Get the Happiness Tracker Spreadsheet
Updated for 2023
One of my first posts on this site was about How to track your happiness. It includes a simple and actionable plan to track your happiness daily, using Jim Collins’ system, that he devised and spoke about on The Tim Ferriss Show.
And if you track your happiness long enough using this method, as I have, then you will eventually start to see patterns in your good days and bad. From there you can start to make some tweaks.
This is really simple process and takes about 1-2 minutes each night.
This process is very simple. It will not take you long to do, but to get the benefit, you must commit to doing it every day.
All that you need to do, is open up this spreadsheet each day, and then enter in your score for the day:
- 2 is a great day
- 1 is a good day
- 0 is a so-so day
- -1 is a bad day
- -2 is a really bad day
You can also add in any “Notes of the Day” or you can skip it.
For me, my “Notes of the Day” usually include a short description of any highlights of the day. I also like to add in my “Top 3 Moments” as I have found it brings on a feeling of gratitude. These are usually a good meal, a fun moment with my kids, a new show or good book, etc.
Even on my bad days, I try to find something good in that day. It just helps me see the bigger picture. Today was bad, but that is ok. Tomorrow will be better. I know now this is a fact, because I track it!
Ok, so here is an example of what entries will look like:
And if you do this for an entire month, you will start to have enough data to review and take some action.
Here is an example of what my data looks like already.
For each day of the week, the “Yearly Review 2021” tab will auto calculate the average points for a given day of the week, and also calculate my year-over-year happiness increase or decrease.
You can see that for 2021, my happiness has increased by near 15% this year over 2020. That is great to see, especially considering that Jan-Feb of 2020 were normal and the remainder of the year was anything but.
Even though it doesn’t feel like it at times, I am happier than I was last year so far.
Download the Happiness Tracker Spreadsheet
Now you too can utilize my Happiness Tracker Spreadsheet.
Then navigate to “File” and “Make a Copy” for yourself (or download).
I have left in my actual scores, so that you can see what this looks like in practice. You can go ahead and remove those and after reviewing, you can also delete the 2020 tabs.
To track your daily happiness:
- Navigate to the “2023” tab and start to enter your daily score in column “E”
- Enter any “Notes of the Day” in column “D”
From there you should be on your way to tracking your happiness. That is all you need to do. Like I said above, it should only take 1-2 minutes per day, if not less.
And as always please let me know if you run into any issues with the spreadsheet in the comments. Thanks!
Why track your happiness?
Tracking my happiness, has helped me to really ensure that I am doing the things in my life that make me happy. It has also helped me to realize that I wasn’t happy working as a CEO any longer, and it encouraged me to engineer my exit.
Tracking my happiness, has helped me to really ensure that I am doing the things in my life that make me happy.
I hope that you too consider picking up the habit of tracking your days.
And then we can all thank Jim Collin’s for inspiring this project.
Have you messed around with google forms? You can make a simple survey, and it dumps the data in a sheet. This is nice because it’s easier to enter your responses on a phone, and convenience=consistency or whatever. It’s got some simple visualization tools built in too. You can always get into the sheet if you want to do some more complex analytics. I built a tracker using google forms to see how 60 days of 60 minute meditations affected my mood, and it worked well (the tracker, not the meditations-I just got better naps 😉).
How do you start a new year on a new sheet?
Hey Jared, to add a new year, you’ll want to duplicate both the 2021 tabs and rename to 2022. Then on the “Yearly Review” you would want to go into the forumlas and simply change the query to the new year.
If you need any help, let me know and you can share your document with me and I can assist.
Man, this is awesome. I’m downloading this and looking forward to the results. Lately every day has felt like Wednesday haha
Hahaha. Hopefully your Wednesdays turn out better than mine so far this year!
What goes down on Wednesdays for you??? Lol… Poor Hump Day!
Haha. Well it’s not great, but it is still above a 0! So mostly good…