On the eve of a new year, I'm writing this post to offer a new year solution to help those of you who would like to establish and maintain healthier habits.
I have always enjoyed journaling and have done so since my pre-teen years. I used to keep paper journals and would try to track my goals, habits and thoughts by filling out little hand made graphs and charts. I also jumped on the "bullet journal" trend awhile back. Additionally, I used to give space in my journal for "brain dumping" to write down everything that I was worrying about, in hopes of alleviating stress and thinking I'd be able to look back and laugh at the silly things I lost sleep over, with the benefit of hindsight aiding my mental health. As I've come to realize, the "brain dump" exercise was kind of a waste of time.
Over the past three years, I've developed a much better system for myself.
Check out my wellness tracker here (you can make a copy of the template and edit it accordingly).
Now, my journal is completely digital and lives in a Google Form that I parked on my phone's home screen for easy access.
Using the domains of wellness (physical, emotional, social, intellectual, occupational, spiritual, financial, overall well-being) I created 10 daily action steps that I wanted to work towards throughout the year. For instance, throughout 2023, I wanted to get better at taking a daily multivitamin, so that was a daily action step that I tracked under the "physical" domain of wellness.
Beyond tracking my habits with quantitative tracking, I also track my habits with qualitative tracking. Every night before I go to sleep, I complete these three nightly reflection exercises:
Today I am grateful for....
The best part of my day was....
Today I learned.....
Rather than giving negative thoughts power, I've found that focusing my daily efforts on achieving small wins and intentionally learning new things every day is both empowering and energizing. It's easy to say this is flimsy science, but rewiring my brain to focus on positive energy has had such a profound and positive impact on my life that I know it's this positive thinking that has given me the courage and confidence to take action on bigger goals that I have set for myself.
Every year my tracker changes, depending on the overall goals I have for myself and for the year. For instance, this year (2025) was a big year for me with the growth of my business, so under the "occupational" domain I really pushed myself to complete all ten daily actions related to business development, networking and writing proposals because I knew I needed to do that to reach the growth goals I had.
This year was the first year since my 20s that I wasn't a member of a gym so admittedly, my physical health domain wasn't as strong as I thought it was going to be. I thought I was going to do fine, relying on my daily 10k step goal that I usually achieve with my morning walk and lifting some weights in my building's gym, but there were a lot of last minute schedule changes, just "one more Zoom" to attend to, and by the end of the year, my daily average dropped to 6k steps/day.
I did get better at logging my daily results. In 2024, I only did 84 entries as you can see in the sample below. However, in 2025, I logged 245 of 365 days.
Last year, I took all of my qualitative data from the spreadsheet and parked it in a Google Doc that I printed out and put in an envelope to open in ten years, as a special time capsule. I'm doing the same with the data from this year, but what I also did for 2025 was put the data in ChatGPT and I asked the robots to analyze the text and recommend areas for improvement. I don't normally celebrate the robots that much, but I have to give credit where it's due. It picked up some interesting nuances that I didn't even catch and it also affirmed a lot of the growth that I was attempting to achieve in 2025 and gave some pretty awesome ideas for 2026 to further improve. Side note: please remember to remove personally identifying information if you attempt to do the same!
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the growth I've achieved this year and the healthy habits I have established and maintained for myself over the years. I know life moves fast in the modern age and sometimes it feels overwhelming to keep track of everything. The best part about this solution is that it's completely free and you own all of your data. No one's trying to sell a shake or a supplement, etc. etc. based on your habits and actions.
In closing, I also want to say that I'm glad I thought to create this digital journal and tracking mechanism because my daughter sees that I have a healthy relationship with the tech tools I use to stay healthy and she sees that I'm using my phone for good, at the end of the day. She likes helping me think of things to be grateful for and throughout the day she reminds me of things that we learn about that she tells me to include in my tracker. I asked her if she's ready for her own tracker, but she said not yet.
Friend, I hope this new year brings you joy, health and happiness. No matter what happens, don't let up. Keep looking for the good in every day and remind yourself: I AM LOVING AND I AM LOVED.
Happy 2026! 💗
