Cards on the table: I like to write. Maybe a little too much.
It’s inconvenient to have crapped-out wrists that limit typing severely and a voice just weird enough in accent & vocal fry to make dictation software stare back at me, blinking blankly, instead of capturing the marvelous flow of inspiration…
I have a bunch of self-documentation templates and techniques which I’ve been meaning to write about, because we know how important providing evidence of your own experience can be and because… I like to write.
Sigh.
I’m not trying to make them pretty and I’m certainly not taking the time to make them generic or pare out the details of what I’ve tried and used over the years. I like doing that, but wanting to do that is what has kept from getting this stuff up… for years.
I’m just going to throw them at you instead. You’re all smart enough to take what you like and leave the rest. Have fun!
Note: All of my Self-Documentation by LivingAnyway.com is marked CC0 1.0. To view a copy of this mark, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
TL;DR – it’s a formal way of making this work Public Domain. Go wild. It’s yours now.
Pro Tip: There are good health tracker apps now, and one or two are very good. If they work for you, that’s good enough!
If, like me, screens hurt your eyes and tapping hurts your hands, you might want to consider the ol’ pen-and-paper method here.
We’ve got logs in color. We’ve got ’em in black and white. We’ve got half sheets, whole sheets. We’ve got tables, checkboxes, body maps… anything I could think of to make using these a low-cognition task:
You can see how my tracking changed depending on just how sick I was vs. how much activity I could (or, more often, wanted to) expect from myself. They show how my priorities and needs shifted, what worked for me well enough to track, and so on. Don’t worry that it seems rather personal – it’s all information; information is a good thing; good things should be shared. You might find a relevant format to start your own tracker from.
They’re in PDF format, for technical reasons. Conversion tools and PDF editing tools are available, some of them for free. Have fun, and come back here to re-download if you mess something up. This is a no-shame zone.