Here I am trying to stay true to my life’s work by writing 🙂 Today it’s another self-coaching tool, part of this series I’m beginning called #CoachYourself.
Let’s talk about our day.
The “Day Chronicle” tool is really just what it says.
- The moment you wake up, jot down the time.
- The next thing you do something, jot down the time and the activity.
- Do this for all your activities until you fall asleep. Don’t forget, jot down the time 🙂
- All you need is pen, paper, and mindfulness
- Do this for a minimum of one day. You can even go up to doing it for a week.
I’m sure this exercise that is something you’ve already heard of before or maybe even thought of yourself but – have you ever really done it?
It seems silly writing everything down. When you look at your paper, it may even look silly, especially the beginnings of it. Today was a sluggish morning and this was mine:
~ 6:30am – woke up ~
~ 6:50 am – checked Facebook ~
~ 7:00 am – went back to snooze ~
~ 7:20 am – checked Facebook ~
~ 7:40 am – charged phone ~
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do my “Day Chronicle” today.
What can this “Day Chronicle” exercise possibly give you? From doing it myself a couple of times and from recommending it to coaching clients, I can share three big things. [SEE: Get Life Coaching]
- Awareness and mindfulness: Once you put yourself to the task of writing the time and the task down before or after you do something (though ideally, it’s before), without even doing anything yet you’re already becoming mindful. Mindfulness here simply means, knowing what you’re doing. Seems simple but, is it? Sometimes we do things so automatically and regularly that we don’t know we’re doing it. Do you remember what you did 3 hours ago? Do you remember what you were doing at this time yesterday? Do you often find yourself thinking, “Where did the time go?” We can think of this awareness and mindfulness as learning.
- Patterns and habits: You get to see what you really spend time on. Perhaps you’ll find you spend an hour a day just having breakfast. Or an hour and a half a day, scrolling the internet. Maybe you spend 30 minutes deciding what blouse to wear. Maybe you take 10 minutes on a cigarette break and 20 minutes on a coffee break. Who knows? No one will unless you write it down. This can be quite… mind-blowing to say the least. For myself and other people who I know have tried it, it’s an eye-opening look on how you actually spend your day.
- Making time for priorities: Once you’re aware of patterns and habits, you’ll get to see which actions you need more of and which you need less of. By doing a little math, we can add and subtract time to our activities eventually creating more time for what’s important to us. For example, I can take 15 minutes less time taking a shower – those 15 minutes can go to more time spent meditating. Of course, this is just calculating and after this we’re actually going to have to follow our calculations. But as I always share, observation and planning are always great steps towards change and hope.
If you do this and you find, you need a little bit of help in the aftermath of what you’ve discovered, perhaps try Life Coaching. If you’d like to try it with me, visit this page: Get Life Coaching.
Thank you for your time and namaste 
Let me know if you have suggestions or questions.
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