I find that I have amnesia regarding any details on the days after about 48 hours. Maybe I’m just old, but it’s hard to remember what happened in May and while I do journal, I was looking for something short form as a reference.

So last year I began a tracker in my iPhone Notes app where I just jotted down how I felt at the end of each day. Some Mood Trackers have 10-15 feelings but I went simple with “great, good, even, sad, terrible” for my options. Like some of my other trackers, I kept the daily notes on the phone and then transferred it to the journal every week or two. On the opposite page I left space for notes, especially for those terrible or sad days to remind me what happened.

Here’s how the 2026 set up looks:

Here’s the color key:

And a look at my 2025 mood:

If I look back at 2025, I can pinpoint the month when I decided that a day can be great, even if it’s not a banner day. To illustrate my mindset here, let me tell you a quick story.

What does your ideal day look like?

I used to do this exercise with clients all the time and I’d specify that this is not your wedding day, the day you win the lottery, etc, it’s an average day. My clients would write this out in any way they wanted and they would create a day that they would love if it was their average day for months in the future.

Remembering this, I re-adjusted my baseline to decide that an amazing day is one which meets my average day desires. Previously, I would make amazing days the BEST DAY EVER, which is a lot of pressure, and the rest of my good days would be marked good. Instead, I now default to ‘this was an amazing day’ unless something happened which tainted the whole day. Because even good days have bad moments, right?

This also helps me stop overthinking because when I get into a mood tracker, it’s easy to say to myself, how can today be good when there’s a war happening? How can my day be great when there was a hurricane?

I’m really curious to see how this shifting mindset shows up in my 2026 tracking.