The College Journal: Ideas for Your Special Tracker

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The College Journal Dailies section is a place to keep track of your daily activities, both before the day begins and as the day is drawing to a close. At the end of a week or before a new week, depending on how you frame it, you will look back at your Dailies entries in order to look for patterns of behavior that can help you change bad habits and continue to act on beneficial habits. Realizations about how you spend your time, money, and energy can then become goals and action items you record in your Weekly Review.

The Dailies section includes a task manager and organizer, a blank graph for keeping track of how you spent your 24 hours of time, an area for a Button-Size Mini-Memoir, and a place to keep track of an additional "thing" of your choice. Because the Dailies are meant to be a fast, user-friendly journal experience (because students don't have a lot of free time in college), what follows are some basic tracker ideas for that special "thing"  that will fit into your Dailies pages.

What Kinds of Things Do I Put in My Journal?

Use Your Journal to Track Good Habits Versus Bad Habits

One way to think about your options for tracking behaviors and habits is to divide your tracker into two rows, one for the "good" and one for the "bad." You could track these behaviors for one week, or you could track them throughout your semester to look for changes.

Communication

In the example above, the student is tracking both complimenting others, a good habit, and swearing, a bad habit. Every time the students swears, that student fills in a stop sign. Every time the student compliments someone else, the student fills in a smiley face. In this example the compliments may not replace the swearing directly, but may simply improve the student's mood when there are more compliments than swearing.

Other good versus bad habit combinations related to communicating with others might be complaining versus offering solutions or gossiping versus getting to know someone.  In both of those instances, the healthy behavior may replace the bad behavior, so your tracker could be set up a little differently.
In the example above, the student colors a section to the left in black each time the student spends time genuinely and sincerely building someone up during the day. The student colors the right side of the tracker red if the student spends any time putting people down or making sarcastic jabs during the course of the day.

Health and Wellness

Some habits related to health and wellness might be meditating instead of arguing or stretching instead of slouching. Those can certainly be tracked like the examples above.

Additionally, your habits might include drinking water instead of pop, or eating vegetables instead of chips. If you want to track meditation, you could simply fill in the box with a before and after impression of the time spent in meditation.  If you want to be slightly more creative, you can draw glasses of water to color in blue for each glass you consume, or you can even try your hand at drawing the yoga poses or exercises you completed for the day.

Two different ways to track a yoga practice are shown in the figure above. You could simply list the poses you've tried with a simple decoration (or no decoration), or you can find a more colorful way to track your practice.

Lifestyle and Hobbies

A third way to think about your habits is in tracking your lifestyle and hobbies. Should you be spending more time studying and less time in the game room?  Or do you need to make sure you are practicing a skill or craft on a daily basis?  Try tracking your successes for a confidence boost!

There are two ways to track lifestyle and hobbies shown in the image below. The first is to draw or fill in one baseball to indicate feelings of accomplishment on a scale of 1 - 10. The second way is to create a musical message on a staff or fill in notes to indicate musical achievement and success.

The most important "thing" to remember about your special tracker of a "thing" is that it should be meaningful to you without being difficult or time consuming. It should never be considered a burden. Try tracking communication, health and wellness, or lifestyle and hobbies all semester or only for one week. Try a few different trackers until you find one that makes a difference in your life and offers real insight. If you gain helpful insights, you can write about them in your Weekly Review. 

Happy Journaling!

Want to read more about The College Journal? Try

The College Journal: Creating a Weekly Budget
The College Journal: A Fill-in-the-Blank Journal for First Year College Students

The College Journal: Prompts for Freestlye Journaling
The College Journal: Supplies on a Student Budget

Copyright Amy Lynn Hess. Please contact the author for permission to republish.