Calendar Man

Once I'd quit my course I had made a decision that affected me in more ways than one. The most logical of which being that I didn't have a course and wouldn't be getting my diploma. This also meant that I suddenly had a huge amount of time to spend on, well basically anything I wanted. I was taken away from the social 'working' life that I had known for years now. From now on I would be on my own during the school days.

Being alone for five days a week certainly had some consequences. For example I started to monitor my feelings a lot more than I had done with people around me. I'm a people person so being alone for so long is not very comfortable for me, which was refelcted in the way I felt. Certain events triggered certain feelings and I was curious to see if I could influence this in any way. If I could find a way to steer my emotions towards the more positive side, even in the current circumstances that would be awesome.

The first step I undertook was to monitor my feelings. I was linked towards an awesome site by someone who knew the situation I was in. On the site there was a calendar on which you could register how the day went by putting a certain emoticons on the current day. I immediatly fell in love with the idea and decided to make such a calendar below. Instead of emoticons I would be using words as they are more descriptive in my opinion. The results cn be seen below. For every day of the week I will register my feelings. Because I found that my emotions can change quite drastically in a day I decided to put use two words every day.

The words that I use are the ones that best describe my feelings over the day. Now it should be noted that I didn't have the word Okay right from the start. So if my day went okay I would use the word Awesome instead which may give an incorrect image of how amazing my first weeks were. The later weeks are more reliable and I'm quite proud to say that I haven't really had any terrible days since the 15th. Below I'll show you the words I'm working with. They are ordered from best to worst.

EPIC  -  CONTENT  -  AWESOME  -  OKAY  -  NEUTRAL  -  MEH  -  CRAP

I'm also using my calendar to detail my 30-day trials. My current 30-day trial is playing the keyboard for at least 30 minutes a day. As you can see it's not going partiularly well so far but I'm sure that'll come in the future.

Creating the calendar required very little work yet the results were amazing. It livens up my room and I can keep track of my feelings in a fun and rewarding way. Furthermore any goals I wish to achieve can be added to the calendar, such as my current 30-day trial. I'll certainly create another one for the coming month and, if the idea interests you, I would advise you to do the same. It's way more fun than your regular calendar and you can keep track of anything you want. Of course you can use the idea for a number of other things as well and there is really only one advice I can give you: Go wild!