{"id":3031,"date":"2011-07-09T00:18:20","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T16:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=3031"},"modified":"2025-03-13T09:29:58","modified_gmt":"2025-03-13T09:29:58","slug":"how-i-started-tracking-my-life-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2011\/07\/09\/how-i-started-tracking-my-life-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How I started tracking my life, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continuing where we left off from How I started tracking my life, Part 1<\/a>:<\/p>\n

You can see that I started with a monthly perspective, initially keeping track of my gym habit and notable occasions. I specifically made it a point to keep it fun<\/strong>, simple<\/strong> and sustainable<\/strong>– it didn’t feel like a lot of effort, and took less than a couple of minutes every other day. The most interesting thing is- once I started making an effort to keep track of interesting things, more interesting things started happening<\/em>. I unwittingly began to live my life with more focus and clarity, without even really trying.<\/p>\n

Here’s Week 15<\/a>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong> I created (n_n)\/ in this week, which would go on to become quite a big part of my life over the next 35 weeks. This was the first time I started keeping track of each day in greater detail- I started a new notebook, and allocated more space to each day. It’s a little bit messy. As usual, you can see… I’m not sleeping enough.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I still kept my monthly tracking, though, to get a sense of perspective of how each week measured up against the rest. Here’s weeks 15 to 19:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hearts represented days that I met my girlfriend, bolded squares are days that I worked out. Crosses represented mistakes or failings that I ought to learn from and avoid repeating. Zzz represented days that were ruined by bad sleeping habits. Mind you, I didn’t have any formalized legend or anything with a list of what the symbols mean- I made stuff up along the way, and I’m looking at them now and figuring them out along the way. By the way, I believe I drew this without using rulers! Over time my handwriting and penmanship got noticably more stable and consistent- again, without my conscious effort.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s Weeks 23 to 26: At first glance it might seem like a step backward- but it isn’t really. Remember, I’m keeping track of each individual week now, and it doesn’t make sense to have the same information repeated verbatim in two different places. So I focused on the details in my weekly analysis, and simplified my monthly analysis. By stripping it down to the bare minimum, I get a clearer big picture. <\/strong>I can refer to the specific weeks if I want to get the details. Although, to be honest, on hindsight I wish I had put in a little<\/em> more detail here- but I was experimenting, trying to find a balance between making it as simple and easy as possible and making it useful to me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s Week 36<\/a>: <\/strong><\/p>\n

This is still part of the same book as Week 15 earlier. You’ll notice I simplified “Mon, Tues” to “M, T”. I’m quite proud of little things like that- it’s less effort on my part, and more elegant to work with. I experimented with having missions or objectives, something that I think I ought to bring back. Oh, and I bought visakanv.com this week!<\/strong> \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here’s Weeks 35 to 39:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I quite like how things are getting around this time. Notice how even after 30 weeks of tracking and attempted self-improvement, I still get dizzy and dehydrated, I still spend days at a time being incredibly unproductive, and my fitness routines are far from stable or consistent. Oh, and I obviously used a ruler here. Freehand is fun for practice sake, but doesn’t allow you to squeeze in as much information. In case you’re wondering, the colours don’t really mean anything, I just work with whatever pens I have available to me. Perhaps I should begin colour-coding things.<\/strong> That’s a thought. Hmm.<\/p>\n

Here’s Week 49<\/a>: <\/strong>(I’ve started a new book, having exhausted the last one!)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I really, really like how my handwriting has evolved:<\/strong> I can now write in a much more “tight” manner, squeezing in a lot more information in much less space. There’s a lot more rhythm. I feel like it’s a manifestation of something a bit more profound, a sort of deeper understanding of context and expression. Figuring out how to put it into words is a task for another day.<\/p>\n

I also keep track of things at other levels- here’s a week-by-week summary!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Needless to say, I’m going to have a lot of fun analysing all this information at the end of The 90 Week Project<\/a>. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continuing where we left off from How I started tracking my life, Part 1: You can see that I started with a monthly perspective, initially keeping track of my gym habit and notable occasions. I specifically made it a point to keep it fun, simple and sustainable– it didn’t feel… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,23],"tags":[818,817],"class_list":["post-3031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-reflections","tag-90weeks","tag-legion"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-MT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9337,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3031\/revisions\/9337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}