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. 

My grandmother lived for 94 years, experiencing wars and four reigns of Thailand.

Year after year, our entire family—over a dozen of us—gathered at Grandma's house to share meals during ceremonies, holidays, and birthdays. It was certainly more than a hundred gatherings that she graced us with.

She was always there with us from the moment we entered this world. You could even say that our earliest memories began with her presence.

She lived so long that we sometimes thought she would live forever. Even in her final year, she remained healthy enough to smile, talk, and navigate her days—until she could not anymore.

The reality struck us: no one can live forever, no matter how much we wish for it.

She was always calm and collected, yet her presence radiated warmth that made us feel safe and comfortable.

Most importantly, she was a fighter. The doctors told us she had less than a month to live, yet she gifted us two whole months to be with her and process our grief—a testament to her strength.

Though her absence has left a significant void in our hearts, it comforts us to know that she did not suffer much in her final moments. Now, she can rest peacefully after a long, well-lived life.

As descendants of Chinese heritage, we held a traditional Chinese funeral ceremony. We walked her soul to heaven ourselves and burned essential items for her use in the afterlife. We also buried her alongside Grandpa, who passed away a decade ago, so now she can finally enjoy eternal peace with the love of her life.

This is not a forever goodbye; we will visit her every year as part of The Qingming Festival. However, it is undoubtedly one of the hardest goodbyes we have ever faced together.

Although, sadly, the journey back to Grandma's house together as a family will no longer include her physical presence, we still find joy in being together. The atmosphere remains filled with warmth from the bond that Grandpa and Grandma created for us, just as before. We continue to chat and laugh, looking at each other with happiness. We can see old memories overlapping with new stories being created in every moment we spend together in the room where we have always shared meals.

I believe this is what people mean when they talk about leaving a legacy behind: when what you’ve done becomes the norm and the way you loved becomes second nature to those who remain. There’s no need for grand gestures or eloquent speeches—just pure habits lingering like a perfume that never fades away.

This is what grandma left us: 
Her way of life.  

And I’m so grateful for it. We all are.

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With what you taught us, I’m sure we will be okay, no matter how difficult it may be. The lives we shared will remain with us until our own last breaths. And the love will continue to persevere, and your legacy will thrive through our way of life. No one is truly gone as long as someone remembers them, and we all plan to remember you for the rest of our lives.

So may you rest in peace. Don’t worry about us; we will meet again soon enough.