Episode 159: How Tracking Your Present Helps You Plan For The Future
Introduction
Welcome back to the show. You’re listening to live free creative podcast. This is episode number 159: How Keeping Track of the Present Helps You Plan Your Future. I’m coming to you on location in Costa Rica. You might be able to hear the rain falling in the jungle outside during the show. I tried to wait it out, and it turns out that the rain is not messing around here during rainy season.
So this episode is going to have just a little background, rainfall, ASMR to help ground you and bring you into the moment here while you listen.
Sponsor: Golden Coil Planners (use LIVEFREE for 10% off!)
Today’s episode is brought to you by Golden Coil. Golden Coil is my favorite paper planner company. It is woman-owned, sister-owned. I talk about it all the time. You know that I love it.
And it’s November, which if you’ve been listening to the podcast for any length of time, then you know, that November is my big planning month. This is when I like to get excited about the upcoming year. I think about the holidays, of course, but I also look past that into what are my goals and hopes and dreams for the future.What went well this year? And what would I like to lean into for next year?
Golden Coil helps me make all of those plans a reality. Something that sets Golden Coil a part is that it is totally customizable. You can choose a daily layout, a weekly layout. You can choose your monthly layout.
In addition to all of what you would consider regular planner pages that have, you know, to do those and where you would write down appointments and such, Golden Coil also offers an incredible array of tracking pages, habit, trackers, mood tracker.
Tracking is what I want to talk about today in part inspired, by the way that my life has been improved upon by using my Golden Coil to track some of my own habits, some of my own goals, and even my mood with their mood tracker pages. I kind of joke that my Golden Coil is like my paper brain, and it’s only partially joking because I really use it for everything.
I know there’s a ton of research about writing things down. I’m going to talk about that more in an upcoming episode. The covers are beautiful. The inside pages are 80 pound Mohawk paper, which if you’re a paper person means a lot. It’s luxury. Like the Cadillac of planners.
I absolutely recommend one to everyone, whether you need at the calendaring system or whether you just want to order yourself a custom notebook with dot grid or grid pages, or plain blank pages for journaling or writing or drawing pictures.
Golden Coil doesn’t have sales very often. They don’t have discount codes very often. And I’ve got one for you for this month. Use the code LIVEFREE to take 10% off your entire order at goldencoil.com.
There’s an entire highlight… I think there might be two highlights in my Instagram. If you go to @livefreemiranda on Instagram, you’ll be able to see the highlights of actually me walking you through the way that I’ve chosen and laid out my own planner to give you an idea for what you might like in yours. Again, use the code LIVEFREE for 10% off your entire order at Golden Coil.
Segment: Magical Adventure Moment
For today’s segment, I thought it’d be appropriate to do a magical adventure moment since I am living one right now, let’s jump in:
Swimming In La Fortuna Waterfall
Earlier today, Dave and I walked down about 800 stairs all the way down to the base of La Fortuna waterfall. This giant waterfall here in La Fortuna, Costa Rica. With the light bouncing around creating rainbows and the spray, we posed for some pictures and then stripped down to our bathing suits, climbed over the rocks at the base of the waterfall, held hands and turned around with our backs to the falls and fell straight back, plunging ourselves into the freezing cold crystal clear water.
For the next hour we climbed around on the rocks, swam in the water. At one point I put my feet downstream and was carried by the current bouncing over the moss-covered rocks underneath as if it were a natural water slide. Our guide showed us how, if you threw these little flower petals into the water, swarms of almost translucent fish would come to the surface to either.
The sun was bright and the leaves were vibrant and there were birds swooping back and forth through the tops of the trees. There was one moment when I was floating in a still pool beneath the waterfall, gazing up at this, the canopy of trees and a blue sky and a rainbow of sunshine.
My ears were beneath the water, so everything was a little bit muffled. There wasn’t a lot of sound.
I felt my synapses all wire together to just concrete this experience, that exact moment into my memory. One day I will be going through something difficult or I’ll be a little bit thrown off or frustrated by life. And I’ll be able to recall and reach back in and grab this moment where I’m floating without a care in the world.
In the cool, clear water at the base of a giant majestic waterfall.
Episode: How Tracking Informs Planning
It really was magical as magical as it sounds. Okay. Let’s jump into today’s topic, which is how keeping track of your present helps you to plan for your future.
I wanted to start by just telling you a little bit about the way that I used to work as a Diabetes Educator. For many years, I was specialized in Diabetes Education as a Registered Nurse.
I had a little office in a big office medical tower and on a hospital campus. And the very first time a patient would come in to see me, we would do this kind of basic assessment. I would learn a little bit about them, their medical history, how their diagnosis had come to be. And then I would send them home with some homework.Their homework was to– for the next two weeks– keep a detailed food journal and activity log.
Two of the major factors that contribute to wellness in Type Two Diabetes are what you eat and how much energy you use. And so I would send them home. Two weeks later, patients would come back with their food journal and activity log or not.
Now, the patients who came back with a semi-detailed log, the patients who had tracked the things that they ate, the ways that they had used their energy and physical activity, those patients had created this entire map that together we could look at and assess where things were going well. And what things could use a little bit of tweaking in order to improve their outcomes as patients.
The homework didn’t include any alteration or adjustment to their current habits. I simply wanted to get a snapshot of what their day to day life looked like in the ways that it would impact their diabetes right now, before we made any plans for how to change it in the future. Make sense, right?
Understanding what is actually happening on a day-to-day basis in your life really helps you be able to get an idea of whether or not, and where any type of adjustment or change could be benefited.
You can imagine that patients who came back without a very clear picture were much harder to assess were much harder to help. There was definitely a lot more guesswork and sort of generalized prescription in the things that I could recommend to someone who didn’t have a clear record, then the people who did. The case of a patient who had a very clear track record that they were able to bring in and look at, we could make incredibly detailed, personalized plans for their care.
That is what I hope for each patient. I would hope that the care that they get could be tailored directly to their needs.
We Can Make Plans Based On Reality
And I feel the same way about us and our individual lives. The way that we make plans for our future should really be based on our individual values are individual challenges, and our individual circumstances. It’s really easy out there in the world to find one size fits all prescriptions for happiness, for health, but those things don’t necessarily fit into your life, the way that they could, if you had a little bit of an idea of what your needs actually are.
A lot of times we’re asked to reflect on the things that have gone well, and the things that haven’t gone well, but reflection without a record is subjective, and sometimes fiction.
If you reflect on what’s been going well in your diet or what’s been going well in your relationship and you don’t have any clear record of the actual facts and figures of the situation. Then your reflection is going to be really dependent on your mood or on your hunger level or on your hormones rather than on actual reality.
Personally, I like to track a few different things and I have in the past tracked a lot of different things. Let me give you some examples: At different times of my life, I have tracked my own food in a food journal and exercise. I like to track the books that I read hikes that I go on restaurants, new restaurants that I visit, I at times have tracked my sleep hours or the time I go to bed.
Definitely when my kids were younger, I was able to track some of their feedings and napping and things like that, to help me get a picture of what their days look like and what they needed.
Recently, in the last couple of years, I’ve started tracking my mood and my menstrual cycle, and those two records have dramatically impact my well-being and the way that I’m able to plan.
Those are some examples of some ideas of things that you could track. There’s also all types of habit tracking. Not all of those things are habits, but there are lots of people who find a lot of benefit in tracking simple daily habits like flossing, their teeth, or writing in their journal.
Not only do they do the habit, but they also give themselves a little check mark and a habit tracker in order to stay motivated, have a clear record and be able to continue in their habit-forming pathway.
I’m not going to specifically focus on habit tracking today. In fact, I think that the best thing to track are the things that you are curious about.
Three Ways Tracking Can Help You Plan: Motivation, Awareness, Accountability.
And I’ll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes. I am going to share in this episode, three ways that tracking and reporting helps you plan. The three ways are one. It increases your motivation. Too, it increases your awareness and three, it increases your accountability. So motivation, awareness and accountability are the three ways where tracking and reporting helps you plan for the future.
1. Motivation
So let’s start with number one, motivation. Seeing your progress in any part of your life encourages you to continue on that path. James clear, who is the author of the massive hit Atomic Habits, (It’s an incredible book) He’s a habit genius. He said that the most effective form of motivation is progress.
You don’t know how well you’re progressing in a particular area of your life without having some sort of report or assessment of it. You may have a general sort of long view. Like over a year or two, you think, oh yeah, I think I have gotten better at that. Or I think I am improving. There are a lot of things that don’t really have a short term outcome, even though you would like one. So the short term outcome can simply be that you have a page of checkmarks showing your progress.
Research shows that people who track health habits, there’s been a lot of research, particularly into health habits. Things like getting more healthy in your amount of exercise, healthy, eating, sleep improvement, that those things. You might not notice an immediate impact. Like you go on one run, you don’t automatically feel like your heart is beating easier, or you get one good night of sleep…I mean, actually that one, you probably do notice an immediate effect, but just over time, these things sometimes take a little bit longer.
Research will show that the people who actually track those daily habits with a little check mark as like a progress report, show greater improvement over time. And a lot of this is correlated to what James Clear is talking about.
The idea that simply writing down what you’re doing, keeps you motivated to continue doing it. It feels good to see a line of check marks. And even if you get off track, knowing that you could start another, that you could check another box can be really motivating. I know that sometimes at the end of the day, I want to write down things on my, to-do list so that I can check the box of all the things that I actually got done.
Some of them that I hadn’t really planned on, but since I did them, I figure I might as well give myself that little jolt of joy that comes from being able to check the box. Anyone else feel that?
Sometimes just simply having a progress report, having somewhere to mark down the simple habits or the daily things that we’re doing really helps with motivation.
What about things like our mood or our menstrual cycle. Those are not things that you might feel, you know, especially motivated or not motivated by keeping track of that. Well, I will tell you that I have absolutely had an incredible increase in my self-compassion since I started tracking my mood and my menstrual cycle a couple of years ago. I’m able to have bad days and to have negative emotions and not think, oh, shoot, I shouldn’t feel like this, or why me or what’s happening.
Sometimes I’m able to just have the bad day or feel the negative emotion and have some grace and some compassion for myself because I have an awareness of what’s happening for me, hormonally, I have an awareness around what types of other events in my life may contribute to my overall mood or the, the overall sort of feelings that I’m having.
If you’re interested in moon cycles or menstrual and mood cycles and how those relate, you could listen to Episode 86 that I did with April Davis, who is a specialist in this. And I know a lot of women who listen to that episode were like blown away by the idea that.
You know, the week right after your period, there are some specific things that you can plan into your life to help really take advantage of that hormonal season. And then the week after that, you can plan in a different way. And then the week after that, which would be the week before your next menstrual cycle, you have a certain, you have sort of these vibes and, and these systems and these rhythms in the way you exercise and the things you eat and the mood that you have, and the amount of output and energy that you might have, that is something that you can just like actually calendar and you can see and keeping track of.
There’s a page in the Golden Coil planner that I added for the first time last year, because it was the first time they offered it. But before that I was tracking it in my planner, just on like a note. But I love that. Now there’s an actual mood tracker and I will put mine in the show notes livefreecreative.co/podcast.
Look for episode 159, I’ll take a picture of my page and put it in the show notes so you can see, I track my mood and my menstrual cycle together on this page, which I think is really effective. Sometimes the two correlate a little bit. And so that’s really nice to see.
Number one is motivation. I’ll tell you that not only does it feel like motivation to check those boxes and like see your streak, but also it can feel like it can feel really motivating to be aware and have some self-compassion around the things that you’re experiencing in your life not brings us to number two, which is awareness.
2. Awareness
One of the huge benefits of tracking and reporting is that you have this incredible amount of self-awareness that you otherwise would not have. Now, most of us have almost no idea where our time and energy and money go on a day to day basis. I’m always surprised when I start tracking something new. I’m always surprised.
I think I have an idea of how I’m spending my time or how much extra time I have or how much time I spend on something. The same thing goes for money and for energy and all of these different resources that we have. It’s really easy to misinterpret where they’re going. When we aren’t actually tracking where they’re going we usually misjudge dramatically the amount of time that we spend doing one thing versus another.
For example, now I’ve always been a big reader. I’ve loved to read since I was young and it’s always been one of my favorite pastimes, but until a couple years ago, I had no idea how many books per year I was reading.
I didn’t, you know, I don’t really care as far as like– I need to read more or less for any specific reason. I just thought it would be fun to start tracking. So a couple of years ago, I started writing down the books that I was reading. As I read them just on a notes pages in the front of my planner, I would write down the book and the author and give it a little mini rating.
That simple act of keeping track of how much I was reading in which books I was reading, dramatically improved my awareness around it. So then last year I was able to set myself a goal that was realistic because I had an idea, you know, going from like nothing, having no idea to setting a big goal can be challenging. But because I had an idea of about how many books I had read the year before I could set myself a goal of reading a hundred books last year.
What this did for me– the awareness– how this helps me plan and kind of set this goal, was that it inspired me to read in my free time, rather than using that time in another way that wasn’t as meaningful to me, maybe watching a random show, maybe scrolling on Instagram.
There are so many different ways that we kind of fritter away time. Not that it’s wasted, because I think that all of those things have a place in our lives and can be valuable. But, because I set myself a specific goal to read a little bit more than I had read the year before that meant that I was able to focus on it and challenge myself and be excited about it.
I know that in the past I had thought I want to read more or I really like reading. And I know a lot of you have reached out and asked questions about “How do you read so much?” or “Where do you find time?”, or “How do you read when you have kids home?”
And by the way, I should just put a plug in for an episode that I did with Janssen Bradshaw of Everyday Reading. I don’t remember the episode number right now, but if you go to the show notes, I’ll make sure that it’s linked in there. So you can listen to it. That is all about how to create a reading routine, even as a busy mom. So that. It’s a great episode.
The point is that I know that a lot of you fall into the same camp where you really like the idea of reading and you don’t know exactly how to fit into your life.
My experience was that as soon as I started tracking it and having an awareness for it and setting a little goal for it, then I made more space for it. Really set it to the forefront as something that was in my awareness. And rather than doing something else, mindlessly, I very purposefully would reach for my book.
Just a total aside, because it goes along with reading: right now I’m reading a book called The Overstory by Richard Powers and it is so good.
I was trying to explain it to Dave and how there’s all these different characters and their stories intertwine. And then they come back out and it’s making me look at trees in the wilderness a whole different way. And today we went on a hike in the jungle and I was like, jaw dropped eyes popping out of my head at these little micro-worlds that live all on a tree and it’s just like mind blowing and incredible. So I will link The Overstory by Richard Powers in the show notes because I highly recommend it. It’s so good.
I want you to think about for yourself. What are some areas that you would like to have a little bit more aware of?
Something that might be helpful for you to come up with this for yourself, might be to think about some of the questions that you ask yourself from time to time.
For example, if you ever find yourself asking the question: “Where does all of our money go?” If you’re struggling with a budget, you might find some benefit out of the awareness that comes from actually writing down what you’re spending money and keeping really clear track of it for a week or for a month. Then you have so much awareness that you didn’t have before.
The same thing goes for the question “Where did all of this stuff in my house come from?” A lot of us feel like that sometimes. Right? Where does all this stuff come from? Actually keeping track when you buy something and you bring it home, or when you acquire something new can help you, you know, where you got it, what, where it’s from, why you bought it, what you were thinking that can just bring a level of awareness that you didn’t have before.
If you are having any sort of food reactions, one of the first things that your practitioner will tell you to do is keep a food journal to be able to gain awareness as to what might be causing the reaction. If you’re feeling sick sometimes, or if you’re having any sort of allergic response. They’ll need the information and the awareness that comes from tracking what it is you’re eating in order to come up with any sort of solution.
If you ever ask yourself, “Why am I feeling so grumpy?” Or “Why do I feel like I don’t have very much energy?” you may find that keeping track of your mood and keeping track of your menstrual cycle if you’re a menstruating female is helpful. Keeping track of the things that set you off. If you’re, for example, kind of feeling like you don’t have as much patience as you would like keeping track for a little while of what it is that causes you to get frustrated or to yell in situations that you don’t want to you over.
You know, may have the overarching thought “I don’t really want to be a yelling mom yet. I am finding myself yell often.” Keeping track for just a week of what are the situations in which I find myself yelling will bring a huge amount of awareness to it. It’ll shine a spotlight on it.
I’ll tell you maybe five or six years ago, I made a commitment because I was teaching a lesson in church and I wanted to experiment for myself about the power of our words. And so I set myself a goal to not raise my voice for a week with my kids. And my kids were younger at the time. So, Plum was three. That means Eliot was five. Milo would have been like seven.
So they were pretty young, still like struggling to put on shoes. And I don’t know if Plum would have been all the way potty trained by then and you know, just younger kids sometimes take a lot more out of you in like physical and emotional energy every day. They’re not as self-sufficient.
I remember that because I set myself this really short term, very clear goal of not raising my voice for the entire week that I had a lot of awareness of when I wanted to, because I had to sort of restrain that urge. And then I was able to teach about it and to share the things that I had learned, that the specific triggers that I had discovered in myself that caused that sort of lack of patience.
And knowing those triggers has changed my mothering and my ability to recognize that feeling late to something, or like I’m pressed for time and being in a hurry, is like one of my least favorite things. Understanding that that’s a situation that I have a really hard time with emotionally has helped me then to go on and make decisions in our family’s life where we really try to reduce that friction. Where we get our kids up way earlier than they might need to get up, because I do not want to be in a hurry in the morning. And so we have plenty of time. We give ourselves plenty of time so that nothing feels hurried about our morning, getting ready for school.
Now I have one child that still challenges that.I mean, I think we could wake him up at like four in the morning and we’d still have a little bit of a hurry at the end, but for the most part, just knowing that I like to feel a little bit of a head a ahead rather than a little bit behind is really helpful.
And also allowing myself to understanding that it might be okay for me to be late. And that that’s just going to be something that when I’m not only responsible for myself, but I’m also responsible for other people that that’s going to be part of our life. That is okay. And that I’m going to be fine with that.
I’m just telling you all of this to let you know that the awareness that comes when you are tracking and paying attention to something.
I think even like not only paying attention, but also writing it down, there’s something really powerful about writing it down. Makes a huge, huge impact on your ability to then make changes and plan and have a more purposeful future.
You may have a question: “I wonder how much time our family actually spends together?”, or “Am I spending enough quality time with each of my kids as individuals?” Pull out a piece of paper, grab a planner and, you know, write a little, write their name at the top of each one.
Every time you spend a 10-minute interval with them during a day or a five-minute or whatever, you decide, do a little check mark, or just keep track of it. Five minutes with Eliot reading a book, 10 minutes going on a walk with the dog, with Milo.
As soon as you are able to track and understand what is actually happening right now, then you’re able to see a clear picture to make decisions moving forward about whether you’d like to increase, whether you’d like to drink, decrease, whether you’d like to add a tradition in that makes all the things that you want to do a little bit easier.
This awareness that comes through tracking. I think I’ve driven that point home.
3. Accountability
And the final point that I want to share in this episode about the ways that tracking and reporting can help you plan is accountability. If you are anything like me, there are a lot of things that you say you want, that you want to accomplish, that you want to create, that you want to spend time on, that you don’t actually do.
Tracking and reporting can help you be accountable for your own values for your own dreams.
One of the most poignant examples that I have of this is from a couple years ago, when I really, really wanted to write a book, I took myself on a retreat and I wrote an outline and I wrote, you know, I copied and pasted from some stories I had written on my blog and I had a document ready to go. And then I came home from the retreat, so fired up and so excited about it. And I didn’t open it again for probably 10 months.
I just, in my head, I was writing it and I kept talking about it and telling people, oh my gosh, I’m writing a book. It’s so fun. And I, you know, I’m really excited about it, but I wasn’t actually writing the words.
And the way that you write a book is to type words or write words, the words go together to form sentences and then paragraphs and then chapters. And then there it is. You have a book. You can’t write a book without writing the words.
Finally, about 10, 12 months after my initial kickstart of my book writing, I decided that I was going to hold myself accountable.
The way that I did that was by tracking my daily word count. I made a spot in each of my days in my planner where I would, I just wrote WC and a little colon. And at the end of the day, I would write my word count for my manuscript. That meant that the days that I actually wrote new words, I could see the word count, go up the days that I didn’t write anything, the word count stayed the same.
The days that I edited, sometimes I had to edit and the word count would go down. But every single day I was opening up and looking at that document. And you know how sometimes the first step is the hardest, as soon as I would open it up and start looking at. I would feel inspired and I would start writing.
I could write a story or I could share an anecdote or I could work on a little piece of it. And slowly day by day, my word count, grew and grew and grew until the book was completed.
Giving myself something specific to track, held me accountable to my own personal goal. James Clear, who I have talked about already in this show who wrote Atomic Habits, he recommends that you track things in as far as habit tracking and accountability, that you track things that can take two minutes or less.
Two Minutes Or Less Rule
So two minutes or less might be holding yourself accountable to…Did you hear that frog? That noise was like a jungle frog right outside…
So holding yourself accountable to small things like writing my word count that wasn’t, I didn’t have the goal of writing 500 words a day that would have taken a lot more than two minutes.
What I was tracking was something that I could look at. Every single day I could look and see what my word count was. And sometimes I got into the manuscript and I would write and be inspired and sometimes I would edit things out, but just keeping track, holding myself accountable for some pieces made all the difference.
The Challenge: Track Something Moving You Towards A Personal Goal
I want to challenge you to think of a couple things. Maybe it’s just one obvious one that comes immediately to mind. When I say, what is something that you want to be doing that you aren’t regularly doing, or what is a big goal that you can’t shake that you just keep feeling like you want to move in that direction, and yet you haven’t gotten started or you haven’t gotten very far, break that down that goal into something that you could keep track of. Something that you could track to create awareness and accountability around the progress that you could have.
Have you got it?
The thing that you’re thinking of?
I want to challenge you to write something down, to keep track. Maybe you don’t want to make a big change right now. Maybe you just need to bring awareness and motivation to it.
Okay.
Simply writing down what’s happening.
Now, when we have a clear picture of where we are, we’re much more prepared to make plans for where we want to go.
So my friends, do you feel ready to track something that you haven’t yet been tracking to pay attention to your present and report to yourself? What you’re doing and how you’re doing it so that you can use all of that information and motivation and accountability to create a life that you love even more in the future.
I can’t wait to hear what you choose to keep track of that you aren’t yet tracking. And to hear about all of the motivation and awareness and accountability that comes because of that choice.
Personal Accountability Mentorship
Now, I just wanted to let you know that for those of you, any of you, someone, one of you listening, who could use a little bit of added accountability, I have a couple spots available right now in my one-on-one creative mentorship.
You can find out all of the details of that. It includes weekly check-ins and a monthly call, and I help you work on your own creative and personal goals. I’m your cheerleader. I’m your support person. I’m your accountability partner. And we have a really good time as well. All of the information for that is available at patreon.com/livefreecreative.
Conclusion
I want to thank everyone. Who’s here for listening to the show. If you love it, and you want to support me even further, you can leave a five-star rating and a written review on iTunes. It makes a huge impact that sort of. A little record of all of the people who have enjoyed listening to Live Free Creative, and helps other people know what they can look forward to when they’re listening in.
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