This month I’ve been really focusing on tracking my daily activities. Here at the midpoint I’d like to take a look at how I’m feeling, potential mood factors, and how the tracking system is working so far.

I had my first good day of the month yesterday. I spent the day with friends helping one of them move, and then picked up dinner at night for my wife. Even though I struggled to help as much as I wanted to with the move due to being out of shape, my friend was still grateful and I think it felt good to be helpful and appreciated.

Another major mood factor is that recently a job I had been waiting to hear back from for over a year got back to me. This is huge for me, since this would be the first career job I would have in my new field since going back to school. I can feel a big weight off my shoulders from that as looking for new job opportunities in my field no longer feels so desperate and urgent. The job got back to me on the 12th, which corresponds to a big swing in both mood and energy levels, leading me to believe this was the major contributor to feeling better recently.

Now to the tracking system, the first two weeks have shown substantial productivity, 42 and 47 respectively, placing them within the upper bound of activity compared to last month. I’m proud of that, and also grateful to myself for keeping better track this month so I can more clearly see how I’m doing. The sustained productivity feels great, and even though I had a challenging first half of the month it feels good to know that I can keep up that productivity by paying attention to what activities are easy to reach for in those times and which are difficult.

Based off these observations, I would say that the tracking system seems to work very well for cueing me towards achievable results when I’m feeling unfocused, as it gives me a menu of easy to difficult things to do as I see fit. I’d also say it does well for reinforcing my appreciation for the things I can do, and keeping an eye on what’s harder so I can pay more attention to that when I’m feeling able. Dishes, for example, have in the last few months gone from an infrequent task to something I can handle confidently within a few minutes, which I’m glad to say feels like progress from a few years ago discussing strategies with my therapist on when to do them.

My goal for the rest of the month is to stay focused on tracking my activities and keeping up the good work so far. By the end of this month I will have recorded my mood every day for an entire year, and I look forward to posting about that data and any general patterns that can be observed from it.