This Is The Life tracker system on the left you have the date the highlight of what you did a habit tracker and a metric tracker on the right you have your goal for the month and then after this you have one of the most powerful and also underrated things that you can do is actually journaling and today I want to share with you my journaling system which I call the life tracker method it's a modification I made to the bullet Journal method to optimize and track my life I believe it's one of the lowest friction
ways that you can start journaling and I've been doing this for the past 6 years I filled five journals I buy a new one every single year and I've been doing this since I was age 20 there's just something about a physical Journal that really captures the essence of that time I've tried using a bunch of different apps and digital ways of journaling and documenting my life but I always just come back to using pencil and Pen I'm going to show you the system that I came up with to track things like my sleep my
weight uh different habits even the books that I'm reading but before we get into that let me talk about my favorite Journal brand that I actually use yeah so I've tested a lot of different Journal Brands and I think the best one for my usage and for what I'm using it for is this brand called Le term 1917 I'm not actually sure how to pronounce it I think it's a German word but it's Le l l e u c h t t u r m there's a bunch of different version it comes in like either
Grid or dotted and my favorite one is either a dotted one or a grid one and the reason for that is just because it's more modular when you have a grid or dotted like you can draw different diagrams you can capture a lot of different stuff I'm going to show you some of the stuff I've captured at the court of the system every month I have a monthly page that is two pages so I write the month on the left and the month on the right so I'll just show you I'm going to create January's
page and then I'll have the numbered dates 1 2 3 four five 6 7 8 30 31 so I'll have the dates of January here on the left side and I also put in an abbreviation for the day so Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and then on the left side here I'll have different metrics and habits I want to track so for example right now I'm on a cut so I'll track my weight every day so I just put in like pounds here and I'll draw a line and then I can see my progress over different
days and what I'll often do too is I'll track like two or three different habits okay so now we have three rows that we can use for tracking habits so I'll just do one is like caffeine maybe like workout and then meditation so if I drink caffeine I'll just color it in and if I skip my workout I'll just draw an X and I'll skip my if I skip my meditation I'll draw an X and it's really cool because at the end of the month you can just see how consistent you are with your habits
and you can see how that correlates to any other metrics that your track so for a while I also track my sleep times like I tracked when I went to bed when I woke up and that actually became like two whole pages but now I'm just tracking my weight and a caffeine usage workout meditation so like if I'm only drinking caffeine every other day then maybe the next day it's like this and the next day I'm like that and then on the left side here I will write down the highlight of that day like what
made that day memorable like it could be like I ran 10 miles or I had a PR or I just uploaded a video but the point of this left side is just to kind of document the main highlight of that day so that if I read it I can kind of see like oh that's that's the day that I did that so like like hung out with friends this is pretty much it for the left side of the monthly page and then the next month I do this again and now I know like maybe I
need to change my habits or I need to do a new strategy for these habits so this is a really effective way to really make sure that you are consistent with your habits and also thinking about how to optimize for them so on the right side of the month of P share usually I'll write down some of my goals for this month or some of the things I want to get accomplished I don't use my journal as a to-do list but I just use it to kind of track like what I'm doing what I'm thinking
and some of the things I'm working on so I might have like you know read five books and then maybe I have the books here 1 2 3 four five and I'll write like so yeah super simple just like something I want to keep in mind for the whole month it could also just be reminders or like trips coming up like once you actually start doing this and if you're like me you start actually doing this for multiple years it's really interesting because I can flip back to Any Given month in the past 5 years
and you're going see like on every single day like what is the highlight of that day did I follow through my habits on that day and what were my goals on that year and that that date so this is like the easiest way to journal because rather than actually journaling every single day like what you did everything you did you're only journaling like one single line and also tracking like whether or not you hit your habits but after you set up this page this is the page that I go to every single day in the
morning or at night when I'm updating it sometimes if I don't update it like for a week is totally fine too cuz I can usually just think about like what I accomplished over the week so while you probably have your yearly goals or your decade long goals that you're working on these are just like monthly mini goals or like mini challenges that you want to try out and you can kind of like document your experience kind of like a experiment log or a laboratory Journal so a lot of times I'll do like 30-day challenges like
not for YouTube but like just for myself I'll do a 30-day challenge here and I'll track it and then I'll like Journal about like my experience with doing that so after I set up the monthly page I'll usually have individual entries whenever I feel like journaling or there's something that I want to think about on paper and how I do that is that I'll just write like the date and then I'll write the time the beauty of a analog Journal is that it can really be any format that you want so sometimes I'll be like
drawing a diagram or for an idea that I have definitely the coolest thing is just being able to look back on any given date or year and see what you were thinking about what kind of decisions you were trying to weigh and it really helps with increasing your mental Clarity reducing anxiety and just being able to optimize your life further it doesn't even have to be individual entries like sometimes I'll be summarizing a book that I read or capturing things that I've learned because this journaling system is really inspired by Leonardo da Vinci he's really
known for his journals where he like writes down his observations or things that he's studying and it's really interesting even now to look at some of the things that he was thinking about or some of the things that he was studying I think Bill Gates previously bought one of his journals for like $30 million and you can create something like that for yourself too I also don't force myself to journal every day or even try to make it a habit I just write down stuff whenever some new thought comes to me or I just want
to capture some sort of thing that I learned the monthly page is the only thing I try to update every single day but even if I missed a couple days it's still totally fine cuz I can go back and think about what I did on that day and then fill it out I don't want to show the actual entries but I want to show like some of the things that I've captured in my journal so like like here's like an energy graph where I was like starting how I use my time and I noticed that
I had this like different Peaks and troughs throughout the day and I kind of like graph this out that is an interesting thing just for myself to look at yeah here in July of 2021 I wrote down so my goal is like read four books like do this new workout plan sometimes I just Doodle for fun in my journals um here I actually like grafted out my sleep for I think this must be like around almost a month I grafted out my sleep like when I was going bed and when I was waking up and
it was just really interesting to see like this kind of correlation based on like how much coffee I was drinking let me see what else sometimes I just like Journal stuff just so I can document it and record it for the future cuz I know like sometime in the future I'll look back and I'll be like nostalgic of this information here I tracked like how many steps I was taking for a vacation to Japan and I wrote down like what I did every day um so you can see how many steps and I also like
even tracked my time on the trip so I can see see like it's been like 150 hours sleeping like 23 hours exercising I still hit the gym oh here I have a immersion tracker so this is also when I was studying Japanese I tracked like how many hours I was spending on the language every day and you can see like on average I spending like almost 3 hours for these three weeks I was tracking it yeah I track down like guitar uh riffs that I learned I also have some piano notes sometimes when I I
finish a book that I think is really good I'll also like write a one pager of everything I learned and also just different quotes um from there so this is after I finish the book 0 to1 I wrote down like a one pager of like some of the most impactful things that I learned from there I developed the system during college when I wanted to find a way to capture not just the ideas I was having but also a way to capture what I was actually doing dayto day so that I could just look back
on it I realized how fleeting and unreliable my memory was and I was also really overwhelmed was trying to find the best allinone app that could help me capture everything that I cared about at some point I realized that an app like that will probably never exist because my interest will constantly change and so the formats of my pages will never be the same year to year or even month to month like sometimes I have piano or guitar notation other times I'll have a doodle or some sort of diagram that I'm drawing I would say
if you're going to start journaling definitely don't worry about it if you're not doing it every day just keep the journal around do the monthly pages and in between the months you can add in different journal entries or just take notes on things that you are interested in but I also want to talk about another benefit of journaling and using this tracker method which is that it can enable you to achieve any goal that you set your mind to one of the most effective ways to set goals and Achieve them is simply to track the
progress of your goals over time the more metrics that you track the easier it is to quantify and improve and even though a lot of the metrics I'm tracking digitally like how I'm spending all time or what my weight is and how many steps I took I'm actually transferring that to my journal so I can flip to any month and see all these different metrics I'm tracking when you don't do self introspection or document the reality of your habits and actions it's really easy to just forget about them and move on to the next month
but when you just document them and write them down in a physical place you become more conscious of them and following through with your goals become way easier like I found that there's a huge difference between just stepping on the scale versus stepping on the scale and then copying that number onto a journal it's also really interesting to see how I track different metrics throughout different ages like one year I tracked my net worth super closely every single month and in the past year I've been super interested in tracking my fitness and health metrics and
seeing correlations there here I actually tracked my wake time sleep time and the steps I was taking every day and I intend on doing this forever I want to have a notebook for every year of my life so I can just pull a journal off the bookshelf and see what I was thinking at age 25 35 or even 50 my only regret is that I didn't start this earlier before the age of 20 so if you're considering journaling this year I would highly recommend it and even if you don't know how consistent you'll be with
it just buy a notebook put on your table and just write in it until you finish it hope this journaling method can help you optimize your life I'll see you in the next one [Music] peace
