Last week, I was working on the Organize My Life (OML) project, and I recognized that since I am essentially trying to replace my current organization system, so it may be a long time before this project is ready for me to use reliably, in a way that is a significant improvement relative to how I currently journal and plan. I will continue to work on the OML project, for the long term benefit of being able to use it, and for what I’m learning while I’m building it. In the mean time, I’ve decided to focus on something simpler, an app to regularly flog “evidence” that I am living by my values, working towards my goals, and practicing my habits.

For lack of a better turn of phrase (lol trust me, I’ve even tried asking ChatGPT to help me find synonyms) I’m calling this a “Win Journal” for now.

As a user, I can add my values, goals and habis.

I create my values in the style of affirmations “I am healthy”, “I nurture my relationship with ____”.I create goals, as stand alone goals, or associated with values (“< X lbs and have X % body fat” is associated with “I am healthy”). I can also create habits, that can either stand alone, be associated with a goal, or associated with a value.

Then, when I do something — or experience something — that re-affirms my values and self image, or supports my goals and habits, I can log a “win” and specify the date and time that it happened.

I can then go to the Value, Goal or Habit page that I want to check in on, and I can see the associated wins, and remember how far I’ve come and how much I continue to support my goals, whenever doubt or guilt try to creep in:

I created this using lovable.dev, connected to Supabase, and I will continue to add little tweaks to make it more enjoyable. However the simplicity of the feature set allows me to get value out of it right away. I already have a login, and am adding in my own values and real “wins”. I’ll also be able to learn about making this into a downloadable mobile application, and eventually about how to make it ready for other users to sign up and use it. I’m particularly excited about setting up user testing and iteratively improving this app based on usage data and feedback.

—While I was writing—

As I was writing this I got some inspiration to ask ChatGPT to help me name the “logs” something else. I gave it the direction that this is a self-love evidence journal and I didn’t want them to be called “pieces of evidence” because that felt clunky. This led to the term “receipts” which I looove.

So I might rename this to something along the lines of a Self-Love/Self-Respect Evidence Journal, which I feel is more fitting for how I’m using it, and since not all of these logs fit under the category of “wins”.