It is the time of year when I have both updated my tracking plans for the year, and can actually post about them.
I don’t have a lot of changes from last year in terms of the overall system (a journal in which I do a weekly layout to help me see what’s coming up, daily notes in Obsidian, and a tracking spreadsheet to rule them all…)
And even the spreadsheet is mostly the same.
In other words, go look at last year’s posts for the details.
However, I did want to highlight a couple of spreadsheet changes in case they’re useful for anyone else.
Summary sheet
Here’s my summary sheet for the year. (As you can see, my word of the year is “enough”, with some images that relate to that in my head.
The lefthand columns are the date, then there’s a column for the total (colour coded by how that fits into a range from “awful” to “lean back”. The total for the year is reflected in the top bar of the page. (This year, I’ve got 25 days that are Miserable, Poor, or Fair, and all the others are Good or better, which is great.)
“Lean Back” is a category for “You did a whole lot today, maybe take it a bit easier tomorrow.” (In and of itself, a day or two of this is fine for me right now, but I want to make sure I’m not there for days at a time, that’s going to have consequences I don’t like.)
The next four columns are for a qualitative analysis of how I felt (focus, energy/will, emotions, and physically). From there, we have the current astrological signs for the moon phase, and the seven visible planets.
After that, how much ritual work did I do (usually a fraction, for my morning ritual, but one or two days a week there’s more), the song of the day, the Tarot draw for the day.
Then we come to columns for doing (how many words did I write, how many things did I do), activity (time), quality of sleep (percentage, from my sleep app), and my ahi (CPAP machine).
Then we have a new added column, “strain” which is drawn from the Body sheet, so I’ll explain it there. Finally, there’s a note for if I was sick or had something else unusual.
Body sheet
Here’s my body sheet, which tracks all the physical things. During 2022, I had to start tracking blood sugar readings (twice a day) and paying attention to the number of carbs in my diet. (I resent this, and also it’s helping, so here we are.) I stuck 2022’s data on a separate sheet, but for 2023, I integrated it into the body sheet.
The top of the sheet has space for a summary by month, so I can see what’s going on in each month (and some of that is data various of my doctors would like handy.) In the middle are the six lines for the months (first half of the year on the left, second half of the year on the right.)
The summary includes:
- Strain
- Total movement/activity
- Exercise time in specific
- Sleep amount
- Sleep quality
- AHI (CPAP, again)
- Morning blood sugar (first thing)
- Evening blood sugar (two hours after eating)
- Average carbs for the day, over the month
In the middle are blocks for the number of miles a day I’m averaging walking.
The bulk of the sheet breaks this down into more detail.
Excercise and physical movement in summary: total, minutes of activity, minutes of exercise.
Column that summarises the strain. (Keep reading a little more). This is colour coded when there’s information there so I can see at a glance what’s going on.
Detailed exercise information. I’m trying to get more strength exercise going, and I’d like to track stretching, and both of these track by minutes, but don’t produce steps on my pedometer app the same way. So the sheet takes these, multiplies them by an appropriate step multiplier, and will add them to my total. (Home is the same thing, it counts minutes of things like house cleaning or ritual setup when my phone is set down somewhere so I can listen to it while I’m doing things.)
Tracking is where I put the steps from my tracking app, then the miles adds those to the step calculations and gives me a total for the day that I can then put into my walking challenge app.
Sleep and blood sugar are already largely explained. The blood sugar entries will colour themselves according to whether I’m hitting my targets.
Out is because going out is still unduly tiring for me. This year’s categories of out include commuting to work, medical appointments, errands, and social outings. (Work counts as 1, commuting both ways, as do single runs of errands, even if I stop in two places. Otherwise it’s add one per outing on a day.)
Strain: One thing I’d like to track this year better is what’s going on with my body. So these entries are checkboxes I can tick if:
- I had allergy shots that day (Great, but they make my body deal with them. Same deal with vaccinations in general.)
- If one of my autoimmune things is flaring enough it’s affecting daily life.
- Migraine, with two boxes, one for “I notice I have this, it’s not affecting me a lot” and one for “more” (probably self-explanatory)
- If I’m actually sick with something
- And if I have my period
The strain calculation also looks at if my blood sugar numbers are above my target, and adds a point if each reading is. (So the total number of possible points is 7. It’s very unlikely all those things would happen at once, though!) This total is also on the main summary sheet, so I can more easily do things like “Oh, I didn’t get a lot done, well, duh, I felt lousy”, and also let me catch the feeling lousy patterns as fast as possible so I can make adjustments.
Doing sheet
Here’s where I track what I’ve done in a day. This is roughly the same as last year, but I’ve rearranged the order and added ticky boxes. (Who doesn’t like ticky boxes?) Why the order? I wanted the colours in a pleasing array.
The date, the grand total, then the summary by planet (which is how I organise them). I usually track to the nearest .5, rounding up, but sometimes I’ll track quarter hours if it makes sense.
Ticky boxes for things I want to do on a regular basis (dishes, tidying, my daily tracking, sorting files, and “15 minutes of a similar sort of task”, aka “etc.”) Each reflects about 15 minutes of attention – if I do more cleaning or sorting, that goes in other places in the sheet.
Then we have things grouped by planets:
Moon for religious stuff – ritual (drawn from the Spirit sheet), personal witchy things, PS for coven things (Phoenix Song), and S+TC for online sharing and conversation in various ways.
Mercury for writing and tech. The write field pulls from my wordcount on my writing pages, translated into points based on my goals for the year. Then slots for editing, learning (either research for writing, or learning about some writing/marketing/etc. skill), sharing (for newsletters, social media wrangling, etc.), and admin (for my wikis, managing files, etc.)
Earth is for physical things – spending time on household things (cleaning, organising, etc.), my body (medical appointments, naps, other things that are like that), and the activity number (pulled from data on the Body sheet.)
Venus is for beauty and pleasure, so the columns here are pleasure on my own (gaming on my own, making art, crafting, watching a movie where I’m focused on the movie…), social (time chatting with friends) and gaming (roleplaying games).
Jupiter is about expansion, so here’s input (reading, watching, and listening to things – blogs, podcasts, etc.), learning (everything that’s not directly related to writing), and specifically reading (sitting down reading a book, which I’ve fallen out of the habit of again other than right before bed, so I’d like to track it.)
Saturn is for planning, defying entropy (sorting files, managing digital resources, etc.), and the organisation/data wrangling I do for a friend.
Sun is for my day job: library work (reference, projects, etc.), meetings, and upkeep (ongoing maintainance projects in our catalog, mostly), because I like seeing the breakdown there.
Mars is the addition this year – it’s a place for me to note if I did something I’d been putting off a lot, or something that was exceptionally challenging, so I have a way to capture that.
Spirit sheet
The Spirit sheet is much the same as last year – date, song, card, suit, notes. And then space for minutes of meditation. It’s followed by ticky boxes for rituals – morning (counted at .3), new moon, full moon, other rituals, divination, and “other” which lets me put in an additional time for things like coven rituals.
Other sheets
My other sheets – especially the writing ones – haven’t changed much at all from last year, so again, go look at last year’s posts for that. I really like being able to enter multiple items per day and have it count up properly.
Feel free to use the contact form (or whatever other place we might be in touch) to ask questions.
