'm improving over time. For example, when I studied Japanese, one of the core habits I had for nearly 3 years was to add 10 new words to my flashcard deck every day and learn them. Even though the habit was really simple and it didn't even really take that long, it resulted in massive progress in the language, including fluency, in just one year. I never had to question myself whether or not I was improving because I could always see that I learned 10 new words at in know the day before.
And as you track, reflect, and apply changes, sometimes in some months, you'll notice that you're way too ambitious with your goals and habits, and in other months, you could be way too laxed. If you do find that you set habits and goals and you're not really hitting them consistently, I would recommend dialing back down until you find a sweet spot that is sustainable for you. In the book Atomic Habits, the author James Clear talks about a habit-setting framework, and he says that if, for example, you wanted to set a goal to run every day, actually having the habit be "run every day" can be really daunting and lead you to skip the workout. But instead, it might be better to set a goal like, "put on your running shoes every day," and make it a habit to just check that off. Most of the time, if you put on your running shoes, you'll probably go for a run anyway, and having this sort of really easy habit that you can check off really sets you on a positive spiral upwards. If you've never read that book, I would highly recommend it. And the beauty of the life tracker system is that it incorporates almost all the habit and goal-setting frameworks naturally into the monthly page.
But the last part of the life tracker system is capture, which is short for capturing your thoughts, ideas, and random bursts of creativity throughout the month. This is actually what the majority of your journal will be. So, for me, I use a 260-page journal, and the monthly page only takes up 24 pages out of that. So, the other 230 or so pages are purely just reflections and random bursts of creativity. It might seem like a lot to fill up an entire journal, but it's really only about 15 to 20 pages a month. So, even if you're journaling like once a week, or once or twice a week, you will probably be able to fill an entire journal in a year. So, during the month, I like to capture different ideas that I'm having, debates I've had with other people, or even just random bursts of creativity like doodles, or sometimes I write down different guitar riffs that I come up with. It really depends on yourself, but I would encourage you to be as creative as possible and to use your journal as an outlet so that it makes it more fulfilling to reflect on in the future. Sometimes I put in Polaroids when I have them, or different concert tickets in between the months, so that it's easy to reflect on.
One of the most amazing things about journaling with pencil and paper is that it forces you to lay out your thoughts and to think clearly. Compared to journaling on a computer, you can't easily delete paragraphs or move stuff around, so you'll learn to structure your thoughts clearly, and as you read through them, you also learn how to write in a more readable way. I think it's really interesting to flip back on my old journals and see how some views that I had that were really strong have just slowly changed over time and have completely dropped them. And it's really interesting to kind of capture the human experience into to just a journal. I think when you finish your first journal and you look back, this will probably be one of the most fulfilling and most prized possessions that you own. Imagine being 80 years old and having a bookshelf of notebooks, each one for a different year of your life, and being able to pull it out and see exactly what you're thinking, what you're focused on, or different highlights of any vacation trip, and any part of your life.
If you get the Lamy, which I highly recommend, on the back, there's also a pocket for stuff like letters, concert tickets, receipts, or Polaroids, and it's really an easy way to hold on to and capture different things that you have. I've been doing this for 6 years now, and this is my seventh notebook. The only regret that I have is that I didn't start sooner. I started when I was age 20. So, if you're watching this and you're thinking about starting journaling, I would highly suggest you to just buy a notebook, put it on your desk, and just get started. I think you'll find that just having it there will encourage you to journal more often, and before you know it, you'll have a journal filled with ideas, thoughts, and different highlights of your entire year.
But that's it for this video. If you want more tips on the life tracker system, you can check out the life tracker system ebook, which is on sale until the end of the month. It has detailed scans of my journals, tips I've found for habit tracking, goal tracking, and different templates that you can use in your journal. It helps support the channel and helps me make better videos. But if not, let me know what you think, and if you have any other questions with journaling, just leave them down below. I'll try to reply to every single comment. But that's it for this video. I'll see you soon. Let's good.
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