Concept
The Good Time Journal
The Good Time Journal is a short daily log from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans's Designing Your Life in which you note which work activities leave you engaged and energised and which leave you bored or drained, so career choices rest on observed patterns rather than guesses.
Most people answer the question "what work suits me?" from memory and self-image, and both are unreliable: we remember the dramatic days rather than the ordinary ones, and we describe the person we think we ought to be. The Good Time Journal replaces that guesswork with evidence. For a few weeks you list your main activities each day and rate each one on two signals: engagement, meaning how absorbed you were, and energy, meaning whether it left you charged or depleted. Once a week you read the entries together and look for patterns. Burnett and Evans, who built the book out of a course they teach at Stanford, stress that the two signals differ: some tasks you are good at still drain you. To zoom in on a good moment they offer the AEIOU questions: which Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users were involved? The source of a good time is often a detail, such as the kind of people in the room, rather than the job title. Moments of flow, the full absorption Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described, are the strongest entries to look for. The result is not an answer but a set of clues about what to build more of in your work.
A real-life example
Kerem, a cost engineer at a construction firm in Kocaeli, was sure he wanted to move into management. Three weeks of a Good Time Journal said otherwise: his highest-energy entries were the afternoons he trained two new site engineers, and his lowest were budget meetings. He did not quit. He volunteered to run the firm's internal training for juniors and began looking at roles where teaching is part of the job.
How to use it
- 1Each evening for two to three weeks, list the day's main activities and mark each one for engagement (low, medium or high) and for energy (up or down).
- 2At the end of each week, read the entries together and write down what the high-energy moments have in common.
- 3Zoom in on one standout moment with the AEIOU questions and name the activity, environment, interaction, object or person that made it good.