Notion Bullet Journal | My Symptom Tracker
Hi Muses! Welcome back to my channel.
As someone with chronic illness, I know how supremely difficult it can be to keep track of all of your symptoms in a easy, manageable, and useful way. I've incorporated symptom tracking into my Notion bullet journal and it has been game changing for me, which is why I want to share it with you today. By the end of this video you'll have gotten a tour of my symptom tracker and a tutorial on how to make one just like it all by yourself inside Notion.
Watch the video below or read on for the transcript. (Since this is a tutorial with screen sharing, I highly recommend watching the video.)
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So I've been using Notion for a while now and I'm absolutely addicted to it. It is the best way I have ever found to manage my life, my businesses, my tasks, and now also my chronic illness and mental illness symptoms. (If you're interested in my full bullet journal setup inside Notion, I gave a digital flip through of it in this video, and then I did a full tutorial on how to make the setup yourself inside Notion in this video.) Today I'm going to start out by giving you a quick tour of my digital symptom tracker inside Notion, so let's go ahead and head over to the screen share.
Welcome inside my symptom tracker inside Notion. It might look a little boring right now, but that's because I'm showing you a blank month. ('Cause I don't necessarily feel like sharing all of my symptoms with you right now.) I also have another view that's just a simple grid view, but I tend to live inside the month view 'cause that makes it easier for me to see relationships between my symptoms across time, which is really helpful. The calendar view is also what I embed inside my daily bullet journal page and that's where I interact with it most of the time (and again you can check that out in my other two videos on my bullet journal setup).
So let's open up a blank entry inside my symptom tracker and I'll show you everything that I can log inside of it.
So here we are inside a blank entry in my Notion symptom tracker database. I can add a title to the entry. I can add an icon. I can add a cover. I usually title an entry just what my dominant symptom is at the time, and then I'll add an icon if there is readily an associated icon with that. So for example, whenever I have a headache I use the brain icon.
But down here, this is the important stuff right? So my symptoms property is a multi-select, and over time I have added lots of different symptoms to this. So for instance: stomach pain, gas ('cause sometimes that can get really bad and really painful), insomnia, headache, muscle pain. I like tracking my period inside my symptom tracker 'cause I found that really helpful to see how some of my symptoms are really associated with my menstrual cycle. So that's been really interesting. POTSie is just my name for my POTS symptoms flaring. Nausea. Skin irritation. Itching. Yadda yadda. Weak heartbeat. All of this stuff.
And what's great is when I want to put an entry inside my symptom tracker I can have multiple things. That's why it's a multi-select property so that way I can see them all going together. That's really helpful.
Then this one. I recently added a way to track my blood pressure because I've unfortunately been experiencing some new symptoms that have been kind of troubling. I don't want to go into it right now, but my doctor is confused too. Yay. Unfortunately the number property doesn't allow for fractions currently inside Notion, so I just have this as a basic text field so I can put in a fraction (like a blood pressure fraction). But Notion doesn't recognize that as a number, it recognizes that as a text string. But it's important to understand the difference between a number and a text string when you're dealing with formulas inside Notion. So when is the text field, even though I put in numbers, Notion still sees it as a text string - not a number.
Then obviously I want to associate the symptom with a particular date, so I have a date field. So I can say what day the symptoms occurred.
And then this is a property where I am relating this symptom tracker database to my bullet journal database, so that way when I am looking... Let's say I had a symptom today, and I added it here, if I clicked this (and today while I'm filming this it's November 1st), so all I would have to do is go here and click Sunday November 1st and then this whole entry would be associated with that day in my bullet journal. And then you can see that this is a rollup, so whatever week is associated with that day inside my bullet journal, it then spits out that week. Isn't that cool? So that way I can always keep track of when my symptoms are occurring in the context of the rest of my life and that is really helpful. Not just being able to see them on a calendar, but then being able to associate that symptom calendar with my bullet journal calendar that is keeping track of everything going on in my life.
So then I have another text field where I can just take notes. 'Cause usually symptoms aren't as straightforward as, "I had a headache. It was a level four." There's usually more to the story. And so I can actually journal a little bit and provide more context here inside the symptom tracker itself.
Then I have a multi-select for remedies so I can say what I tried to help deal with the symptom.
Then here is a single select, not a multi-select, where I can choose how bad on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being you should have been in the ER an hour ago), how severe the symptom is.
And then I now also have a multi-select for suspected causes. So for example, if I ever experience stomach pain and I recently had eggs, it's probably 'cause of the darn eggs. It's not fair. Or maybe I got a headache because I overheated. Or maybe I have a headache 'cause I just had an amazing EMDR session with my therapist but my body is kind of falling apart after all of that work ('cause EMDR is a LOT of work).
And then lastly in addition to suspected causes (because I have some mast cell activation issues, yay) if I am discovering that I might be allergic to other things but I haven't confirmed it, it's just a theory at this point, I can put those here. And this is another multi-select. So all of these for example are the ingredients in Tiger Balm, because I used it for the first time thinking it might help me with my pain, but I immediately turned red like a lobster and it itched so bad. But do I know which one of the ingredients it was that I was allergic to? No. So they're all in there. Yay.
So that is just a basic tour of my symptom tracker. Now let's move over to making it ourselves from scratch.
So those are all the things I track inside my own symptom tracker. Comment and let me know which things you would want to keep track of. I'm always open to more ideas to expand my own and for anybody who's watching to get ideas on how to expand theirs as well.
All right, so to start out all I've done is open up a blank page inside of Notion and all I'm going to do to start out is name it symptom tracker. And I'm going to add an icon, just make it an ambulance so it's really obvious what this database is about.
Now you can see how when you open a blank page inside of Notion you get all of these options. We are going to go with a table to start out, and then we're going to add a calendar view in a little bit after we have sorted out all of our properties.
Like I talked about in my Notion bullet journal tutorial, there are two ways you can add properties to a database. One is from the actual view that you're in (if it's a table view). Or you can do it inside one of the pages itself by adding properties. If you wanted to add them here you would click this plus button and add the property here, but for our purposes just to make this really easy, I'm going to do it all inside one of these pages.
So we're going to start off by renaming this first thing symptoms, and we're going to keep it a multi-select. And all you do to add items to the multi-select is just type them in over here once you're in a new page. So let's say you started experiencing a brand new symptom: your skin is burning. So all you have to do is (when you open up a new entry into your database) is just type in skin burning and it'll ask you if you want to create that as something that you can select, and you click it, and then now it's here. But if we were to open up another page and click here it's available to be clicked again in the future, so that's really simple. And you just add as many as you want over time and color code them at your leisure. It's quite handy.
Now let's go ahead and add blood pressure. I liked having an emoji for this one: little drops of blood. Blood pressure. And this one we're going to leave it as a text property like I explained earlier.
Now we're going to add the date and we're going to change it to a date property. Pretty simple.
Now I'm going to show you real quick how to add a relation. (And this is how I related my symptom tracker to my bullet journal database.) So we name it day, and then we go down here and we click relation and there's an arrow pointing up to the right. And then you click select a database. (And this is where it's really helpful to have an icon associated with every database, so like I chose an ambulance for the symptom tracker. That makes it easy to find when you're looking at lists of everything.) So I'm just going to go ahead and make it.
I'm going to attach this relation to my daily agenda template. (This is actually the daily agenda that I built in my tutorial video.) And then you click create relation. And now if you click inside here, every entry inside of that database is available for you to link to the current page in your symptom tracker.
Now let's add a notes property. Pretty simple. You add a property. You name it notes, and you leave it text. Excellent.
And now we're going to add remedies, and just like the symptoms property at the very top where we put skin burning, we're gonna make this one a multi-select. And just like with the symptoms one, as you're going you can add things and then it'll be available for you in other pages.
Now we're going to do severity. And you can choose what scale of severity you want to use. Usually the standard is from 1 to 10 because that's what most medical practitioners use. This one however is going to be a single select so that way you can only ever pick one severity at a time. Depending on how your symptoms work, you might instead want to make this a text field. And so for example, if you have a headache that is lasting more than one day and you want to have one entry for that headache, you could have it as a text field and then just mark the number and then a comma. So if your headache starts out as a three: three comma. A few hours later it turns into a six: six comma. And you just have this string of severity numbers in order of how they occurred, and that might be helpful for you. I prefer just having a simple: How bad was it at its worst? and then that's what I picked.
So, single select. And then you want to make sure to make each of those numbers from one through ten. So one. And then you click it again. Then you go two. Click it again. Go three. Click it again. And go four... And you can see how when I added each new number, it superseded the one that had been selected before. So now if we click here, we can select from all of these and the same goes for when you open a new page.
And then because I mentioned how you can track symptoms over a period of time. In this date field, it's really cool, you can click this toggle and then you have a date range. So if you have a headache that lasts from today through friday, you can do that. And then on the calendar view it'll actually show that symptom through all of those days on the calendar. It's really helpful.
So now we're going to add suspected causes, and that's a multi-select again. And you would just add all of your suspected causes as you go.
And then we're gonna do a rollup, which is basically taking this relation to the day and actually spitting out a piece of data from that database. It's really nifty. So we're gonna go down here and we're gonna turn it into a rollup, and then we click inside here and you say select an existing relation. (Rollups only work if you already have a relation field, which is the one with the arrow to the upper right in the database.) And since we already have one there, we can select it. And then you choose the property from that table you want it to spit out. And so we want that to be weekly. So now that we have that rollup set, now if we were to go in here and pick this day, it spits out the week associated with that day without us having to put it in manually, which is really handy.
Lastly we're going to add possible allergens. And again this is a multi-select like so many of them before.
And you can reorder these in however way you so choose, depending on your priority of what you're tracking. You can leave out properties if you want, and you can add your own.
And then what's really nice about Notion is in a database entry like this, you don't simply have the information that falls into the table. This is an entire page and you can write notes down here that don't necessarily fit inside any of your very specific database properties. And so for instance, if you want to cross-reference across your Notion like, maybe research you're doing into one of your symptoms, you can link to that research that's somewhere else in your Notion workspace to this entry so that way they're related. And it's so nifty. You don't have to connect all the dots yourself. Notion can do it for you. It's very handy.
So now you can see that all of those properties we made are now populated inside this table view, and just like inside the page itself, you can click and drag to reorder them here as well.
And then lastly let's go ahead and add the calendar view ('cause this is the table view). Add a view (and we're going to call it calendar), and we're going to click calendar, and then hit create, and then ta-da!
So you can see like I was talking earlier, this is the thing that we were building all the properties in and I explained how when you select a date range, it'll show up as a range inside the calendar. And this is just so handy to both be able to do single day symptom entries and multi-day symptom entries, 'cause then at the end of a month you can look back at this calendar view and (especially if you're someone with chronic illness that has a lot of symptoms that you're dealing with all the time), you'll be able to see all of your symptoms in relationship to each other across time. And then if you notice anything that sticks out to you, just on that, you can then dive deeper and see how those dates are then related to your bullet journal (if you're also bullet journaling inside Notion). And you can learn a lot about your symptoms and how your body works, and maybe in the future be better able to manage those symptoms or even prevent them in the first place. So, yeah...
I'm going to go ahead and send it back to full screen Cassie for us to wrap up.
And remember, if you're curious about my full Notion bullet journal setup, you can check them out in the two videos I mentioned earlier.
Lastly, if you're curious about my coaching, I highly recommend checking out my free Masterclass on how to overcome procrastination and resistance. You can sign up for it by clicking here. All you have to do is sign up with your name and email and a copy of the replay will be sent directly to your inbox.
If you liked this video, please hit that like button and subscribe, and please share this video with at least one other person. I'll be back next week with another video. Talk to you then. Bye.
OUTTAKES: Wow I need to start all that over again. [BLAH]
Oh my god. I can't talk today.
And today while I'm feeling- Today wa- Oh my god!
To know if you're dealing with um...
Brain fart...
Formulas! That's the word I'm looking for.
To my channel. [BLEH]
All of your- [UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH]
I should do smiling.
Where I give a- [AH!]
Full bullet- of it- [GROAN].