My Life at a Glance Notebook: A Journal and Planner System for Seeing Life Clearly

Saturday, August 9, 2025

My pocket-sized notebook isn’t like a traditional diary or a paragraph-heavy journal, nor a typical bullet journal or planner. Instead, it builds on those concepts but with a unique purpose: to view one’s life from a bird’s-eye perspective, and review it with a broader outlook. I call this my “Life at a Glance System.”

Why Other Methods Didn’t Work for Me as a Life Reflection Tool 

I started my journaling practice with the Bullet Journal Method because it aligned with my goal of living intentionally and recording life as it unfolds. The basics of the Bullet Journal Method (not the decorated, elaborate versions often showcased by influencers) are straightforward: the Future Log for reference, the Monthly Log for tracking and scheduling, and Rapid Logging for capturing moments and thoughts.


While Rapid Logging is helpful in the moment of jotting things down, it became cumbersome over time: retrieving information was challenging, and the keys (categorization symbols) were quite limited. Additionally, repeatedly writing the same things—which the Bullet Journal Method encourages to strengthen intention—became tedious. As a result, the review process felt like a chore, without a clear structure built-in to process all these information. Without proper review on Rapid Logging, I lost sight of the bigger picture of my life.


I’ve realized that recording daily events and gaining an overarching view of life are distinct needs, each deserving its own dedicated space.


Later, I tried using a physical planner as a journal, hoping its structure would help me better understand my life. Sure enough, planners offer a better framework for review and retrieval. However, their philosophy centers on looking ahead, while life itself isn’t set in stone and should focus on living day by day. That’s why I wasn’t sure how to use the yearly pages and monthly calendars, as I didn’t want to reflect on unfulfilled plans and an imaginary life. When I open my life notebook, I want to see a life well-lived.


Detailed Planning is a distinct mindset that deserves its own dedicated system. My life notebook will be for capturing lived experiences.


Here’s the realization I’ve come to about documenting my days and capturing my life: the most important thing I want is a notebook that sums up my year—a way to reflect on my life and see what truly matters. I don’t need to remember every detail, just the most significant ones. I’m okay with most details falling through the cracks, as long as I can view my life as a whole. I simply want a space where I can answer the crucial question: “How has my life really been?”

Thus, I created Life at a Glance—my own life-logging and life-reflection system.


After experimenting for over a year—blending templates and layouts from bullet journaling, planners, and resources I found online—I discovered a structure that truly fits my needs. And I hope it can fit into your life, too.


While this system can be integrated into your current notebooks or existing setups, I still urge you to try this system with a dedicated notebook. There's something deeply satisfying about effortlessly flipping through the pages and viewing your life at a glance, with clear evidence of a life well-lived.

The 4 Anchors of Life: The Act of Counter Balancing

Life is complex and ever-changing, with multiple demands pulling us in different directions. It’s easy to get swept up amidst the shifting tides of life, waking up one day wondering where you are, how you’ve been, or even who you truly are.


At the simplest level, I believe that life can be understood through two key dimensions: “Your Pursuits” and “Your Connections.” Together, these shape and reveal “Who You Are” and create the foundation for self-awareness and growth.

I call these—Wins, Joy, Social, and Health—as The 4 Anchors of Life. These essential areas of life give you grounding as you navigate the ups and downs of life’s waves.


Life is rarely perfectly balanced but naturally swings between these anchors, and that’s okay. These natural ebbs and flows happen continuously, with or without your conscious direction. The key is learning how to ride those waves—shifting your balance when needed, rather than being knocked off course. 

To navigate this complexity with clarity and calm, I created a simple yet powerful system called Life at a Glance Notebook. This notebook helps you observe, understand, and counterbalance the 4 Anchors of Life by turning abstract concepts of life balance into concrete insights.


You, then, will only need to frequently check in with yourself to spot patterns on what’s working, what’s off, and uncover life lessons to make sure you’re living a balanced, fulfilling life. 


By regularly tracking these anchors, you’ll gain a clear overview of where your time and energy go, enabling you to make conscious adjustments and confidently navigate change.

Life at a Glance: The Life-Logging System Built In With Self-Reflection 

Traditional journaling or planners often focus either on recording in detail or looking too far ahead. The Life at a Glance System captures your lived experience concisely and purposefully, short enough to be sustainable, yet rich enough to reveal meaningful patterns. 


It’s designed to help you answer “How has my life really been?” without feeling overwhelmed by details or future plans.


The principle of this notebook is to capture life in a very concise manner by focusing on intention, introspection, and reflection. Using charts, columns, and symbols, I represent life’s key data deliberately and compactly. This helps me capture life concisely, identify patterns clearly and understand what truly matters.


The system is structured into three time-based sections:

  1. Quarter at a Glance: 
    • Highlights (Memorable Moments)
    • Wins (Achievements)
    • Lessons (What to do More, Less, and How)
  2. Month at a Glance: 
    • Life Flow (Joy, Health, and Social Trackers) 
    • Focus Flow (Projects with Key Activities, Timelines and Daily Focus)
  3. Week at a Glance: 
    • Boost (Boosting Moments)
    • Drain (Draining Moments)
    • News (Updates on People and Events)


Life at a Glance System is founded on the idea that when you effectively organize the moments of your life; lessons, insights, and highlights will naturally emerge and write themselves. Rather than focusing on planning ahead and and trying to follow through, this system begins with the smallest aspects of your life—your day-to-day moments—and gradually builds them into the bigger picture: your own life.


That’s why the Life at a Glance System progresses like this:

How The System Works

The Life at a Glance System follows a straightforward process that encourages you to regularly flip through its pages and reflect on your life—daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly—ensuring you never lose sight of what truly matters. The more you review these pages and observe how your life has been filled on each one, the more it reinforces your determination to discover better ways to enrich your daily life.

Daily to Yearly Reflection Cycle of Life at a Glance System


Daily Review:


Weekly Review:


Monthly Review:


Quarterly Review:

Yearly Review:


Each step is designed to take approximately 5–10 minutes, thanks to a pre-designed layout with a clear structure. The system utilizes symbols heavily to categorize information, grouped by The 4 Anchors of Life: Wins, Joy, Social, and Health. You can, of course create your own symbols as you see fit. For inspiration, you can explore terms like “icons,” “symbols,” or “pictograms.”

It’s simply a matter of organizing the information and placing it in the right place to fill your Life at a Glance.


Besides requiring minimal time, it also demands little effort to flip through, much easier than traditional journals and planners. The system uses fewer pages—approximately 124 per year—to capture life holistically.

For easier navigation, you can pre-set the quarterly and monthly layouts before the weekly pages, then use a bookmark for the current weekly page. Alternatively, you can do what I plan to do next year: use a separate notebook solely for the Week at a Glance to streamline the reflection process and provide additional space if needed.


It’s a structured, concise, and effective system. Don’t you think?

Now, let’s dive into the setup in more detail. 


And hey, I don’t mind if you just skim my super-detailed instructions to see my actual notebook setups. I already bold keywords for you :)

Getting Started: What You Need

All you need are a small notebook, a pencil, and an eraser. That’s it.

You don’t even need a ruler since my layouts are mostly built around a half page sections, making it easy to estimate the space you need by eye. Columns can be roughly marked with short lines, and rows counted using dots or lines. Therefore, a dotted, or grid-ruled notebook is preferable for this system, but a lined ruled notebook can work as well.


I recommend a small notebook for this system because constraints foster focus, turning the notebook into a concentrated reflection of life. We’re not aiming to be verbose; instead, we strive to encapsulate life concisely and purposefully. My handwriting is tiny, so a pocket-sized notebook (Muji Slim Notebook Grid A6 Slim Size) works well for me. Others might prefer something slightly larger, but keeping it under B6 size is ideal.


I’d avoid using pens (sorry, fountain pen lovers!) because the system requires flexibility of rescheduling and changing your minds, which pencils handle with ease. However, if you strictly rely on other planning tools, you can keep using your pen (yay!) and simply write things down afterward.

Month at a Glance: The Heart of the System

A month is the ideal time frame—not too short to miss emerging patterns, and not too far off that you lose the plot of what truly matters: your lived experience. That’s why I decided to anchor my system with these monthly layouts, which I call "Month at a Glance."


This is the space to track key moments relating to The 4 Anchors of Life:


Month at a Glance has two key layouts to track these four anchors: 

As you track these regularly, you’ll start to see patterns. Maybe you’re hitting tons of goals but missing out on downtime. Or maybe you’re having fun but not taking care of yourself enough. This awareness helps you counterbalance, shifting your focus and create a better mix that feels right for you.


Life Flow

This is the activity logs where I track activities to visualize my life for that month. While it may resemble a Habit Tracker, it serves a different purpose. Instead of focusing solely on building streaks by ticking boxes and maintaining unbroken chains of each activity, it encourages me to embrace life's natural ebbs and flows. This approach allows me to reflect on how I spent my time and energy, identify health signals, and evaluate my intentions—all on just two pages.


Life Flow has three sections:

  1. Joy Trackers: Regular joyful activities tracked with symbols for immediate pattern recognition.
  2. Health Trackers: Daily physical and mental states, including symptom codes, period tracker, sleep hours (line graph around a 7-hour baseline), daily energy levels (smile/frown faces), and intention fulfillment (+/-).
  3. Social Trackers: Logged vertically for media and social moments, noting people involved along with symbols (1 person icon = family, 2 people icon = relatives, 3 people icon = friends) and special moments (hearts).


Let's go through my setup step by step.

First, I track activities I enjoy, such as writing, designing, and reading. As you can see, I use symbols that represent specific activities or information, providing clearer and more immediate pattern recognition than the typical X marks. For books and TV shows, which are ongoing activities, I decided to write down the titles at the bottom of the page because I don’t necessarily need to record specific dates for them.


Next, I use health trackers to monitor my health throughout the month. These trackers help me identify patterns and potential relationships among:

Now, as we move on, it gets a bit more interesting because this part is my social tracker focusing on moments with people.

I rotate the notebook vertically to log social interactions, using different symbols to note the people involved then I write down the name or the letter codes for the people I share the day with. 

Here, I also track media consumption such as movies and TV shows, which are activities I often enjoy with others. I can also do some soft scheduling, and erase it if gets postponed or canceled. This approach creates a concise snapshot of my social life and most memorable experiences.

Focus Flow

This is where I record activities and achievements that require time, effort, and skills with my full attention—whether they are work-related or personal projects, or even houseworks if wanted. I refer to these activities as "Focus" and their outcomes as "Wins."

The Focus Flow also consists of three sections:

  1. Focus: Projects with key activities.
  2. Timeline: A visual timeline with deadlines
  3. Daily Focus: The top priority for each day

I organize projects in a timeline with three columns, one per Focus, and note deadlines (asterisks for strict deadlines). 

Next, I rotate the notebook vertically to create a soft schedule by jotting down the daily focus—the top priority for the day. 

When you get swept away by the waves of busyness, it’s easy to forget what you’ve actually accomplished. This Focus Flow anchors you to the most important focus you’d like to achieve each day, making it easy to review your wins. This clear overview of focus, progress, and achievements at a glance also promotes work-life balance through effective time blocking and the protection of your time as needed.

Week at a Glance: Categorizing Moments with Boost, Drain, News

People often say you should spend time reflecting on your life regularly, but few actually do. Most of the time, it’s not because they don’t want to, but because they get overwhelmed by the term "reflection" and how to approach it. 


Many believe it to be time-consuming, requiring lengthy confessions about their lives, so they typically postpone it to the end of the year, and by that time you’re likely to forget valuable lessons and insights by then. 


I used to do it that way for a long time, too, but it doesn’t have to be.


You don’t have to figure everything out or find perfect answers to your life’s problems in one self-reflection session. Instead, you can do the bare minimum engaging in frequent self-reflection, allowing time—and your future self—to uncover insights from these moments later on.


The simplest and quickest way to reflect on your life is by categorizing your daily moments into two groups: what’s boosting you and what’s draining you. If you’re up for it, you can also add a few more details or notes on how you feel.


It may seem so simple that it barely feels like a reflection, but over time, they’ll add up and can become a valuable source for deeper self-reflection in the future.


Moreover, you cannot truly reflect on your life without acknowledging your connections to the world and the people around you. That’s why I also include a small section for updates about the people in my life and the world at large, something that feels significant enough to remember.

While Month at a Glance offers a dense overview, Week at a Glance focuses on simple categorization:

  1. Boost: Energy or mood boosters, wins, important events.
  2. Drain: Draining or distracting factors.
  3. News: Updates on people and events.

Each day, I sort activities, information, and experience into these three groups, adding some notes and feelings about it. This minimal structure supports monthly and quarterly reviews and helps identify what fuels or drains me for future planning.

Quarter at a Glance: Life Overview and Lessons

Often, the most valuable things in your life require time to fully shine. You might not realize how precious they are in your day-to-day life until you wait then step back and view the bigger picture—the mosaic of life formed over time. Only then can you truly appreciate how each moment colors your world.


This is where Quarter at a Glance comes in—a space designed to help you see the pieces of your life's mosaic more clearly and bring them into focus with full appreciation. Quarter at a Glance serves as both an index and a reflection tool for your life experiences, wins, and lessons from the past three months, presented through three simple layouts: Highlights, Wins, and Lessons.


Quarterly Highlights

After years of trial and error in capturing the best moments of my life, I realized that my highlights primarily revolve around meaningful experiences with people and media that have touched my heart. 


This insight inspired the dedicated section in Month at a Glance for media, joyful activities, and social trackers, allowing you to easily reflect on your life experiences as a whole with the people you love and the activities you enjoy in it.

This Quarterly Highlights layout is where I document the key moments from my Life Flow for each month, offering a snapshot of what truly mattered during that time.


End-of-Month Review:

I assess each anchor using a simple stamp rating system:

Based on these ratings, I assign an overall score for the month.

End-of-Quarter Review:

This system is not a rigid evaluation but a personal way to gauge how you feel about your life. The rating method is designed to help you easily see your life as a positive and meaningful journey. Even if some areas rank lower, the overall tendency of the stamps encourages a view of life as a good life nonetheless. 



Quarterly Wins

I truly believe that capturing your wins is one of the most powerful yet neglected tools for a fulfilled life. 


After all, how can one recognize how much they’ve filled up their life without counting all the results of their efforts and skills? That’s why I dedicate a space to celebrate my wins like this, and I wish I did this much sooner.

Setup a Quarterly Wins: I start by stating my focus for the quarter and setting up a space for each month to jot down what I consider a win—whether it aligns with my stated focus or not. 


End-of-Month Review:

End-of-Quarter Review: Take time to mentally celebrate each win and write down a few overall reflections or insights about your progress and feelings.

Quarterly Lessons

We live with limited time, energy, effort, skills, and resources, so the art of living ultimately depends on how effectively we allocate these precious elements. As a result, life lessons naturally fall into two categories: doing more of something or doing less.


Yet, aspiration without actionable steps remains a mere imagined future. And the most valuable lessons in life come from lived experience—through trial and error.


Quarterly Lessons is the space where you identify concrete, actionable steps toward welcoming the changes you want in your life. 


These two pages serve as your personal living space—a place to explore, experiment, and define the way you want to live.


Feel free to change your mind, erase, and rewrite as often as needed. Keep refining and mastering the art of living to your heart's content.


Try, fail, and try again with different approaches until you discover what works—and what doesn’t. Or at least until you realize it’s wiser to pause certain goals and shift your focus elsewhere for the time being. Whatever happens, carry your lessons forward with you in this Quarterly Lessons journey.

End-of-Week Review:

End-of-Month Review: At the end of the quarter, review each “How” step:

Year at a Glance: Brief Summary of the Year

Year at a Glance is the space to see The Key Dimensions—Your Pursuits and Your Connections—of The 4 Anchors of Life for the whole year at a glance. By writing how you counterbalance between Your Pursuits of achievement and pleasure, as well as Your Connections to yourself and others.


This is not a vital part of the system, as reviewing all the quarterly pages already provides a succinct and comprehensive overview of the year. However, it serves as a meaningful way to reflect and close a chapter of your life at the year's end.

I decided to use a single layout with two pages for Year at a Glance as the closing chapter of the year. This is the only space in the system where writing in paragraph form might be preferable. 


I haven't used this layout myself yet, as it’s still five months away from the end of the year. Therefore, both the layout and the process are likely to evolve. However, as of now, the process would look like this:

Final Notes

The Life at a Glance notebook system is designed to be concise and intentional. While it doesn’t capture every detail, it can easily be complemented with other tools for more specialized needs. This pocket notebook encourages frequent, meaningful reflection without the overwhelm of lengthy journaling. 


By using clear symbols and a structured layout, I can create a clear, satisfying overview of my life—all within the palm of my hand.


Despite having other journaling and planning tools, their complexity and effort often lead me to set them aside for days or even months before returning. 


With the ease of Life at A Glance system, though, I find myself reaching for this little notebook every night before bed to log a few details from my day in Month at a Glance and jot down a few notes in Week at a Glance. 


Even on my most exhausted days, simply flipping through these pages to see my life at a glance lifts my spirits and reminds me that the small moments of today can grow into something significant in the grand scheme of things over time.


Life at a Glance may seem quickly to grasp, but each detail reflects the accumulation of countless small, significant moments experienced day by day, over hundreds of days. These moments are distilled into this pocket-sized reflection of life, gently reminding you that your life, in all its nuances, always matters.

P.S. For those who are curious, I plan a bit more thoroughly using the Tweek app. It’s essentially a planner with the layout of a physical weekly planner, while offering the digital benefits like other task management apps. 

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