How To Start Journaling With The Life Tracker System (Beginner's Guide)

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 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 a analog medium it also keeps me focused because I can't have like a million different habits here so every month I'm only focus 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 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

Loy term which is a a German notebook and I find this to be the perfect size and weight for this system it's 260 pages on s 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 are coming up or

to-dos 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 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 reach that 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 habit 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 dayto day you can also expand more on your reflection in the next few pages of your Journal as a fullon 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 in the 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 flash card 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 to 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 CLE 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 up on your

running shoes every day and make it 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 they 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 Rifts 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 Force 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 Loy term 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 a 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 live 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 [Music]