What is the problem

Right now as I’m starting this project of creating a path on how to properly track data in your life, I am getting lots and lots of ideas. If I try to implement them all at the same time, it will be messy. And if I try to remember them all, I will forget some and be overwhelmed about knowing what I have to do.

How can I resolve this?

By taking the time to write my ideas down in an organized manner, I will know where to go to when I am ready to work on new ideas, and when I’m busy I will know that I can be totally focus on the task at end.

Clearly, this is regarding our Mind category of life, so we will create a new tab in the Mind spreadsheet. Let’s call it “Ideas”

  1. Create a table “Ideas” with a text column called “Idea”.
  2. My first ideas are regarding using the questions from the book “The 12 Year Week” and doing a personal favorite article for that book on my website
  3. Now I realise it is more a task than an idea, so let’s create a Tasks tab with a Tasks table with a Text column name “Task”

The ideas tab will be used for ideas I don’t know yet how to implement or that needs revisiting.

Acting with urgency

“Don’t pull off until tomorrow what you can do today!” - Benjamin Franklin

As I created the task for using the book questions, I realised my clarity tab was more about goal questions than clarity of life. Let’s move those to a new tab called “GoalQuestions” with one column of type text named “Question”, and another named Source of type text.

Now, in order to be able to answer those questions for multiple goals. We will create a new tab “GoalQuestionsEntries”

  1. First column named “Goal” of type dropdown from range of the table Goals
  2. Second column named “Question” of type dropdown from range of table “GoalQuestions”
  3. Third column named “Answer” of type text.
  4. Fourth column named “Date answered” of type date.

Since I now need to precise my sources in different tabs, I can centralize my data to a new tab “Sources”.

  1. Column named “Source” of type text
  2. Column named “Type” of type dropdown with values “Book” and “Movie” for now.

It will be easy as our system grow to add more precise descriptions to this tab and have well organisez data all accross the spreadsheet many tabs. I now have to rectify all Source columns to be of type Dropdown from range to this new table.

Back to tracking ideas and tasks

Now that I’ve worked on my tasks, I can get rid of them from my data. How? I could delete them. But I like to have some kind of history in my data.

Let’s just add and indicator “Done” of type checkbox. We will then filter our table on Done = False.

Getting life easier

Now, you might feel it is not much user friendly if you are on a phone to go and fill new data into your spreadsheets.

I feel you. That’s why in the next post, we are going to build an app available on all platforms (ios, android, and web browser) to help us enter new data easily.

Until then, continue tracking your data. We are growing habits here.

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