Chartam Planner User Guide

Your new Chartam planner is specially designed to help you better communicate with your doctors.

Color Guide

This page is meant as a color key for relevant indicators and symptoms of your mental and physical health. It is designed to help you visually distinguish your various moods. We recommend assigning each mood a unique color to be used in each month's indicator log.

There are an additional three spaces so you can color coordinate the intensity of symptoms. Examples include...

  • How tired you may feel on a particular day

  • How often you may have suicidal thoughts

  • The frequency of self-harming behavior on a particular day

  • The place and intensity of migraines

  • The color and flow of menstruation cycles

Monthly Header

This page is designed to make you think about how you want to feel the next month and what you want to achieve. It is a space where you can be intentional about what you accomplish in the next 28-31 days. 

In the bottom half of the page, there is a space for you to write down three emotional goals.  There is an additional space for you to establish three more conventional goals. 

For the minimalist, date-less planner:

The empty space is intentionally left blank so you may draw, doodle, and illustrate the month as you see fit. Feel free to use the empty space on the monthly header page to express yourself.

Monthly Spread

Indicator Log

These two pages are designed for you to keep track of your appointments, deadlines, birthdays, events, and other important content.


For year-specific planners:

The monthly spread is meant to be a more in-depth version of the corresponding year-at-a-glance column found at the beginning of the planner.

Gratitude Log

This is a space for you to look at things that affect mental illness and things that are affected by mental illness. In the visual data, you may find trends between indicators.

You should show these pages to your doctors the next time you see them so you can communicate how often these symptoms or patterns are occurring.

Chartam has already filled out some of these indicators for you. You can keep track of the weather, the temperature, your mood, and your eating habits. These are indicators that may reveal useful patterns in most mental illnesses. 

Other indicators you may wish to keep track of in your monthly log include showering, washing your hair, menstruation cycle, panic attacks, self-harming behavior, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, taking various medications, nightmares, or migraines.

Sleep Log

What is something good that happened today? What is one thing from today that you are grateful for?

This page is designed for you to write down something good that happened that day. You can write out a full sentence or jot things down as bullet points. 

The idea is that no matter how poorly your day went, something must have gone right. When you are having a bad day and are in a poor mood, you can reference these gratitude lists to help remind you of all the good things in your life

Many mental illnesses affect sleep. Some people sleep less than "normal" amounts while others sleep a great deal more. Sometimes mental health makes someone take multiple naps a day despite getting a full night's sleep. This is why tracking your sleep patterns is so important. You can track when you fall asleep, wake up, or get up in the middle of the night.

You can also track all of the time you spend laying in bed on your phone or laying on the couch. These bouts of idleness and lack of motivation are also symptoms that you can track on this page. 

When you next go to visit one of your doctors, whether it is a therapist, psychiatrist, or general practitioner, show them this spread and ask if the changes in your sleep patterns along with the data in the indicator log are cause for concern.

Weekly Spread

Just like how you have different categories to sort your yearly goals at the beginning of the planner, you have the opportunity to split your day into the same categories.

By keeping your daily personal to-do's separate from your work, school, family, extracurricular, volunteer, or other to-do's, you can manage your day much more efficiently. 

This is a great place to make sure you don't let your personal needs fall to the wayside. It is a great way to maintain a work-life balance and keep your life organized.

End-Of-Month Wrap Up

This page is designed to help you reflect on the previous month. Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? Did you feel how you wanted to feel? In the table at the top of the page, you can look at your original goals and decide whether or not you accomplished what you had set out to accomplish.

On the bottom half of the page, there are three spaces for you to use to reflect on how the past month went for you. This is a diary-like area for you to determine what went well and what could have gone better. 

This page is purposefully located right next to the next month's header page so you can turn your reflections into goals for the next month.

We help you help your doctors  to help you.

Now that you have read through the user guide, you should be all set to start generating data about your health! If you have any questions, please contact us by clicking here.

Remember to bring your journal with you to your doctor appointments and therapy sessions, especially with your mental health providers.

Your new planner is meant to help you better communicate with your nurses and doctors. This way, you don't have to rely on memory and can draw on the visual data you have captured in your journal.