As you may remember, I made an attempt to organize my life via Google sheets back in February. It became a habit for a while until I found an alternative called Asana. After reflecting upon my working habit, I realized I have more flexibility when I do not assign a specific time frame for each individual task. Instead, by listing out the tasks I have, I can easily keep track of the things I need to accomplish for the day AND easily adjust to unexpected events/activities/incidents that might come up and disrupt my schedule.

Enough talk about my reorganized task management: now that’s talk about something more personal! I tried to do bullet journals (bujo-ing) when I first entered the IB but soon halted the process since I felt like I was “wasting too much time.” However, I realized that a bujo does not necessarily need to be a task tracker. Instead, it can be a mood tracker that allows me to have some self-care over the days. I only began the process since September 24th since I soon realized that as my mental health declines due to the immense stress I am giving myself, my physical health declines accordingly. I found research done by the National Center for Biotechnology Information that supported my assumption, which stated, “Self-tracking mood helps users increase their awareness and proactive self-regulation of their emotional well-being.”

Although it has been a few days, I found the process to be cathartic. The method is really simple, too! What I did was basically write a sentence or two about how I am feeling that day. I thought about giving my day a rating, but I decided not to since a day can be mixed with good and bad things accumulated together without one prevailing another. The information is a bit personal, but here I attached a page that was not-so-personal. Although like Asana, there are mood-tracking apps on mobile phones, I believe I need to flush out my creativity in order for deep mental cleansing.