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Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals

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Published:19 April 2018Publication History

ABSTRACT

Digital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people's practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a self-tracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful self-tracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2018
      8489 pages
      ISBN:9781450356206
      DOI:10.1145/3173574

      Copyright © 2018 ACM

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      • Published: 19 April 2018

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