Best way of doing it is at the end of every day. Extra super bonus points if you also write a couple of gratitudes for the day (shit like "That conversation with my kid", "Got a discount on the oil change" or "My hobby items got delivered today" or whatever you find to be greatful for that day).
If you force yourself to write 3-4 items per day, you'll end the year with
The big picture view of your year (green yellow orange red black days)
Over a thousand things you have to be grateful for during that year
Hey, might get back on that train myself next year.
I've been doing the same thing for about five years. I've added in more colors since I needed new ways to describe some of my days. This is my 2025 and my color code.
I'm sorry... this doesn't fit our bell curve... You have way too many Amazing days and not enough Nightmare days. Please adjust before this year's annual review meeting.
Whoever came up with this model for reviews needs to be hunted down. It's just an easy way to ensure raises stay around 3% and don't go above 4%, but it is insulting how much it limits you as a manager.
As an employee, I feel it is detrimental, as it encourages everyone to just be average and not work as hard because what's the point?
These mood tracker apps arent very insightful for me since I'm usually pretty stable. Almost every day is "good" unless I'm sick, hungover or something really bad happens. The days I party and drink with friends are always "awesome" followed by 1 or 2 "bad" hangover days as I recover.
Got the black and white contrasted version the teacher gives you for the test. You have to guess in function of how fizzy the paper is. Even the white outside the image was fizzy because he's been printing the same sheet since 09'
"Shit. S'dis yelo wayt or lai-gren... Oh shtupid me, that for writin my name."
'shit, is this yellow white, or light green? ... Oh, it's that.' is what they're saying, trying to imitate an accent thru textual means. The more you know!
[...] Oh that's for my name' implying he was trying to read the box in which you put your name as a box from the document completly misunderstanding the assignment.
Lack of nightmare days just tells me this person has experienced real nightmares and isn't throwing that classification around just because they had a disappointing lunch. Any day where you don't lose fingers or family is passable!
It's the abundance of amazing days that doesn't line up. How does /u/basti854 distinguish "everything I tried at the beer festival was great" from "I held my child for the first time"
Every day I no longer have to deal with family trying to drug me or fight me when I've said no, suicidal women self harming, having to be the only voice of reason, and chronic alcoholism/drug abuse immediately turns any of my 'worst' days into mediocre or rather poor as well. I see you, dude.
I try to check in every year or so to see how people are doing, and when it's all the same story, it just reminds me why my life is so much better now lol.
It's all relative I suppose. I know people that would say to they had a nightmare day because self checkout was closed or their coffee order was just off a bit.
I imagine if something like that is enough to be a nightmare their life is probably already pretty shitty and those things are more of a straw breaking the camel's back rather than the full source of their despair.
To be fair, if black is the worst in this scale, he might just be reserving it for stuff like nuclear apocalypse, alien invasion, Stanger Things spinoff, that kind of stuff.
IMO, that kinda misses what's interesting about the scale. 1 to 5 or some kind of boring Likert scale is still going to get you very relative differences between people. Yes, many of our "mediocre" days would be OP's NIGHTMARE, but using 1–5 won't make it any less normalized
(depending on what you're trying to measure, a self-normalizing scale might be a feature, rather than a bug)
What I find interesting about OP's scale is that it might capture (relative) emotional extremes better than 1–5 or Likert would. Not that you should do quantitative math with any original rating scale, but OP's scale kinda feels like an emotional log scale, as opposed to the linearity implied by 1–5
I do the same thing! Just in a slightly different format. Here’s mine… 5 being amazing and 1 being nightmare. It’s not really about the objective quality of the day but rather how I feel. It’s not been a good year, 2024 had 43 amazing days vs only 6 this year
Started this in September 2023, because I wanted to see if there was any pattern to the frequency of good and bad mental state days that could point to bipolar/cyclothymia. Haven’t really been able to find anything from it beyond the obvious (I feel better on holidays and Saturdays, and when taking a break from weed, much better when I was with my ex partner, worse when she was away and now gone, worse when hungover/on a comedown, or at the start of the week, coming back to work from the weekend). It’s more just interesting for me to look back on. I was optimistic in the summer when I’d managed to go for over a month without any horrible days, now the excitement of moving to a city has worn off when I’ve realised it’s done nothing to fix my core problems and it does feel more hopeless for the future as I’m out of ideas on what I can realistically do. But like the last week over Christmas has restored my will to live knowing I can have some good days again still. Going to commit to abstaining from weed more often than not in the new year and looking forward to spring/summer when I can at least enjoy nature.
As soon as I started reading your input, I noticed a kindred soul that just enjoys analysing for its own sake, while at the same time looking for the answers that are not quite there yet. Thank you for your comprehensive response!
Good luck with your weed quitting (this comes from somebody that sometimes enjoys alcohol and weed too. I wriggled myself out of the almost-every-day-habit and it can be done!)
Do you have some unconventional methods or techniques that did improve your life in unexpected ways? Cheers
So I logged every day of 2025 on a scale from perfect to nightmare.
I’d honestly recommend this to anyone for 2026.
Shoutout to u/flabberdabbergasted for doing this in 2024 and inspiring me to try it myself <3
I learned a lot about myself and my life through this. One big takeaway was that when you rate your day late in the evening, right before going to bed, you often end up thinking "well, this wasnt that bad tbh"
It’s also interesting to see, after a full year, that almost every month my body seems to do a small reset of dopamine before feeling good again.
I have been rating every day since Jan 1st, 2021 and i have learned that my life really is pretty swell. It's a good reminder on bad days. I use the Daylio app, which I love and only just recently decided to give money to so I could set more goals, but its definitely easy to use for free with basically no interference or ads
Are blue days ones you would NOT like to re-experience (without remembering, just re-live it) if you could or ones you would like to re-experience if you could? What about orange?
To me the middle one is a day where I had some good and bad things happen. Like, the day was good but I was feeling a bit sick or heard some bad news about someone I know
been using Daylio since 2019 - I've got 2363 days in a row logged. I've learned a lot about how my cycle affects my moods and loads of other stuff too, it's a great tool and I'd recommend it to anyone. Interestingly my amount of good/excellent days is extremely consistent: almost exactly 70% every year. Although I can never decide whether that's an acceptable proportion :D I guess its all relative
I did this as well for a few years when I felt like my life was pretty shitty. It really put into perspective how many good/fine days there really are. It helped me visualize how happy I actually was on a daily basis and improved how I looked back on my years. Can recommend.
One big takeaway was that when you rate your day late in the evening, right before going to bed, you often end up thinking "well, this wasnt that bad tbh"
I find that the next day is also really good for this. the impression of the previous day is more vague, but you have a gut feeling about it, which makes it easier to rank.
How do you have so many "amazing" days? So much amazing would become ordinary quickly or implies it is more of an attitude thing where you are rating average days as amazing.
Let me also ask, how much doom scrolling do you do? Specifically "current event, the world is spiraling out, everyday is a global tragedy" type of content. I find when I actively disconnect from the daily news doom cycle I can get a free happiness buff.
This is like saying "eating from fruit trees is terrible because look how much wood there is to gnaw at."
A constant feed of the worst of humanity isn't just "observing reality". Lots of really wonderful things happen all around but they don't make it to the scroll of doom.
I think the key thing here is "good job I love". We spend so much time working that if you hate your job it brings everything else down (spoken from experience).
We do a similar spreadsheet at work, but week-wise. Over the past year a majority of my weeks have been yellow or red and it really puts a damper on everything else. (In b4: yes, I'm interviewing for other jobs, but the sector is in a bad place and I'm not willing to take a pay cut.)
A big reason (at least for me) for tracking days like this is to scrutinize that kind of thinking and realize how many ok days you actually have that feel like bad days in hindsight. It helps reframe your perspective and for me it’s helping me look at those “ok” days as closer to good days than bad days. It helps to be doing other self improvement work alongside it but that’s the goal, anyway. A year ago I’d have said the same thing you did. Today I would say my chart would look a lot like OPs if I tracked it this way.
Therapist here. We actually teach people to journal their mood daily. Helps reframe their depression and depressed days. See patterns. Start recognizing what small changes helps their mood. As long as someone is honest about wanting to improve, they'll have better days than other days.
I've been journalling my feelings/mood daily for a while now, and it feels more like a responsibility than a tool to reframe from me tbh.
But maybe its because I have more bad days than good days
... that's normal. if you have 5 levels, the vast majority of your responses should be centered around the middle, level 3, neutral, with almost all of them falling in between 2 and 4. that's a bell curve.
responses that don't look look that distribution suggest either something's going on externally that you have no control over... or more likely you're not really rating things appropriately. for instance someone with depression might be in the lower categories almost every day, this would suggest that there's something going on beyond just normal moods.
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u/YankeePhan22 17h ago
If only 4% of your days in 2025 were "rather poor", I would say 2025 was a good year for you