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We all live within the continuous flow of time, yet the meaning and purpose behind how we live differ and evolve day by day, moment by moment. We harbour aspirations to pursue, intentions to act upon, and reflections to learn from. Most of us strive to progress towards the life we envision, trying to bridge the gap between that ideal life and our current reality as much and as soon as possible. However, the gap between the life we desire and the one we live largely depends on the wisdom we gain from each moment.

If you don’t know who you are right now, you won’t know how you can improve. Likewise, if you don’t know where you want to go, you cannot determine the path you should take. Therefore, personal growth relies on gaining a deeper understanding of yourself, fostering a sense of purpose and direction in life, and building a foundation that aids in overcoming challenges and obstacles along the way.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” 
— Søren Kierkegaard

Although we cannot retrace our steps, we can leave breadcrumbs that mark how far we’ve progressed and in which direction.

In this context, this Life in Progress Notebook system, in a way, acts as a series of breadcrumbs marking your path, indicating your current position in your journey, and helping you decide your next step.

As you progress, moment by moment, aligned with your personal compass towards a self-chosen meaning of life, you live forwards while gradually gaining an understanding of your life in retrospect.

While My Life at a Glance Notebook: A Journal & Planner System for Seeing Life Clearly, allows you to see where you stand and the route you have taken at a glance, this Life in Progress notebook system will assist you in seeing the trajectory of your life from past to present, and how you can adjust your course when needed. This fosters a mindset of continuous self-discovery—understanding your intentions, actions, lessons, and values—cultivating a sense of fulfillment and purpose through living and reflecting.

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Why Other Methods Didn't Work for Me as a Personal Growth Tool

The issues with typical planners

Physical planners are too rigid, focusing solely on intention setting, without considering broader areas of focus, so you cannot see a comprehensive view of your roles and responsibilities. They also don’t account for the ebbs and flows of life that affect your plans. Sure, we aim to live forward, but cannot precisely plan each next step. Beyond setting intentions and planning, you need to follow through and be capable of adjusting your course of action when necessary.

Moreover, there is no integrated reflection session connected to your intentions. Physical planners lack the space to track your progress simply and meaningfully, side by side with your reflections on that progress. This means they don’t help you honestly confront time constraints and your (unavoidable) shortcomings.

…Planning alone is not enough: accountability is the key to success…

The issues with daily journaling (prompts)

They usually focus on your day-to-day thoughts and feelings and tend to make you ruminate instead of progress. Due to the nature of a blank space, they lack materials for purposeful reflection. You don't have your breadcrumbs of how many steps you take and in which direction you have been walking on this path. 

Instead, you just accumulate your answers day by day but without a clear, organized way to make it useful. You cannot clearly see the patterns of your life, and you can't reflect on it in a meaningful way. Think of it as filling out a survey form; those data only matter and are usable when you compile and organize them by questions, not by the filled form in each instance. It is, therefore, really important to have structured layouts that can help you see patterns within your answers and reflections.   

…Accountability is not enough; reflection is the key to wisdom…

The issues with almost any other tools (especially digital tools) 

They don't really have the space for you to reflect on each of your actions, so you don't know what the lessons or key takeaways are, what you can avoid, reconsider, pivot, or re-implement for later. They also only care about your actions, not your values. This fixation on achievements or the lack thereof often neglects your own character. You may start reflecting on each step you take but not whether it aligns with your moral compass or your personal virtues that make your life worth living. There would be, if there is any at all, only a vague area for you to write down something about your values, but without clear guidance and concrete evidence of how you practice those values.

…Reflection is not enough, your personal values is the compass towards a life worth living…

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Life Navigation Framework: Sailing Your Life Journey

Envision yourself as the captain of a ship journeying through the vast, unpredictable sea of life. The catch is, you won't find out your final destination until you actually arrive there. So, how can you navigate your life under the circumstance where your destination is unknown? With the possibility of sailing in any direction, there's no right or wrong in how to live. How, then, can you chart your life course with this understanding? The key lies in how you sail, not just where you end up.

Power Your Ship: Focus Forces (Energy & Effort)

First, your ship must be functional and ready to move. In life, this means having enough focused energy, your Focus Forces, to propel you forward. These represent the key areas where you invest your energy and effort, such as work, personal, wellness, and household roles and responsibilities. Like multiple engines working together, your Focus Forces keep your life's sail filled with power. It's vital to understand where and when to direct your energy for each Focus Forces to move forward with clear intention, and build up the momentum to move faster.

Align Your Inner Compass: Personal Core Values (Purpose & Meaning)

Next, you need direction. Since there is no fixed destination for everyone, you must choose your own path by actively aligning your Inner Compass—clarifying and living your core values and virtues. This compass doesn't give exact coordinates but points you toward your true north, helping you live with integrity and purpose. When life's storms push you off course, your Inner Compass helps you reorient and keep moving forward in your intended direction.

Take the Helm: Steering Wheel (Accountability & Control)

How do you ensure you stay on course? That's your Steering Wheel; the tool of control and accountability. By regularly steering your life’s path, you adjust your efforts and actions to stay aligned with your core values. The Steering Wheel empowers you to make course corrections and actively navigate your journey in harmony with your Focus Forces, and Inner Compass.

Drop Your Anchors: Life Dimensions (Balance & Stability)

When the seas get rough, you drop your Anchors—actively grounding yourself in your life's foundational dimensions. Anchors keep you steady, offering a chance to pause, reflect, and regain balance. These anchors help you resist being swept away by life's currents and maintain a strong foundation. (You can read more about this concept on My Life at a Glance Notebook)

Log Your Journey: Logbook (Lessons & Wisdom)

Finally, you need to actively decide where exactly you want to go next. So, how can you learn from your experiences and grow wiser along the way to understand and navigate your life? This is where your logbook becomes invaluable. Your Logbook is your continuous journal, recording daily reflections, insights, and lessons. Along the way, you mark Waypoint Logs—special milestones highlighting breakthroughs or courses adjustments. Together, they create a personal map of your journey, helping you make informed decisions as you sail onward.

This Life Navigation framework harmonizes life's complexities into an inspiring system. 

• Grounding—Anchors (Balance & Stability): Provide stability, allowing you to pause or resist external forces, grounding you when needed.
• Direction—Inner Compass (Purpose & Meaning): Your inner guidance system, pointing you toward meaningful directions aligned with your values.
• Momentum—Focus Forces (Energy & Effort): The dynamic personal efforts and energies in your core life areas that give your power to move forward.
• Accountability—Steering Wheel (Accountability & Control): Your control mechanism that lets you actively steer and keep you on course toward your chosen direction.
• Reflection—Logbook (Lessons & Wisdom): Your detailed journal of ongoing experiences (Logbook) combined with highlighted milestones or insights (Waypoint Logs) to guide course corrections.

Your ship is your life; your Focus Forces propel you forward; your hands control the Steering Wheel to navigate your course; you align your Inner Compass to guide your direction; you drop your Anchors to maintain stability; and you log the journey in your Logbook, making it your trusted advisor for decision-making. Together, these elements empower you to intentionally sail through the vast ocean of life with meaning and purpose throughout your journey.

This Life in Progress notebook system, in conjunction with the "My Life at a Glance Notebooks Systems" (based on Anchors of Life), made up into this Life Navigation framework. This offers a comprehensive view of your life and how you can navigate it on your terms, empowering you to move forward with clarity, control, intentional effort, and ongoing learning towards growth and life progress.

Life in Progress: The Self-Growth With Purpose and Meaning

Life in Progress integrates the Life Navigation Framework into a simple yet practical system that helps you visualize your growth through timelines (progression over time) and milestones (progression through achievements). This lets you see your life’s trajectory clearly, like mapping your journey through time.

Growth is not just about moving forward, though. It also means taking steps back to reflect on each move. That’s why Life in Progress emphasizes capturing short personal reflections for every step, helping you understand where you are, what you’re doing, why, and how you’re advancing. This approach blends both qualitative insight and quantitative progress tracking, all within one notebook.

At its core, Life in Progress is about:

• Logging your actions on a timeline,
• Capturing observations and insights on each action,
• Incorporating them into deep reflections, and
• Listing key milestones to mark your growth.

Think of this notebook as purposeful life-logging, instead of journaling (which can be spontaneous) or planning (which only sets intentions). It combines intention, commitment, and reflection, helping you visualize progress and log the breadcrumbs of your journey towards your values and focus areas.

Life in Progress notebook is where you log your life, and where your life becomes a living record of your own wisdom, lessons, insights, and experiences.

However, since personal growth is, well, personal. How you define growth and progress can vary from person to person. Although I share methods for using these tools and systems for self-growth, you can decide which parts resonate with you and help you understand yourself and your unique path

To reflect this, the system is divided into the core system and the support system. The Core System (Life Navigation) provides a timeline-based perspective of your journey through monthly growth and quarterly reflection, while the Support System (Life in Focus) offers targeted tools for managing projects and commitments.

The Core System: Life Navigation 

This core systems helps you understand how you live by logging the breadcrumbs of your experiences and insights at the moment, combining Monthly Growth and Quarterly Reflection.

Monthly Growth (daily logging):

• Monthly Dashboard:: Overview of your areas of focus, projects, and alignment with your personal compass.
• Monthly Intention (Focus Forces): Choose and schedule effort and energy priorities for the month; review weekly progress and how you can improve your next week’s plan. 
• Monthly Character Log (Inner Compass): Track daily virtues and vices aligned with your core values.
• Monthly Accountability (Steering Wheel): Log daily activities, that drives progress toward milestones, along with your observations and insights.

Quarterly Reflection (post monthly logs):

• Quarterly Milestones: List weekly big wins from Focus Forces (work, personal, health, and household)
• Quarterly Focus: Reflect on outcomes and lessons learned in each focus area.
• Quarterly Integrity: Assess your practice of personal values.
• Quarterly Lessons: Highlight insights that significantly impacted your growth.

Now let's get into the the notebook layouts for Life in Progress.

Monthly Growth: Setting Intention and Course Correction

Monthly Growth is the heart of the Life in Progress system. This is where you gain a holistic monthly overview, set focused intentions for the month (Focus Forces), practice your core values (Inner Compass), and hold yourself accountable to follow through or adjust plans as needed (Steering Wheel). Each aspect is supported by its own layout: the Monthly Dashboard, Monthly Intention, Monthly Character Log, and Monthly Accountability. These hands-on tools ensure that each month you move closer to your meaningful destination.

The Monthly Dashboard:

The Monthly Dashboard provides a high-level overview of your commitments, progress on Focus Forces, and alignment with your Inner Compass. It also invites short reflections on your projects and values for the month. Monthly Dashboard serves as a monthly overview for how you fair you are in your commitment and on Focus Forces, and Inner Compass of that month, along with some short reflections on outcome-based, or value-based.

This layout categorizes your focuses into Four Focus Forces (four key areas of focus), so you can plan what you intend to do to have a well-round life, fulfilling roles and responsibilities on each aspect: 

• Work (business and finance)
• Personal (hobbies and relationships)
• Health (physical and mental)
• Household (family and home)

Focus Forces

This is the focus of the month to put your energy and effort on. I recommend organising your focuses into two categories: 'sprint focuses' and 'marathon focuses' Place sprint focuses; goals with clear deadlines or completion criteria; on the left side of the page. On the right, list marathon focuses; which involve ongoing maintenance or long-term efforts; focusing primarily on routines. This way, you’ll have a visual hierarchy for your focus of the month.

Milestones

List your focus with associated success markers, ideally three milestones per focus:

• Baseline Outcome: The minimum achievable with minimal effort
• Likely Outcome: Realistic results assuming consistent effort
• Ideal Outcome: Your ambitious goal if you push yourself hard enough

I prefer to list them step-by-step, using indentation to clearly display the stages for each milestone.

Bet

While you set intentions and outline milestones, it doesn’t guarantee they’ll happen. This section encourages you to place a 'bet' on how likely you are to achieve your milestones.

Indicate your confidence in achieving them with a "Bet"—loosely inspired by Thinking in Bets. Estimate how many milestones you aim to complete for each focus and provide reasoning behind this judgment. Reflect on actual outcomes, lessons learned, and next steps. For example, you might bet on achieving only 1 if you want to prioritize other focuses, or if you're feeling extremely confident, aim for all 3.  

Core Values

At the bottom, list your four vital virtues (the inner compass guiding your life.) Under each, record significant actions taken to embody these values. If space allows, include lessons learned, key takeaways, and possible next actions to support continuous growth.

The Monthly Intention:

It’s so easy to get swept up in the busyness of life, merely going through the motions instead of intentionally planning how you live. Here, you set clear priorities and decide how to distribute your energy and effort throughout the month. To ensure you address all your Focus Forces, we achieve this by cascading from your monthly key activities and weekly fixed events into your daily schedule.

There are four sections in this monthly intention layout. 

• Monthly Focus: Outline key responsibilities and activities tied to each Focus Forces, ordered from sprint to marathon efforts.
• Weekly Appointments: Structure the section into weeks. Schedule fixed-time events for each week to coordinate your commitments.
• Daily Schedule: A flexible plan dividing your day into morning, afternoon, and evening to allocate effort across focuses. This gives you a bird’s-eye view of your day, making sure that you allocate time for your key activities. While other tasks can be managed using separate tools.
• Weekly Reflection: Capture what worked and what didn’t, lessons learned, and possible next actions to refine upcoming plans.

Optionally, you can use a pencil board, with a sticky note on it, to highlight your yearly goals or critical monthly actions, keeping a laser-focus sharp amid noise of other lower important actions.

The Monthly Character Log:

As Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do; therefore, excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." This means, then, that your behaviour, what you consistently practice, defines who you truly are. And your character forms from consistent practice aligned with your values. 

If you want to build a character, you must choose what to practice and make it a habit. You decide this by having a personal inner compass guided by your values and virtues. It's not enough to merely set intentions; you must also take action.

This Monthly Character Log provides a space for documenting evidence of your character development. Ensuring you're on the right path to embodies your personal virtues—your core values that act as a guiding north star. This space invites you to clarify and revisit what matters most to you, so you can consistently align your actions and decisions with your authentic self as you navigate life’s journey.

This log records evidence of character growth:

• Core Values: Start by writing your chosen core values. Defining personal values is one of the most meaningful things you can do in life. If you're still discovering yours, you can temporally borrow mine: Curiosity and Courage, which foster Growth, and Compassion and Wisdom, which cultivate Harmony. However, feel free to select only values that resonate with you.
• Intended Practice: List one monthly action per value. It doesn't have to be significant or a daily activity—just something meaningful that aligns with your values. Leave some blank space to reflect on your progress at the end of the month.
• Value-based Reflection: Reflect monthly on alignment with your values and areas to improve and strengthen your character in the following month and beyond. 
• Vices and Virtues: Flip the notebook and divide two columns beside the dates. 
  • Virtues: record daily positive actions or thoughts that align with your chosen values. 
  • Vices: record any negative actions or thoughts that divert you from your values. 

The key is to document positive actions and thoughts that guide you towards your virtues and values, alongside those that lead you astray. What's important is recognising both the positive and negative influences on your growth.  This serves as tangible evidence of your character building. 

The Monthly Accountability:

This is the space where you hold yourself accountable and steer your course. By monitoring whether your actions align with your virtues and goals, you stay actively in control of how you live on a daily basis.

I view this layout as an upgraded version of habit tracking. With traditional habit tracking, you simply records whether you performed the habit or not—a binary yes or no, with no consideration for the degree of actions and reflection. However, this accountability tracker allows you to log varying degrees of skills and effort, and reflect on progress towards your goals or focus. This allows you to daily observe your life’s progress even when you’re not fully dedicating your time and energy fully to that focus.

The structure for this layout is quite similar to a character log layout, you write down the dates, dividing into two columns. 

• On the left side, group any actions you’d like to perform regularly together in your own meaningful way to suit your personal objectives (whether by focus, goal, theme), and preferably organize the action from the least effort to the most effort (from left to right). 
• On the right, document notable remarks daily, preferably prioritizing from most to least effort (from right to left), making it easier to decide which activities to reflect on. Use these remarks to understand successes, setbacks, feelings, and plan forward.

This accountability acts like a partner you answer to honestly, providing concrete evidence of your journey. It feels similar to having an accountability partner or group—discussing what you did, what you didn’t do, why, and how to move forward. However, rather than sharing with others, you’re answering to yourself, supported by clear evidence and daily "breadcrumbs" that highlight your progress.

Each day, take a moment to reflect and ask yourself: What did I do or fail to do? What went wrong? What went right? How do I feel? What stands out about my actions? This reflective process fosters accountability for both your actions and inactions in relation to your intentions.

Knowing that you must account to yourself for what you did (or didn’t) and how it went makes you more attentive to details. This practice is a form of selective attention, where you set up your attention radar and fine-tune your focus to capture any relevant information aligned with your goals and intentions.

My Accountability Trackers

I believe that the essence of being human lies in our ability to think and move. Therefore, I’ve currently organized my accountability into these two groups, tracking daily activities related to each. (I might add more trackers later.)

I personally organize habits and actions based on their intensity. For example, a mobility workout is my bare minimum for physical activity, so I place it on the far left. Activities requiring more effort, like walking, sprinting, and strength training, are placed further to the right. This arrangement helps me identify which actions deserve detailed reflections—typically, those on the right, such as gym sessions, rather than less intense routines like morning mobility drills. If I have an inactive day—just sitting around—I note it down, perhaps with a sad face, and honestly answer to myself why I didn’t take any action.

Some Accountability Ideas

• Work: Tracking activities such as meetings, planning, problem-solving, and sales. Consistently engaging in these actions will help you progress toward your business goals.
• Sprint Focus: Tracking key activities and jotting down reflection or next steps in a notes section. 
• Household: Tracking tasks such as laundry, cleaning, decluttering, and meal planning.
• Health: Tracking your meals, medications, and nutritional intake—monitoring proteins, vegetables, carbohydrates, and other macronutrients. You might also note your recipes or ingredients to gain a clearer understanding of your consumption habits.

You can adjust your accountability trackers based on your current monthly focus, or your cornerstone routines.

But remember to start small with manageable habits that you actively do in a daily basis first, so you can build the habit of tracking, observing, and answering to yourself honestly. Over time, you can expand your accountability areas or adjust your system to identify more patterns in your progress

Quarterly Reflection

Quarterly Reflection is a dedicated space to pause, review your journey, and uncover the key takeaways, lessons, and insights you’ve gathered along the way.

Throughout the quarter, you reflect monthly on growth, lessons, and wisdom. These insights are then consolidated into four distinct quarterly review layouts: Milestones, Focus, Integrity and Lessons.

You metaphorically drop your Anchors to stabilize and ground yourself in the core dimensions of life: Wins, Joy, Social, and Health. During this time, you consult your Inner Compass, your core values, to realign with what truly guides and motivates you, ensuring your path remains authentic and purposeful. You check-in with how your Focus Forces and Steering Wheel have been serving you. 

Then, you explore This Quarterly Reflection, reviewing the continuous narrative of experiences, challenges, and growth recorded throughout the months. Waypoint Logs mark significant milestones and turning points, offering insights into how you’ve navigated your journey and highlighting where adjustments may be needed.

The Quarterly Milestones:

Quarterly Milestones are your Waypoint Logs. This layout captures significant wins and highlights from each week across the quarter, serving as markers to guide your future course corrections and personal growth.

Write week numbers centrally and note your biggest wins within the Four Focus Forces:

• Work (Business and Finance)
• Personal (Hobbies and Relationships)
• Health (Physical and Mental)
• Household (Family and Home)

After the end of the quarter, add a stamp or emotive face—such as a smiley, meh, or sad face—to express your overall feeling about each area for the quarter. Together, they create your personal map of wisdom and growth.

The Quarterly Focus:

List your ongoing and sprint focuses for the quarter, preferably from your Four Focus Forces,  and reflect on outcomes and lessons learned.

Ongoing efforts go on the right, sprint focuses on the left, providing a clear visual of your priorities and progress. Then, document insights gained and outline potential next steps.

The Quarterly Integrity:

Under your core values, document big actions taken toward each one, lessons learned, key takeaways, and opportunities for growth to ensure your life honors your guiding principles.

The Quarterly Lessons:

This final section invites you to distill the quarter’s most impactful key takeaways. Try to pick takeaways that you’d like to bring with you on your next quarter. Reflect deeply on how these insights have influenced you and how you intend to integrate them further.

Write down your key lessons, your feelings about them, how you have implemented them, or how you plan to implement them in the future. This way, your lessons become living wisdom guiding the next phase of your growth journey.

The Support System: Life in Focus

Life in Focus is outcome-based, with progression driven by achievement. It zooms in on individual projects and commitments, offering a laser-focused approach to each step and the direction you wish to pursue. 

Because areas of focus and their scopes vary widely person-to-person, Life in Focus encourages customization. You can design your own layout styles, a dedicated notebook, or even go fully digital; the choice is yours. What matters is that you have a space to implement a similar approach to structured thinking and extracting meaningful takeaways. This should at least include an overview of focus areas, milestones, key activities, and reflections.

So, for this support system, I’ll be explaining the concepts with some examples instead.

"Life in Focus" is the support system designed to fuel your life’s progress through an outcome-based approach. So you can determine what to concentrate on, identify your core areas of focus, and reflect on your vision and results. The unique energy behind this system is momentum—the more you move, the easier it becomes to keep moving. 

Life in Focus organizes your efforts into two primary types, categorized by whether there’s a finish line—either by completion or deadline:

• Marathon Focus: Long-term, ongoing activities that build momentum steadily over time. These usually represent regular, maintenance-oriented actions across 4 Focus Forces (Work, Personal, Health, and Household.) While these don’t always require full attention, consistent effort keeps your life’s engines running smoothly.
• Sprint Focus: Short-term, outcome-driven projects demanding laser-focused energy and attention. Sprint Focuses are defined more by milestones rather than strict schedule, prioritizing “what” you want to achieve over “when.” These are project-like bursts designed to generate breakthrough progress.

Imagine that you’re running a marathon, there are times you want to pick up the pace. That's when a marathon shift to sprint pace. You might set your sprint based on a specific duration or after passing certain distances or goalposts before returning to a steady rhythm.

Marathon Focus is primarily what builds your Focus Forces—consistent actions that create momentum in various aspects of your life (work, personal, health, household). These are tasks that generally don’t require your full attention and effort because you already know what needs to be done. As long as you perform them regularly, the engines of your life keep running smoothly.

However, when situations arise that prompt you to concentrate intensely and channel your full energy and attention into specific tasks, it becomes a Sprint Focus—a project aimed at achieving a particular outcome by setting short-term goals or hitting specific milestones.

In this way, Sprint Focus isn’t inherently time-bound but rather outcome-focused. You prioritise milestones first, with deadlines for each specific action considered afterward. It’s not really about when you complete tasks, but what you achieve during that time, and how your actions and planning support those milestones.

Marathon Focus Example: Household 

Household management is a clear example of a marathon focus. I categorize household activities into four groups: Food-related, House-related, People-related, and Stuff-related.

I track these using simple weekly and yearly trackers—marking planned frequency with dots, and logging completion with dates. Simply write how many time you want to do that activity and put on a dot on your planned time, then when it’s done, you wrote the date. That’s it.

Sprint Focus Example: Fitness 

I envision what I want for this Fitness Sprint (a whole year, in this case, because mobility is something you cannot rush, unless you want to break some bones in the process, lol). Then I consider the actions needed to achieve my vision, then establish a milestone launchpad to guide progress.

I conceptualise milestones as four distinct stages, each representing a step towards success. These progressive milestones are designed to guide you in achieving your goals.

• Kick-off: Develop initial checklists and assess resources, considering constraints like time, finances, and energy.
• Accelerate: Identify key activities and estimate how long it will take to build momentum.
• Overcome Pitfalls: Recognise potential bottlenecks and pitfalls, and determine strategies to improve and adjust your course.
• Wins: Celebrate all achievements, from bare-minimum milestones to overarching goals.

Then, I have a weekly milestones and takeaways in a form of a timeline of the quarter, along with my workout plan for that quarter. Documenting key takeaways at each step helps maintain clarity and momentum.

If you prefer paper planning or tracking your milestones using a Gantt chart, you might organise your workflow into stages, e.g., Backlog, In Progress, and Finished. Then, list key activities and map them onto a timeline. However, I believe digital tools are often more effective for this purpose.

In summary, Life in Focus empowers you to maintain steady momentum complemented by targeted bursts of progress, shaping a flexible yet outcome-driven path towards your goals.

Final Words

With Life in Progress, I barely ran out of things to reflect on.

Each night, instead of struggling to organize my scattered thoughts or searching for something to write about, I simply flip through each page and jot down a few remarks in response to the structured prompts. These notes instantly form a progression pattern, ready for deeper reflection. Filling out these forms before bed leaves me with the satisfying feeling that I have lived a full day, taking meaningful steps for my future self to examine and grow from.

I believe the Life in Progress system beautifully complements the Life at a Glance system. While Life at a Glance balances your life dimensions with joy and meaning, Life in Progress focuses on how you purposefully live each day. It fosters profound reflection and encourages you to contemplate each step and its impact without losing sight of your overall trajectory.

This notebook helps me see life not as isolated daily events but as a continuous, purposeful journey. It enables me to recognize my movement forward, beyond merely listing tasks, by observing the progression, direction, and timeline of my life with intention and clarity.

Life in Progress gets me to pause and reflect, trying to understand my life backwards, while also setting intentions and visions for how I want to live moving forward.

There’s no need to go fully analog. In fact, I encourage you to complement the Life in Focus system with digital tools to keep your life up-to-date with flexibility. And use Life in Progress and Life in Focus together to maintain focus on your future direction and preserve valuable breadcrumbs from the paths you’ve traveled.

My pocket-sized notebook isn’t like a traditional diary or a paragraph-heavy journal, nor a typical bullet journal or planner. Instead, it builds on those concepts but with a unique purpose: to view one’s life from a bird’s-eye perspective, and review it with a broader outlook. I call this my “Life at a Glance System.”

Why Other Methods Didn’t Work for Me as a Life Reflection Tool 

I started my journaling practice with the Bullet Journal Method because it aligned with my goal of living intentionally and recording life as it unfolds. The basics of the Bullet Journal Method (not the decorated, elaborate versions often showcased by influencers) are straightforward: the Future Log for reference, the Monthly Log for tracking and scheduling, and Rapid Logging for capturing moments and thoughts.

While Rapid Logging is helpful in the moment of jotting things down, it became cumbersome over time: retrieving information was challenging, and the keys (categorization symbols) were quite limited. Additionally, repeatedly writing the same things—which the Bullet Journal Method encourages to strengthen intention—became tedious. As a result, the review process felt like a chore, without a clear structure built-in to process all these information. Without proper review on Rapid Logging, I lost sight of the bigger picture of my life.

I’ve realized that recording daily events and gaining an overarching view of life are distinct needs, each deserving its own dedicated space.

Later, I tried using a physical planner as a journal, hoping its structure would help me better understand my life. Sure enough, planners offer a better framework for review and retrieval. However, their philosophy centers on looking ahead, while life itself isn’t set in stone and should focus on living day by day. That’s why I wasn’t sure how to use the yearly pages and monthly calendars, as I didn’t want to reflect on unfulfilled plans and an imaginary life. When I open my life notebook, I want to see a life well-lived.

Detailed Planning is a distinct mindset that deserves its own dedicated system. My life notebook will be for capturing lived experiences.

Here’s the realization I’ve come to about documenting my days and capturing my life: the most important thing I want is a notebook that sums up my year—a way to reflect on my life and see what truly matters. I don’t need to remember every detail, just the most significant ones. I’m okay with most details falling through the cracks, as long as I can view my life as a whole. I simply want a space where I can answer the crucial question: “How has my life really been?”

Thus, I created Life at a Glance—my own life-logging and life-reflection system.

After experimenting for over a year—blending templates and layouts from bullet journaling, planners, and resources I found online—I discovered a structure that truly fits my needs. And I hope it can fit into your life, too.

While this system can be integrated into your current notebooks or existing setups, I still urge you to try this system with a dedicated notebook. There's something deeply satisfying about effortlessly flipping through the pages and viewing your life at a glance, with clear evidence of a life well-lived.

The 4 Anchors of Life: The Act of Counter Balancing

Life is complex and ever-changing, with multiple demands pulling us in different directions. It’s easy to get swept up amidst the shifting tides of life, waking up one day wondering where you are, how you’ve been, or even who you truly are.

At the simplest level, I believe that life can be understood through two key dimensions: “Your Pursuits” and “Your Connections.” Together, these shape and reveal “Who You Are” and create the foundation for self-awareness and growth.

• Your Pursuits involve:
  • Wins: What you strive to achieve.
  • Joy: What brings you pleasure and fulfillment.

• Your Connections involve:
  • Social: How you nurture relationships with others.
  • Health: How you care for yourself physically and mentally.

I call these—Wins, Joy, Social, and Health—as The 4 Anchors of Life. These essential areas of life give you grounding as you navigate the ups and downs of life’s waves.

Life is rarely perfectly balanced but naturally swings between these anchors, and that’s okay. These natural ebbs and flows happen continuously, with or without your conscious direction. The key is learning how to ride those waves—shifting your balance when needed, rather than being knocked off course. 

To navigate this complexity with clarity and calm, I created a simple yet powerful system called Life at a Glance Notebook. This notebook helps you observe, understand, and counterbalance the 4 Anchors of Life by turning abstract concepts of life balance into concrete insights.

You, then, will only need to frequently check in with yourself to spot patterns on what’s working, what’s off, and uncover life lessons to make sure you’re living a balanced, fulfilling life. 

By regularly tracking these anchors, you’ll gain a clear overview of where your time and energy go, enabling you to make conscious adjustments and confidently navigate change.

Life at a Glance: The Life-Logging System Built In With Self-Reflection 

Traditional journaling or planners often focus either on recording in detail or looking too far ahead. The Life at a Glance System captures your lived experience concisely and purposefully, short enough to be sustainable, yet rich enough to reveal meaningful patterns. 

It’s designed to help you answer “How has my life really been?” without feeling overwhelmed by details or future plans.

The principle of this notebook is to capture life in a very concise manner by focusing on intention, introspection, and reflection. Using charts, columns, and symbols, I represent life’s key data deliberately and compactly. This helps me capture life concisely, identify patterns clearly and understand what truly matters.

The system is structured into three time-based sections:

1. Quarter at a Glance: 
   • Highlights (Memorable Moments)
   • Wins (Achievements)
   • Lessons (What to do More, Less, and How)
2. Month at a Glance: 
   • Life Flow (Joy, Health, and Social Trackers) 
   • Focus Flow (Projects with Key Activities, Timelines and Daily Focus)
3. Week at a Glance: 
   • Boost (Boosting Moments)
   • Drain (Draining Moments)
   • News (Updates on People and Events)

Life at a Glance System is founded on the idea that when you effectively organize the moments of your life; lessons, insights, and highlights will naturally emerge and write themselves. Rather than focusing on planning ahead and and trying to follow through, this system begins with the smallest aspects of your life—your day-to-day moments—and gradually builds them into the bigger picture: your own life.

That’s why the Life at a Glance System progresses like this:

• Week at a Glance serves as the foundation, growing into Quarterly Lessons.
• Monthly Life Flow serves as the foundation, growing into Quarterly Highlights.
• Monthly Focus Flow serves as the foundation, growing into Quarterly Wins.
• Everything you write down on the system will become a valuable source for Quarterly Lessons, guiding you for the next quarter.

How The System Works

The Life at a Glance System follows a straightforward process that encourages you to regularly flip through its pages and reflect on your life—daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly—ensuring you never lose sight of what truly matters. The more you review these pages and observe how your life has been filled on each one, the more it reinforces your determination to discover better ways to enrich your daily life.

Daily to Yearly Reflection Cycle of Life at a Glance System

Daily Review:

• In Week at a Glance, log your:
  • Boost: Moments that uplift and energize you
  • Drain: Moments that exhaust or deplete you
  • News: Updates on people and events

• In Month at a Glance, Track Life Flow (Joy, Health, and Social) and plan your Focus Flow (key activities, timelines, and daily focus)

Weekly Review:

• Fill out the Quarterly Lessons section by noting:
  • What you want to add (More) or reduce (Less) in your life, using insights from Week at a Glance
  • How you plan to achieve these changes (How)

• Identify actionable steps you can take now; either keep them in mind or write them in your Focus Flow.
• Set up your next Week at a Glance.

Monthly Review:

• Fill out the Quarterly Wins section by transferring your Focus Flow wins for the month.
• Identify key activities to prioritize in the upcoming month’s Focus Flow, possibly inspired by your Quarterly Wins, Quarterly Lessons or other top priorities.
• Fill out Quarterly Highlights using your month’s Life Flow data.
• Rate your monthly experience in Quarterly Highlights according to The 4 Anchors of Life (Wins, Joy, Social, and Health)
• Add any additional lessons in Quarterly Lessons drawn from your Life Flow, Focus Flow, Quarterly Highlights, or Quarterly Wins as needed.
• Prepare your next Month at a Glance.

Quarterly Review:

• Reflect on your:
  • Quarterly Highlights (memorable moments)
  • Quarterly Wins (achievements)
  • Quarterly Lessons (what to do More, Less, and How)

• Rate your quarter holistically based on The 4 Anchors of Life (Wins, Joy, Social, and Health).
• Set up your next Quarter at a Glance, guided by insights from your Quarterly Lessons.

Yearly Review:

• Reflect on all four quarters’ Highlights, Wins, and Lessons.
• Write an overall summary of how you’ve grown and how well you’ve balanced The 4 Anchors of Life over the year.

Each step is designed to take approximately 5–10 minutes, thanks to a pre-designed layout with a clear structure. The system utilizes symbols heavily to categorize information, grouped by The 4 Anchors of Life: Wins, Joy, Social, and Health. You can, of course create your own symbols as you see fit. For inspiration, you can explore terms like “icons,” “symbols,” or “pictograms.”

It’s simply a matter of organizing the information and placing it in the right place to fill your Life at a Glance.

Besides requiring minimal time, it also demands little effort to flip through, much easier than traditional journals and planners. The system uses fewer pages—approximately 124 per year—to capture life holistically.

• Quarterly pages: 4 quarters × 6 pages each
• Monthly pages: 12 months × 4 pages each
• Weekly pages: 52 weeks × 1 page each

For easier navigation, you can pre-set the quarterly and monthly layouts before the weekly pages, then use a bookmark for the current weekly page. Alternatively, you can do what I plan to do next year: use a separate notebook solely for the Week at a Glance to streamline the reflection process and provide additional space if needed.

It’s a structured, concise, and effective system. Don’t you think?

Now, let’s dive into the setup in more detail. 

And hey, I don’t mind if you just skim my super-detailed instructions to see my actual notebook setups. I already bold keywords for you :)

Getting Started: What You Need

All you need are a small notebook, a pencil, and an eraser. That’s it.

You don’t even need a ruler since my layouts are mostly built around a half page sections, making it easy to estimate the space you need by eye. Columns can be roughly marked with short lines, and rows counted using dots or lines. Therefore, a dotted, or grid-ruled notebook is preferable for this system, but a lined ruled notebook can work as well.

I recommend a small notebook for this system because constraints foster focus, turning the notebook into a concentrated reflection of life. We’re not aiming to be verbose; instead, we strive to encapsulate life concisely and purposefully. My handwriting is tiny, so a pocket-sized notebook (Muji Slim Notebook Grid A6 Slim Size) works well for me. Others might prefer something slightly larger, but keeping it under B6 size is ideal.

I’d avoid using pens (sorry, fountain pen lovers!) because the system requires flexibility of rescheduling and changing your minds, which pencils handle with ease. However, if you strictly rely on other planning tools, you can keep using your pen (yay!) and simply write things down afterward.

Month at a Glance: The Heart of the System

A month is the ideal time frame—not too short to miss emerging patterns, and not too far off that you lose the plot of what truly matters: your lived experience. That’s why I decided to anchor my system with these monthly layouts, which I call "Month at a Glance."

This is the space to track key moments relating to The 4 Anchors of Life:

• Joy: Did you do something enjoyable? Take a pause to appreciate those feel-good moments.
• Health: Did you intentionally move your body? What type of activities? How are you feeling physically and mentally? Check in on your wellness.
• Social: How did you connect with others? Take the time to be grateful about the moments you have with them. 
• Wins: What did you accomplish? Celebrate those little and big victories.

Month at a Glance has two key layouts to track these four anchors: 

• Life Flow: Tracks your joyful activities (Joy), social engagements (Social), and health conditions (Health).
• Focus Flow: Tracks and plans how to allocate your focus, time, and energy to achieve your wins (Wins).

As you track these regularly, you’ll start to see patterns. Maybe you’re hitting tons of goals but missing out on downtime. Or maybe you’re having fun but not taking care of yourself enough. This awareness helps you counterbalance, shifting your focus and create a better mix that feels right for you.

Life Flow

This is the activity logs where I track activities to visualize my life for that month. While it may resemble a Habit Tracker, it serves a different purpose. Instead of focusing solely on building streaks by ticking boxes and maintaining unbroken chains of each activity, it encourages me to embrace life's natural ebbs and flows. This approach allows me to reflect on how I spent my time and energy, identify health signals, and evaluate my intentions—all on just two pages.

Life Flow has three sections:

1. Joy Trackers: Regular joyful activities tracked with symbols for immediate pattern recognition.
2. Health Trackers: Daily physical and mental states, including symptom codes, period tracker, sleep hours (line graph around a 7-hour baseline), daily energy levels (smile/frown faces), and intention fulfillment (+/-).
3. Social Trackers: Logged vertically for media and social moments, noting people involved along with symbols (1 person icon = family, 2 people icon = relatives, 3 people icon = friends) and special moments (hearts).

Let's go through my setup step by step.

First, I track activities I enjoy, such as writing, designing, and reading. As you can see, I use symbols that represent specific activities or information, providing clearer and more immediate pattern recognition than the typical X marks. For books and TV shows, which are ongoing activities, I decided to write down the titles at the bottom of the page because I don’t necessarily need to record specific dates for them.

Next, I use health trackers to monitor my health throughout the month. These trackers help me identify patterns and potential relationships among:

• Daily conditions, noted with letter codes for symptoms, along with my period tracker, all recorded on a single line each day.
• Sleep duration each night, represented by a simple line graph with a seven-hour baseline; sleep below seven hours is tracked beneath the baseline, while more sleep is plotted above it.
• My energy level at the end of each day, indicated by smiley or frown faces for high and low energy, respectively.
• My daily intention or focus, marked with plus or minus symbols to show whether I focus on my priority or got distracted.

Now, as we move on, it gets a bit more interesting because this part is my social tracker focusing on moments with people.

I rotate the notebook vertically to log social interactions, using different symbols to note the people involved then I write down the name or the letter codes for the people I share the day with. 

• 1 person icon for family
• 2 people icon for relatives
• 3 people icon for friends
• The heart symbol highlighting special moments

Here, I also track media consumption such as movies and TV shows, which are activities I often enjoy with others. I can also do some soft scheduling, and erase it if gets postponed or canceled. This approach creates a concise snapshot of my social life and most memorable experiences.

Focus Flow

This is where I record activities and achievements that require time, effort, and skills with my full attention—whether they are work-related or personal projects, or even houseworks if wanted. I refer to these activities as "Focus" and their outcomes as "Wins."

The Focus Flow also consists of three sections:

1. Focus: Projects with key activities.
2. Timeline: A visual timeline with deadlines
3. Daily Focus: The top priority for each day

I organize projects in a timeline with three columns, one per Focus, and note deadlines (asterisks for strict deadlines). 

Next, I rotate the notebook vertically to create a soft schedule by jotting down the daily focus—the top priority for the day. 

• Non-project tasks are denoted with symbols: stars for single tasks, pencils for writing, and brushes for creative activities. 
• Planned activities are scheduled on specific dates and erased if postponed. 
• Days off are marked with crossed lines.

  

When you get swept away by the waves of busyness, it’s easy to forget what you’ve actually accomplished. This Focus Flow anchors you to the most important focus you’d like to achieve each day, making it easy to review your wins. This clear overview of focus, progress, and achievements at a glance also promotes work-life balance through effective time blocking and the protection of your time as needed.

Week at a Glance: Categorizing Moments with Boost, Drain, News

People often say you should spend time reflecting on your life regularly, but few actually do. Most of the time, it’s not because they don’t want to, but because they get overwhelmed by the term "reflection" and how to approach it. 

Many believe it to be time-consuming, requiring lengthy confessions about their lives, so they typically postpone it to the end of the year, and by that time you’re likely to forget valuable lessons and insights by then. 

I used to do it that way for a long time, too, but it doesn’t have to be.

You don’t have to figure everything out or find perfect answers to your life’s problems in one self-reflection session. Instead, you can do the bare minimum engaging in frequent self-reflection, allowing time—and your future self—to uncover insights from these moments later on.

The simplest and quickest way to reflect on your life is by categorizing your daily moments into two groups: what’s boosting you and what’s draining you. If you’re up for it, you can also add a few more details or notes on how you feel.

It may seem so simple that it barely feels like a reflection, but over time, they’ll add up and can become a valuable source for deeper self-reflection in the future.

Moreover, you cannot truly reflect on your life without acknowledging your connections to the world and the people around you. That’s why I also include a small section for updates about the people in my life and the world at large, something that feels significant enough to remember.

While Month at a Glance offers a dense overview, Week at a Glance focuses on simple categorization:

1. Boost: Energy or mood boosters, wins, important events.
2. Drain: Draining or distracting factors.
3. News: Updates on people and events.

Each day, I sort activities, information, and experience into these three groups, adding some notes and feelings about it. This minimal structure supports monthly and quarterly reviews and helps identify what fuels or drains me for future planning.

Quarter at a Glance: Life Overview and Lessons

Often, the most valuable things in your life require time to fully shine. You might not realize how precious they are in your day-to-day life until you wait then step back and view the bigger picture—the mosaic of life formed over time. Only then can you truly appreciate how each moment colors your world.

This is where Quarter at a Glance comes in—a space designed to help you see the pieces of your life's mosaic more clearly and bring them into focus with full appreciation. Quarter at a Glance serves as both an index and a reflection tool for your life experiences, wins, and lessons from the past three months, presented through three simple layouts: Highlights, Wins, and Lessons.

Quarterly Highlights

After years of trial and error in capturing the best moments of my life, I realized that my highlights primarily revolve around meaningful experiences with people and media that have touched my heart. 

This insight inspired the dedicated section in Month at a Glance for media, joyful activities, and social trackers, allowing you to easily reflect on your life experiences as a whole with the people you love and the activities you enjoy in it.

This Quarterly Highlights layout is where I document the key moments from my Life Flow for each month, offering a snapshot of what truly mattered during that time.

End-of-Month Review:

• Write down key moments experienced during the month.
• Evaluate how well I balanced The 4 Anchors of Life:
  • Wins: Achievements tracked in Focus Flow
  • Joy: Enjoyment recorded through Joyful Trackers in Life Flow
  • Social: Quality of relationships from the Social Tracker in Life Flow
  • Health: Wellness insights from the Health Tracker in Life Flow

I assess each anchor using a simple stamp rating system:

• Meh (0 points)
• Smile (1 point)
• Elevated (2 points)

Based on these ratings, I assign an overall score for the month.

End-of-Quarter Review:

• Revisit these key moments and monthly ratings to soak myself back into each moment once again.
• Reflect on a sense of accomplishment I had, the joy and pleasures that nourished my spirit, the relationships I nurtured, and how well I took care of my body, mind, and overall well-being.
• Compile the stamp ratings to calculate an overall fulfillment score for the quarter.

This system is not a rigid evaluation but a personal way to gauge how you feel about your life. The rating method is designed to help you easily see your life as a positive and meaningful journey. Even if some areas rank lower, the overall tendency of the stamps encourages a view of life as a good life nonetheless. 

Quarterly Wins

I truly believe that capturing your wins is one of the most powerful yet neglected tools for a fulfilled life. 

After all, how can one recognize how much they’ve filled up their life without counting all the results of their efforts and skills? That’s why I dedicate a space to celebrate my wins like this, and I wish I did this much sooner.

Setup a Quarterly Wins: I start by stating my focus for the quarter and setting up a space for each month to jot down what I consider a win—whether it aligns with my stated focus or not. 

End-of-Month Review:

• Transfer wins from Focus Flow, organizing them in a way that makes sense to me.
• Reflect and write on how these wins make me feel and, when possible, note how I plan to celebrate each success.
• If space allows, note observations about what could have gone better or ways to improve your focus next month—such as adjusting time allocation or finding better resources. Otherwise, record these observations in Quarterly Lessons.

End-of-Quarter Review: Take time to mentally celebrate each win and write down a few overall reflections or insights about your progress and feelings.

Quarterly Lessons

We live with limited time, energy, effort, skills, and resources, so the art of living ultimately depends on how effectively we allocate these precious elements. As a result, life lessons naturally fall into two categories: doing more of something or doing less.

Yet, aspiration without actionable steps remains a mere imagined future. And the most valuable lessons in life come from lived experience—through trial and error.

Quarterly Lessons is the space where you identify concrete, actionable steps toward welcoming the changes you want in your life. 

These two pages serve as your personal living space—a place to explore, experiment, and define the way you want to live.

Feel free to change your mind, erase, and rewrite as often as needed. Keep refining and mastering the art of living to your heart's content.

Try, fail, and try again with different approaches until you discover what works—and what doesn’t. Or at least until you realize it’s wiser to pause certain goals and shift your focus elsewhere for the time being. Whatever happens, carry your lessons forward with you in this Quarterly Lessons journey.

End-of-Week Review:

• Identify What to Tackle: Each week, look for something from Week at a Glance—the Boost-Drain section—that you want to tackle on to create positive change. Since, naturally, you want to do more of what boosts you and less of what drains you. In addition to boosts and drains, you may choose to work on specific life challenges or workflows that are weighing you down. Write down whatever you decide to address.
• Define the Approach in “How” Column: Write the most actionable, realistic step you believe will bring results. Focus on small, manageable actions. Add new items, revise existing ones, or remove entries as your situation changes.
• Choose What to Focus Weekly: Whenever possible, pick an item from the How column to focus on for the coming week to try tackling on, or include it in your monthly Focus Flow.
• Experiment and Adapt: Try your chosen approach. If it fails, don’t give up—try a different method. If that also doesn’t work but you want to revisit it later, or it offered valuable insights, record it in the “Tried and Failed” section.

End-of-Month Review: At the end of the quarter, review each “How” step:

• Circle the ones that succeeded.
• Underline and mark with a right-pointing arrow any not yet tried but still worth exploring, and move these to your next Quarterly Lessons.
• Look through the “Tried and Failed” section for items worth retrying, and incorporate them into your next quarter’s plan.
• Erase those that no longer matter to you, if you prefer.

Year at a Glance: Brief Summary of the Year

Year at a Glance is the space to see The Key Dimensions—Your Pursuits and Your Connections—of The 4 Anchors of Life for the whole year at a glance. By writing how you counterbalance between Your Pursuits of achievement and pleasure, as well as Your Connections to yourself and others.

This is not a vital part of the system, as reviewing all the quarterly pages already provides a succinct and comprehensive overview of the year. However, it serves as a meaningful way to reflect and close a chapter of your life at the year's end.

I decided to use a single layout with two pages for Year at a Glance as the closing chapter of the year. This is the only space in the system where writing in paragraph form might be preferable. 

I haven't used this layout myself yet, as it’s still five months away from the end of the year. Therefore, both the layout and the process are likely to evolve. However, as of now, the process would look like this:

• Review Your Year: Go through all your Quarterly Highlights and Wins recorded in your Quarter at a Glance. From each Anchor area—Wins, Joy, Social, Health—select 1 to 3 key items that stand out.
• Reflect on Your Key Dimensions: Write down how you feel about each item individually, as well as your overall reflections—especially focusing on how these experiences interact to balance or affect the dynamics between your Key Dimensions:
  • My Pursuits: Top Wins, Top Joys
  • My Connections: Best Moments, Top positive things about my wellness (body, mind, and soul). 

• Top Lessons:Review all your Quarterly Lessons and identify the actionable steps that brought the most meaningful, positive change to your life this year. Summarize these as your top three lessons for the year.
• What’s Next: Look ahead to what excites you most for the coming year. This can include:
  • Actionable steps from this year’s Quarterly Lessons that you either haven’t tackled yet or tried but didn’t quite succeed with.
  • New aspirations or plans for creating meaningful memories with your loved ones.

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Final Notes

The Life at a Glance notebook system is designed to be concise and intentional. While it doesn’t capture every detail, it can easily be complemented with other tools for more specialized needs. This pocket notebook encourages frequent, meaningful reflection without the overwhelm of lengthy journaling. 

By using clear symbols and a structured layout, I can create a clear, satisfying overview of my life—all within the palm of my hand.

Despite having other journaling and planning tools, their complexity and effort often lead me to set them aside for days or even months before returning. 

With the ease of Life at A Glance system, though, I find myself reaching for this little notebook every night before bed to log a few details from my day in Month at a Glance and jot down a few notes in Week at a Glance. 

Even on my most exhausted days, simply flipping through these pages to see my life at a glance lifts my spirits and reminds me that the small moments of today can grow into something significant in the grand scheme of things over time.

Life at a Glance may seem quickly to grasp, but each detail reflects the accumulation of countless small, significant moments experienced day by day, over hundreds of days. These moments are distilled into this pocket-sized reflection of life, gently reminding you that your life, in all its nuances, always matters.

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P.S. For those who are curious, I plan a bit more thoroughly using the Tweek app. It’s essentially a planner with the layout of a physical weekly planner, while offering the digital benefits like other task management apps. 

I’ve been wanting to write about my most used apps for so long but didn’t have enough motivation to do so, until I came across this directory of apps people commonly use. Inspired by this, I’ve decided to compile a list of my default apps.

Prioritize Native Apps, then Fantastic Updates for New OS Support in Apps

For over ten years, I have enthusiastically tried thousands of apps. Throughout this time, I have learned that the best apps are the ones that withstand the test of time, receive frequent updates to support new operating system features, and, if necessary, offer excellent options for sharing and exporting.

The most important lesson I've learned from my years is this: the less I have to worry about the longevity of support, the better. And ultimately, which apps would have a longer lifespan than Apple's own apps?

Therefore, this year, I have decided to mostly use native apps instead of trying to find apps with the best features.

Only if Apple's implementation did not meet my standards then would I choose popular apps that closely follow native app guidelines and are most suitable for my use cases. That is why I have chosen a vastly different list of apps this year compared to my previous years, but I'm happy with my current choice.

However, since writing, learning, and note-taking have been my passion, I don’t use Apple Notes and Freeform because it’s difficult to export and share to other apps. Therefore, I couldn’t bring myself to use the native apps, and opted for Drafts and Bear as Apple Notes alternatives, and Muse as a Freeform alternative.

My Default Apps List

• 📨 Mail Client: Spark (I’ve yet enough time to figure out my workflow for Apple Mail yet)
• 📮 Mail Server: Gmail, Hotmail, Custom Domain using Porkbun with iCloud server. 
• ✍️ Journaling: Drafts, Stoic. (morning and evening prompts), Day One (memory keeping with photos and videos)
• 📝 Notes&Writing: , (jotting downs ideas and tasks to fully crafted articles), iA Writer (Long-form writing), Craft (large projects), Obsidian (daily journal, reference notes, but uses iA Writer to access files on mobile devices), Bear (Book Notes because it’s much simpler to use it for attachments)
• 👩‍💻 Blogging: Using Ulysses  or Drafts to publish on my main blog in Micro.blog. Also use Scribbles, Bear Blog, and Ghost hosting with MagicPages for my other blogs.
• 💡 Brainstorming and Ideation: Muse as my digital whiteboard
• ✅ To-Do: Apple Reminders (Just ditched Things), Agenda (for projects but considering just using Apple Notes or Craft instead.)
• 📆 Calendar: Apple Calendar, but still use widgets from BusyCal
• 📚 Books: Kindle, Libby, Audible 
• 💪 Health and Fitness: Apple Fitness and Apple Health(for logging) and Gentler Streak (health state), just ditched Fitbod (tracking workout progress), Athlytic and Bevel (daily exertion and recovery),  Foodnoms (food log)
• 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Apple Camera
• 🟦 Photo Editing: Photomator, Darkroom
• 📁 Cloud File Storage: iCloud for active files, OneDrive for archiving
• 📖 RSS: News Explorer
• 🌐 Browser: Arc and Safari, but considering trying out Zen Browser next year.
• 💬 Chat: Line, Facebook Messenger, Instagram 
• 🔖 Bookmarks: Goodlinks (for websites), Play-Save Videos Watch Later (for videos)
• 📑 Read It Later: Readwise Reader
• 📰 News: My Family and RSS feeds, but mostly my family, LOL. 
• 🎵 Music: Spotify 
• 💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Still figuring out.