Fill Out a Quick Form and Find Out Why Your Life Sucks (or Doesn’t)
It only takes a minute to take a daily inventory, and it can help you discover problematic patterns in your day. It’s like a data diary, but you don’t have to be a tech geek to use it.
Why Take a Daily Personal Inventory?
If you’re reading this article, I probably don’t have to answer this question for you because the headline already has. We do a lot of things in our days and neglect others. It’s easy to know when you’re tired on a given day or two, but it’s not quite so easy to notice a routine of exhaustion.
The same goes for problems and benefits with exercise, food, and social activities. You might know the specific cause of any given bad day, but what if those were just symptoms? What if you’ve been stuck in a pattern that causes regular trouble in your life that could be easily resolved if you just paid attention to the bigger picture?
That’s the goal of taking a personal inventory—to see the bigger picture. Sometimes life takes a wrong turn for an obvious reason, but sometimes you’re just routinely dehydrated and don’t realize it. Sometimes you’re not sleeping well on Tuesday nights because you end up working later, watching television later, and struggling to fall asleep on time.
While you can’t diagnose every issue with a little general tracking, you can notice a lot. Even if you’re satisfied with your life, it’s good to know why so you can remember that later on. It only takes a minute to make a quick record. It’s the analysis that requires effort, but that’s what this article is all about: I made something to take care of that for you.
How to Take Your Personal Inventory
Back in 2012 I wrote a daily inventory spreadsheet to get a birds eye view of my life. It helped me notice some nasty habits and worry less about the stuff I was actually handling well. I put an article together on Lifehacker to share it with others, hoping it could help, and the reception was far more positive than I anticipated.
Unfortunately, Google hadn’t anticipated the amount of spreadsheet duplication traffic the article sent and most people weren’t able to make a copy. I’ve always wanted to fix it, but couldn’t find a platform better-suited for sharing this kind of thing.
Recently, I stumbled upon Airtable. They offer collaborative spreadsheets like Google, but with the superpowers of a database—and it’s free to use for small stuff like this. It’s a pretty cool platform that can do a lot more than make simple to copy my personal inventory tracker. If you like this project, you should check out a ton of cool stuff other people are doing that you can replicate as well.
Step #1: Copy the Base!
To get started, you need to duplicate my Airtable base (their chosen nomenclature for their supercharged spreadsheet-database crossbreed). I’ve embedded it below, so just click the copy button.
That’s the whole thing, in all its simplicity, with five sample days of data plugged in. You can actually interact with it on this page, but what you really want to do is click the Copy base link on the bottom right. You can also go directly to the base if you’re having trouble and copy it from there.
If you don’t already have an account with Airtable, you’ll need to sign up for one so you have a private copy of this base that you can use and alter as you please. It’s free. The most it’ll cost you is an occasional (and optional) newsletter, unless you want to pay for extra features.
Step #2: Launch Form View!
Once you’ve got an account and a copy of the base, all you have to do is start filling out your inventory. To do that, you need to bring up Form View.
Right underneath the “Daily Inventory” tab you’ll see the view selector, which should say “Grid view” at first. The option will be “Personal Daily Inventory Form.” Choose that and then click the Preview button. This will bring up the form.
If you prefer, you can click Share and grab a direct URL to the form if you want to save it as a bookmark.
At this point, things get pretty easy. You just have to fill out the form and log in any time you want to see your personal data and your average and daily scores.
Personalize Your Results
The Airtable base contains formulas that consider the weight of your input and calculate various scores for your day automatically. You’re welcome to mess around with them, if that’s your thing, and you can learn more about how that works here.
Everyone, regardless of their math nerd status, can change a few important variables to make sure the calculations reflect individual goals—not just what I decided works best. The Personal Inventory base includes three hidden fields (you don’t need to both with the others) that you can adjust. You can think of them as variables or settings—whatever you prefer.
These hidden fields automatically add a Sleep Goal (in hours), Water Goal (in 8oz. glasses), and Exercise Target (in minutes) that are set to 8 hours, 12 glasses, and 30 minutes (respectively). If you want to change some of these, just show the fields and double click (or tap if you’re using an Airtable mobile app)
I doubt I need to explain the eight hour average of sleep, though you might to change it to seven if you’re like me and do better with a little less. Exercise is subjective, but I used 30 minutes because that’s a length most people can handle.
As for the water, that’s a highly debated topic. I researched and wrote an article on the subject, finding that the suggested average was around 9 glasses for women and 13 for men. I chose 12, because that works well for me. You’re welcome to leave this number or change it to something that suits you better. The number you enter, however, will be subject to increase based on that day’s exercise. You’ll have to account for water loss due to diuretics like caffeinated beverages on your own, though.
Because the variables get set automatically through column defaults, if you have a different target for a specific day for any reason, you can change it for that day after logging. Just go into the Airtable base, choose the relevant cell, and change the number. Your scores will adjust accordingly.
I kept the variable columns hidden to keep things clean and simple, but you’re welcome to leave them visible if you prefer. It won’t cause any trouble.
How to Read the Results
You likely wouldn’t have much trouble figuring out what your scores mean even with a little explanation. Take a look at some samples scores below and I bet you‘ll at least have an idea of what’s going on.
Starting from the left, you have your Health Score which—as you might have guessed—is calculated based on physical health-related information you provide via the form. It considers the quality of what you ate and drank, how much you exercised, and the relationship between these things. For example, exercise will automatically increase your water intake goal based on time and intensity.
Your Problem Score considers your recorded problems and their impact on your day. Like most of the scores, certain responses carry a higher weight than others. For example, the significance of logging an argument depends on the level of negativity in other responses. This probably goes without saying, but a higher problem score indicates a problem.
Your Positivity Score reflects the good parts of your day. It comes mostly from your reflection but does incorporate some less opinion-based responses as well. While your Health Score focuses on physical health, your Positivity Score focuses more on emotional health.
Finally your Day Score considers the previous categories and calculates an overall rating for the day. You’ve likely noticed that these numbers look like they could be percentages. While there’s no upper limit—you can score over 100, technically, as you can see in one of the Health Score examples—you can think of every score like a grade on an exam (but not in a scary way).
Here’s a general breakdown:
- 90 and Above: Excellent
- 80–89: Great
- 70–79: Good/Average
- 60–69: Poor
- 40–59: Fail
- 39 and Below: Epic Fail
But don’t think of “Fail” and “Poor” as bad words. We‘ve all had bad days. I’ve had bad years, and I don’t think I’m unique in that regard. Get comfortable with those words, because if you struggle with something regularly you’ll see them often.
There are a lot of upsides to failures and mistakes. First of all, when you’re in a bad situation you have plenty of room to do better in the future. Failure, by nature, provides a wealth of opportunity and you benefit from the knowledge of something that didn’t work.
You have an opportunity to learn, and a lower bar to clear the next day if you forgive your mistakes and set goals that focus primarily on just doing better.
Basically, if you have a particularly bad day like the 49 in the sample, that’s the bar to clear for tomorrow. Taking a personal inventory showed me that if I set a high bar and drop below it, I’m likely to keep failing if I expect myself to jump all the way back up from where I’ve fallen.
Motivation and accomplishment feed one another, so I now focus on making realistic expectations of myself. When they’re the sorts of things I can almost always accomplish, that chain reaction gets me back to good days a lot faster than trying to make the leap immediately.
But that’s just one of the things I’ve learned from this project. I’m excited to share it again—now on a much more capable platform—because I’d love to know what you learn from your own experiences.
If you want to let me know what you discover, there are a lot of ways to reach me. Or just start a discussion below and share what you’ve learned with everyone.
