Tap DUPLICATE to save, edit, and work with this template ↗️
It is a journal/tracker template made to help you log and audit activities with focus primarily on your energy and engagement.
These and other additional metrics make it easy to identify patterns, use recorded information to add, remove, delegate or move tasks or activities, and design a schedule that works with your flow.
Throughout this guide, I will be sharing screenshots of the Airtable version of the Activity Flow Journal tracking method, but it’s very similar to set up in Notion! The Notion page you can duplicate is at the end of this guide.
The core of this flow journal is inspired by the Good Time Journal from Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Here is a sample of their simple method to get a feel for this process:
When you track your engagement, you track your level of focus, how zoned in, or how present you are. An activity that is engaging has more of your attention, for better or for worse!
In the template, a star rating is used— this helps quantify but visually differentiate from nearby energy entries.
Tracking energy allows us to understand if a task/activity refueled our energy tank (positive number), did not impact energy (neutral), or burned through our energy (negative number) and to what extent. Unlike engagement, it is not a rating of a current energy level (e.g. recording that you feel/felt a rating of 1 or -2) — it is the positive/negative/neutral impact of the activity on the energy that with which you started that activity.
An activity that results in you having less energy after isn’t necessarily “good” nor “bad”— one that uses up energy can be either satisfying or feel depleting, depending on the context.
If a task is highly engaging and adds significant energy, you might be identifying a flow activity (or one that lights you up and gets you in the zone).
