The Good Time Journal is an exercise to understand how I feel about each activity that I encounter. The exercise is from the book ‘Designing Your Life’.

The instruction is to log what I do and how I feel about it in terms of engagement, energy, and flow. After logging for a few weeks, I take a closer look to see if I can identify why I felt that way.

I printed out the ‘Good Time Journal - Activity log worksheet’ (available at Design Your Life website). I logged it for 3 weeks.

Results from the log

Here’s what I found out from the log:

Engagement

For me, engaging activities are mostly related to self and creative expression, such as drawing, coding, writing, and teaching. Additionally, activities that require a lot of thinking, such as learning and practicing, requirement gathering, and analyzing process and data, engage me.

Energy

The activities that energize me the most are those related to self-improvement, like learning and working out. I also feel great when I’m trying to understand and help someone to be better, such as through requirement gathering (understanding needs and wants and walking through a possible solution together) and teaching.

Flow

I reach flow when I’m:

• Learning
• Writing
• Coding
• Drawing
• Teaching

The ones that I don’t like

I hate to:

• Micromanage
• Force people to do stuff they don’t want :(

Conclusion

I have a good time when:

• I’m learning.
• I’m expressing myself.
• I’m improving myself.
• I’m improving others.