I journaled every day for 6 years. Here's what I learned

this is called the life tracker system for journaling and setting goals you have your daily highlights habits and metrics on the left and on the right you have the goals that you would like to achieve for the month so previously I made a video about the life tracker system for journaling that you guys really enjoyed but in this video I wanted to go a little bit more in depth and make a full guide to journaling as requested I want to talk about the underrated benefits of journaling this way how to actually use this system to

achieve your goals the best way to be consistent with journaling and also how you can get started immediately but before I get into the video I also want to quick talk about the life tracker ebook which I've been working on you can check it out on my website but I've included easy to copy templates to track your life scans for my journal and also a in-depth journaling guide I'm making it 50% off until the end of April so definitely go check it out it helps support the channel link is in the description if you haven't

seen the previous video I'll just give you a basic rundown of what the life tracker system is so every month you have a monthly page where on the left you write down your daily highlights of what made that day memorable and you also have certain habits that your track and metrics so here I just have three different habits and also a place where you can write down your daily weight this is just the template that I use and on the right you set the goals that you want for the month and I'm going to go

a little bit more in depth and explain how you can actually set goals with this method in between the monthly pages on the back you have your entries of different ideas and thoughts that you have and when the new month rolls around then you make another page and that's basically the core of the system but it's really powerful if you follow these steps in this video so first I wanted to share some of the underrated benefits of actually journaling with this method in the previous video I talked about how the life tracker system is the

best way that I found to be able to track and optimize my life because it's completely modular it's chronological and you only capture the things that you care about month-to month but there's actually two underrated benefits of journaling that I don't really talked about in the last video and the first one is that when you actually write entries you learn how to articulate your thoughts better and actually think clearly so one of the reasons I wanted to start a journal in the first place when I was age 20 is because I started to realize how

fleeting my thoughts were and how often I would actually change my mind like I would have really strongly held beliefs that would become loosely held a couple months later and I kind of wanted to really see what was going on and capture that and the more I journaled and the more I went back and actually read my old entries the more I realized different cognitive biases I was having and the more I learned to actually think critically it definitely made me way better at articulating my thoughts because I was actually having the practice of putting

it down on paper and articulating myself in a different way and the second under benefit that I noticed with journaling is that it also gives you so much better resilience and ability to deal with any situation like in some of my old entries there were times where I felt really trapped or even unhappy with my current situation but when I look back on it now I realized how stupid or dumb I was so in a way the more you journal and the more you go back and read your old entries the more you realize that

you can really get out of any situation and your mind is actually really adaptable to different environments every hard moment in your life when captured on your Journal only become more interesting character developments of your own story and I think one of the best ways to actually develop yourself is to set and Achieve goals which is the next thing I want to talk about how to actually achieve our your goals with this method of journaling if you're familiar with bullet Journal method the life tracker system is heavily inspired by that but the reason why I

think it's really different from the bullet Journal method is that the bull Jour method is a way to track the future which is to write down your todos upcoming events and things that you are planning on doing but the life tracker system is a way to journal to track the things that already happened and how far you've made on the goals that you have set for yourself and personally journaling only became really consistent and easy for me once I started to follow this method because there was no anxiety about planning out my journal or trying

to write down different to-dos and carrying my journal around and I think that's how you should approach journaling you have to make it easy and frictionless which I'll talk about in the next part but first I want to talk about how to use this method to set and Achieve goals easily so you've probably heard of smart goals which if you haven't it's a framework to set goals efficiently and it's to make your goals specific measurable actionable realistic and time bound it's definitely a lot to remember to think about but the beauty of tracking goals with

this method I'm going to show you is that it automatically makes your goals into that framework so if you look right here on your monthly page every month you have your daily habits here and you have your daily highlights here but on the right you have your monthly goals and maybe oneoff habits for example this could be things like read books and you have two check boxes that you need to fill out or post four videos and you just draw out the number of videos or number of times you want to finish that task so

for example like work workout here is like 20 sessions so I just draw out a cluster of checkboxes that I take off and fill in every time I finish that so yeah like if I post this video then I can fill this in and at the end of the month when I go and see how much how much progress I made I could be like okay I skipped you know I skipped one video right here and I posted three videos and the same for working out these on here are things that you just want to

do one time it's not like a to-do list but more like something that you want achieve for the month so it's like maybe join a run club or hit a PR in the gym and you could easily just check that off or say that you skipped it and at the bottom sometimes I'll write a paragraph of some Reflection from the last month and some things I want to change by having the check boox you Ensure your goals that you set for the month are actually specific measurable actionable realistic and also time bound because you have

to finish it within the month so it's the perfect way to track and analyze your goals in my opinion setting monthly goals are actually more powerful than setting yearly goals because often times when you set a yearly goal it's a little bit too vague and it might be too lofty for you to actually know what to do like for example you might set a goal that is like save $100,000 but that's actually kind of vague of how you can actually get there when you actually put it into your monthly goal then you can write like

get one client or save 20% of your paycheck into a savings account this month and that can be really easy things that you check off to ensure that you're making progress on your longer term goals with this method of setting achieving goals first you're forcing yourself to be more actionable in breaking down your goals into actional steps that you can actually finish within the month and two you're actually reflecting every month to see how much progress you made on your goals last month and you can adjust your goals for this month like for example if

you set a go to read four books last month and you only read zero books then maybe you should set your goal to be one book so that you can actually get started and I will say sometimes you should set goals just for fun like not necessarily for personal growth or development but just things that you actually want to do like it could be watch a new movie every single week or go to a new restaurant and that could be just something you do like once a month or a couple times a month that you

check off I think stuff like that makes journaling and setting goals more fun because it's all just mixed in there and if you're new to journaling I also want to share how to actually be consistent with journaling because that's like something I struggled with in the beginning before I actually developed this system the biggest tip that I have to actually Journal consistently is to not give yourself any pressure to journal every day you want to make your Journal something that is fun and not something that you're forced to check in with or write every single

day the mistake that I see is that people often make it a hard commitment like I'm going to journal every single day which might just lead to burning out in my opinion I don't think you should try to make it a daily Habit to write entries every single day but you should make it a daily Habit to just track some part of your life that you care about like something that literally takes 10 to 20 seconds to write down like your weight or whether or not you accomplish your habits or even just like what is

the main thing that you did for that day and if you journal in that way it doesn't really matter if you miss journaling today or tomorrow because they are simple enough that you can actually just go back and fill it in if you missed it for a couple of days or if you went on a trip and you didn't even bring your journal with you this is kind of like a scientific journal where you are measuring yourself and making modifications which I think is really cool I think when you force yourself to write entries when

you don't really feel like it you end up writing really crappy entries that isn't really worth reading later on that's why I don't really advocate for writing daily diary entries in your Journal because it's going to become pretty repetitive and not super readable the idea is to only write interesting things when they come to you so that you actually want to go back and read them later on but that isn't to say to not write any entries at all because I do have pages and pages of different thoughts and ideas that I have written down

the difference is that I only write when I have some sort of inspiration like if I'm trying to think out a problem make a decision or even just capture how it's feeling at a particular moment I also use my journal to take notes on different things that I learn and things that I care about but I'm going to say that for a different video if you're interested in my note taking system the mistake I see people make with the bullet Journal method and why I don't consider this to be part of the bullet Journal method

is that I see a lot of people spending large amounts of time customizing your Journal decorating it and planning out events of months way ahead of time and I have tried that before but in my experience it just creates so much friction about journaling and I end up not not folling through and continuing with this method you literally do not have to subscribe to any newsletter or buy any type of course because you're going to be customizing your journal to the things that you care about every single month and year but if you want to

check out some of the templates that I've come up with after 6 years of journaling for some inspiration or you just want to see some detailed scans of my journal then definitely go check out my ebook that I mentioned earlier which is on my website but yeah I think coming up with very simple templates that you often use for tracking different things that you care about is actually pretty helpful just having pages that you personally want to fill out and things that you want to track like almost like a scientific journal makes it more fun

to actually open your Journal up and fill it out once you have simple templates that you've created in your Journal of things that you want to track and see the progress of it actually makes it fun to open up a journal and you'll naturally be drawn to opening up your Journal like it could be things like tracking your sleep your caffeine usage or even your distractions like I mentioned in a different video the rule for me is that I only track things that I want to see the progress of and things that I've already done

I also keep my temp as simple as possible with no decorations or stylizations because it's literally a utility type of template to track the progress of things and even if you come with some template of something that you want to track for the month and you end up losing interest in it I think it's totally fine to just abandon it immediately because each page that you write in your Journal is capturing some thought or idea of some inspiration that you had so even if you abandon a page that's still something that is interesting to look

at of why you abandoned tracking something that you cared about at one point lastly I want to talk about how you can get started with journaling immediately so I would just suggest that you get a journal that you like the form factor of and then just commit to using it until you fill it up completely like it might take a year or even longer for your first Journal but you'll find that as soon as you finished one journal and it's completely filled with your most interesting thoughts and ideas and things that you care about that

you tracked you'll be so inspired to start another journal and that journal you'll be way more consistent with if you don't know which journal to get I suggest you get the ly term 1917 I I didn't know how to pronounce this company in the last video but because of the comments I know how to pronounce it now and I was suggested you get the grid one because it already has the check boxes written in there for you personally I get a new journal every year on my birthday and I try to fit everything within the

260 or so pages that way I can easily label each Journal my birthday year like this one right here is like 26 that right right on the top and it's really cool to have on a shelf because each Journal is a perfect encapsulation of everything that I cared about and everything that happened that year but yeah that's it if you want a even more in-depth walk through has my journal and also templates that I use then definitely check out the ebook in the description it's the only product I sell and it helps support this channel

that's it for this video try it out let me know what you think in the comments and I'll see you in the next video Let's Get [Music] It