Year In Pixels

The Year In Pixels is my journaling system. I began journaling regularly in 2018 at age 14, and have kept it up ever since. I regard it as one of the best decisions of my life, and I encourage you to give it a shot.

Neither this core concept nor with the name "Year In Pixels" are original to me. I first read about it in this article sometime in 2017. The idea is simple. The year is represented with a 31-by-12 grid, with the months of the year on the short axis and numerical dates on the long axis. At the end of each day, you color in the day's "pixel" with a color that corresponds to how good or bad the day was. At the end of the year, you'll have a fully-colored grid, a dense snapshot of the last 365 days of your life.

Most takes on this concept suffer from what I've dubbed Gather Sign Syndrome. You know about Gather Signs, right? You see them all the time on the shelves of home goods stores. They have that cursive font, that warm southern aesthetic, and that vacuous soullessness that makes you wonder where it all went wrong. And if you look around at examples of this system, this aesthetic is all you see.  Moreover, these tend to use paper and colored markers, and very few even reference a proper journaling element at all.

My Year In Pixels is a Google Sheets workbook. I think this format is a no-brainer. The most obvious benefits are that I can access the journal at any time and hit an "undo" button whenever I make a mistake or change my mind. I know some people think that a physical, handwritten journal is more "authentic" or "personal" or whatever, but it doesn't bother me. The document contains a sheet with the main grid of pixels, and another one with much larger cells for the journal entries themselves. (It also contains some other sheets for data processing).

Ranking Logic

If you do decide to give this a shot, you will come to discover the ranking system that works best for you. Your criteria for a Good day may become more or less stringent than mine. That's the whole idea! This is a super personal endeavor. So long as you're honest with yourself and consistent, you'll glean meaningful results. It took me about six months of daily journaling before I felt comfortable with the general idea of what a Good day or a Bad day actually was. The lines between all of these rankings are deliberately fuzzy, and it's not scientific. It all comes down to gut feeling while writing the entry. 

• Good is typically the default ranking. Good days have accounted for the plurality of every year I've done this (though never a majority, oddly enough). A Good day is a day where nothing substantial went wrong, I generally enjoyed myself, and there's nothing weighing on me as the day ends. If you think of it in school-grading terms, a Good day is a solid "A."

• Goodish days, it follows, are closer to "B." Goodish days come in a few varieties, but the most common is a day that's dull or boring, inoffensive but short of Good. Some days are Goodish if I fall into a bad habit: maybe I've got a deadline coming up and I spend the day procrastinating. It might have been a fine day, but the knowledge that I've essentially wasted 24 hours will have nagged at me, and it'll drag the day into Goodish territory. Goodish days typically make up 20-30% of a year.

• Meh days are "C-" or "D" days. They're rarer, on average representing about 7% of a year. These days tend to have the same flaws as Goodish days, but they're extreme to the point that they make me more overtly unhappy. Sometimes there's a physical element as well; days where I'm sick tend to get a Meh.

• Bad days are "F"s, and they're rarer still. Normally only a smattering of these in a year, and in the case of 2022, sometimes none at all. Bad days leave me feeling sad or dejected for one reason or another. We all know what it feels like to be in the doldrums. And the Worse days are... worse than that. I've only had three of those across five years of doing this, and I think one of them was unwarranted in retrospect.

• Great days have evolved for me since I began. Originally, a Great day was anything better than standard Good. It was the catch-all for "above average." Coming out of year one, I felt like this was the biggest weak point in my system. I needed a ranking between Good and Great. I added a "Very Good" ranking for my third year to address this. Very Good days are "full of delights," as I've come to say, but they're not extraordinary.

I'll give the Gather Sign people this: they nailed it with "Live, Laugh, Love." That's all exactly what I've found makes for a Great day. The best days are those where I'm Living (taking on a new experience or spending time on something I'm passionate about), Laughing (my favorite thing in this world is to laugh so hard that I can't breathe), and/or Loving (spending genuine, heart-warming quality time with friends and family). If I'm going to bed with a smile on my face, involuntarily humming happy songs while the serotonin keeps firing, that, my friend, is a Great day.

At the end of each day, I consider my ranking locked in. No matter what I may think in the future, I forbid myself from retroactively changing the ranking for a day. If I ever do forget to make an entry, I usually try to at least make a mental note of how I'll rank the day, and I'll fill in the journal entry later.

The Summaries

I call the journal entries themselves "summaries," because that's what they originally were. Part of the reason my previous journaling attempts failed was that I would get too long-winded. I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what point to make, so I would just rattle off every tiny little thing I could think of. It was great for thoroughness, but for a daily task, it was awfully tedious and time-consuming. It's no wonder those efforts failed.

The Year In Pixels gives you a point to make: "Why did I give this day the ranking it received?" Sometimes you can answer this in a single sentence, and that's okay! There's not always something exciting to say. You just have to do it daily to build the habit, and if it takes a bunch of single-sentence days to get there, so be it. More eventful days will naturally have longer entries, but it still helps to have that question guiding your thoughts. Most of my summaries begin with a sentence directly answering that question, and then I go into further detail about what actually happened, what I'm feeling, etc.

These days, a typical summary is about a paragraph. Super notable days will get about a page, maybe even two. I try to make sure that I do at least one "extended" entry a month where I go deeper into my overall state of mind, my thoughts on my life's trajectory, and how I'm actually, sincerely feeling. 

After awhile of doing these entries, you start to find your voice. I've got a lot of running gags and in-jokes through these summaries that no one but me will ever know. My writing style more resembles a blurted stream-of-consciousness than well-thought-out musings. Have fun with these, and remember that your audience is your future self. Your memory is not as good as you think it is. Write down the small details while they're fresh on your mind: who you saw, a bit of a conversation that made you laugh, the little running joke in the group chat that day. Give enough detail that you can put yourself back in the moment, but don't get so verbose that it's too much to read later. (I like to rattle off details so quickly that it comes off as comedic understatement, and it helps keep things brief).

When I write these entries, I do it in a Google Sheets cell. This means no rich formatting, no spell check, no paragraph breaks. I find this to be less distracting, so it's easier for me to get into my reflective voice and type away. I usually copy and paste these cells into a Google Doc later, where I standardize the font size, correct typos, and add paragraph breaks (if I'm feeling really fancy). Do what works for you, but this is the approach I've found works for me. (Just make sure to save periodically.)

Voice Entries

About once or twice a month, I pull out my phone and monologue to myself about the state of my life. Sometimes there's something specific weighing on my mind, some project or big life decision looming, and sometimes I'm just feeling reflective and talkative. This has no real bearing on the Year In Pixels, but I consider it a nice complement, especially for capturing raw feelings and reactions more faithfully than the written word is capable of. These are where I've had some of my most revelatory introspections, and they're some of the most interesting to look back on with hindsight. Spoken language is powerful.

​Fun With Data

​A little while into my first year doing the Year In Pixels (which I now affectionately call the "YIP"), I thought it would be interesting to mess with the data and see if there were any cool patterns over the year. Which days of the week were the best? Was the first half of a month usually better than the last half? Which months are the best?

To do this, I assigned a score to each of my rankings, roughly corresponding to the "grading scale" for the days I laid out earlier. And then I made a bunch of charts. Some of them didn't yield any interesting information, but here are some that offer some visual intrigue. Note that the data depicted below is incomplete for 2023, covering only the first eight months of the year.