Get Started With Your Silk and Sonder

You've received your first Silk and Sonder - it's time to get started! As exciting as our layouts and exercises can be, we understand that you might want more guidance on your journey of daily reflection and self-care. We've decided to stay mindful and not be overly prescriptive in how you use Silk and Sonder issues - but we have listed some ways on how you can get started. Please note, this is NOT an exhaustive list of all the ways and combinations you can use each layout. This is just a starting point. If you're curious how other Silk and Sonder customers use their issues, be sure to join our growing community, Sonder club.

Sonder Club for iOS

Sonder Club for Andorid

The Index

This page is intended to be your reference to succeeding with your Silk + Sonder Planner each month. On the dotted lines, you can include the title of various notes. For example, if you went to a “Conference” and took notes on that conference on a blank page, you can write “Tory Burch Conference” and “p. 31”.

Monthly Intentions

This page serves as a reminder to prioritize all aspects of your life rather than just one. For each of these sections, ask yourself - what are 3-5 goals I hope to accomplish by the end of the month so that I can live a more balanced, rewarding life.

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The Mood Tracker

Choose six moods or feelings that periodically come up for you. They can come up multiple times a day or only a few times per week. We recommend you choose 2-3 negative feelings, 1 neutral, and 2-3 positive feelings. The intent is to embrace all emotions and recognize which ones show up for you.

The Hexagon Layout

1. Label each emotion in the line below the circle.
2. Give each emotion a color or pattern. (Colored pens or pencils, black and white patterns, even stickers will do!)
3. You can choose to shade in each hexagon based on how you felt on *average* that day OR you can choose to shade in each hexagon with multiple colors or patterns as you feel those feelings.

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The Wheel Layout

1. Label each emotion in the line below the circle.
2. Give each emotion a color or pattern. (Colored pens or pencils, black and white patterns, even stickers will do!)
3. You can choose to shade in each cell based on how you felt on *average* that day OR you can choose to shade in each cell with multiple colors or patterns as you feel those feelings.

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Read more about the Mood Tracker here.

Habit Tracker Wheel

The habit tracker wheel is an opportunity for growth just as much as it as an opportunity to maintain good, healthy practices. You can choose to:

1. Build New Habits
2. Get Rid of Old, Bad Habits
3. Maintain Good Habits (positive reinforcement!)

We recommend that you choose habits that you’re trying to integrate into your daily routine (rather than a habit you might only need to do 1-2x per week) so that you can incentivize you to shade in as many cells as possible. Once you've decided which habits you want to track this month:

1. Write each habit on the line (we have space for up to 6, but you can always add more!)
2. Using a regular or colored pen or pencil, you simply shade in the cell for each habit's row for every day you complete this habit. 
3. At the end of the month, you will get a holistic view of which habits were challenging to integrate and which were a breeze.

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Read more about the Habit Tracker here.

Want to dive headfirst into our self-care journals? Subscribe today. 

Gratitude Log 

Research tells us time and again that practicing gratitude on a daily basis can elevate happiness. We often include a gratitude log that has a line for each day of the month. When you fill this out is really up to you (we're not tracking, we promise!). Ideally, spend a minute in the morning or evening reflecting on an event that occurred, a person you met, or a moment you're particularly grateful for. Sometimes, we forget. That's okay! Just add a few extra one day.

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Monthly Expense Tracker

For most of us, our relationship with money can often be charged with negative emotions. The Monthly Expense Tracker is meant for you to build a more transparent relationship with your money habits. Whether it's one-off, unexpected expenses for that month, gifts you're planning to purchase, or recurring charges (your Silk and Sonder subscription included!), jot them down. Having clarity on how much you spend and where you spend can be the first step to understanding where you can cut back or afford to spend more. 

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Week at a Glance 

The Weekly Intentions page is meant to provide a holistic view to your upcoming week. We'll break it down by section.

Weekly Intention

The prompt, "This week, I want to feel..." is designed for you to truly and honestly complete that sentence. It can be as simple as "accomplished" or "confident." Our hope is that you can set an intention based on a particular feeling you're trying to attract into your life. 

Major Three Goals

List the three overarching goals (professional or personal) that if you were to complete only these three goals, it would be considered a good week for you. 

Weekly To-Dos

This is where all the important, but smaller tasks should be listed. For some of you, it may feel like a laundry list, and for others, it might be near-empty. Do what works for you - it can be tasks that you'll need to organize as to-dos in your "Weekly Layout" or usual errands and chores that you do on a weekly basis. 

Weekly Habits

A misconception is that the "weekly habits" tracker feels redundant to the monthly habit tracker wheel. However, the intent with Weekly Habits is to track habits that you might not plan nor care to do every day. For example, working out might be a 3x per week activity for you. Others like repetition. You can of course copy over your monthly habits into this section if that works for you. 

1. Decide habits or activities that you want to do a couple or several times per week (but maybe not *every day*) 
2. Specify your target goal for how frequently you want to accomplish each habit this week. 
3. Shade in a bubble in with a regular or colored pen or pencil if you completed the habit under the day. 
4. Sum up the total. 
5. At the end of the week, check if your target goal and total match. If not, reflect on why this might be the case. Did something come up for you? Did you set your goal too high? Can you start smaller or say no to things so that you can make space for what you want to do more of? Or did you end up doing more than what you expected? Is that good or bad?

Meal Plan

There are a couple of ways we suggest you using the meal plan. For those of you who plan meals in advance, this is a great place to plan out what you're cooking or where you're dining out for the week. It can be used hand-in-hand with the Shopping List so you know what groceries you might have to shop for. 

For those of you who prefer not to plan your meals in advance, fret not! This meal plan can be labeled as a "meal tracker." So many of our emotions are linked to the nutrients we intake, it's important to try and be attentive. Can you draw any correlations between the days you eat certain food groups and your moods on the Mood Tracker? 

Shopping List

The shopping list can be used in a number of ways:

1. Grocery List - list the item, check off whether you have it in your pantry or not
2. Other Shopping (outfits, pharmacy, etc.) - list the item, check if you need it this week 
3. Gifts - list the item, check if you need it this week

Weekly Favorites 

This is your weekly reminder to stay present and notice the small things alongside planning for the big. What was a great food, memory, song, or piece of news you stumbled upon that made you smile this week? You can choose one or many! 

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Weekly Layout

The Weekly Layouts is your place for execution. This is your source of truth for what needs to get done for each day. 

One Thing

You can use the One Thing box in a few different ways. 

1. Prioritization: Every day, ask yourself - what is the ONE thing I can do today such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary. 
2. Presence: A daily gratitude or wish you'd like to put out into the universe. 

Daily Log

In your daily log, you can structure however this works best for you. Some ideas are to:

1. Divide the day by times, jot down what you have in your Google Calendar or iCal (appointments, meetings, etc.) and your to-dos by when you want to complete them.
2. Use this alongside your digital calendar as a subset of 5-7 To-Dos you want to complete for the day
3. Use this as journaling / free-writing space. We've seen some of you use other tools for planning and prefer to use your Silk and Sonder as a journal.  

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Looking to dive deeper into your self-care and journaling practice? Check out our courses: 

• Core Values Workshop
• Journaling AMA Workshop 
• Paving the Path to a Better You Workshop