My Weekly Journal – 2024 Edition

At the start of this year I decided that I would keep a weekly record of how I was progressing against the goals I set out in my new year’s resolutions. This practice, combined with actually putting in the work, has led to significant gains in the areas of my life that I deemed needing attention at the start of 2024. Let’s take a look at what it entails.

Background

I’ve been setting resolutions each new year for at least a decade. As the Christmas period draws to a close in the final week of December, I naturally slip into a reflective mode, and start to feel optimistic for what I might achieve in the new year – I suspect this is just a quirk of my own wiring.

The practice is simple: I create a note on my phone, and lay out several resolutions of all kinds – things from wildly-ambitious goals through to finger-in-the-air behaviour changes that I think will improve my life.

Pretty much every year I set similar goals, and almost without exception, I don’t make much progress on any of them.

At the end of 2023 I had exactly 10 years’ worth of these notes. This prompted me to review each and every one of them and look for patterns – exposing some very obvious issues: I sometimes made progress on a handful, but typically didn’t achieve anything for the heavy hitters. I had to ask: why?

Example Resolutions for the Last 10 Years

To summarise: lose weight, get fit, build financial stability, be present.

Important note – these were almost entirely (apart from 1 year) just a bullet list of free form items in a note on my phone, without structure/classification.

Going in to 2024 I decided to reform this into a tightly-structured format – splitting the goals by domain like so:

I quickly dropped the final category of experience, as it was broadly covered by the presence one.

The Weekly Scorecard

Then every Monday morning I sit down and take notes as well as scoring myself in each of these domains. I note down the things I’ve done to advance the goals I’ve set out, or things I’ve recognised as important in each category.

I capture both the positive and the negative – this is usually logged in the space of one A5 page or less – written by hand. For each negative point I ask myself if there’s a follow-up for the upcoming week I can take in order to improve it. If I’ve not been for a run that week I’ll commit to trotting out 10k. If I’ve drank more booze than I would have liked, I’ll commit to a week off.

These micro calibrations add up to significant improvements over the course of a year.

Importantly, I then give myself a score out of 10 for each category. To get a perfect 10, I need to nail the activities and behaviours that I think are most aligned with that area of my life – it’s not an impossible score to hit by any means.

Then, using some powerful number crunching, I get a weekly score.

Monthly Review

Once I’ve chalked up 4 or 5 weeks of scorecards, I do a month review wherein I tot up all the scores and get a monthly score out of 40 or 50. I then calculate the % to get a grade, and jot down the delta vs. last month.

I also re-read every entry and look for patterns – noting these down. At this point the micro-improvements might be more like macros – commitments to improve performance in a domain that might take a month or more to play out.

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This practice has helped me really understand and calibrate my own behaviour over time. Whereas in the past I was susceptible to spiralling out into doom zone when things weren’t progressing along the vague path I’d set out at the start of the year, this method enables me to inspect my practices and fine-tune their application in a simple manner.

I’ve also recommended this to some people – all of whom have reported back that journaling has become an incredibly useful tool. I think a key aspect of this specific format is that it’s remarkably simple and low-cost – I sometimes spend just 5 minutes on this of a Monday. Other times I’ll spot a pattern I was completely unaware of and take an hour.