Journaling

Please keep a daily meditation journal! 

Include:

1. Date
2. Time and length of Meditation
3. Approximately how much of the meditation time did you use doing the preliminaries, contemplation, and meditation?
4. Any realizations you had during that session. Your general experience.  
5. What affected your meditation in good ways and in bad ways? For ex, checking email right before meditation really affected my mind in a bad way...or eating light the night before made me feel great in my morning meditation or practicing at 7am is much better for me than practicing at 8am, etc...
6. Diet - write everything you ate that day - quantity, timing, quality of food, who prepared it, where did it come from, main ingredients
7. Asana, Pranayama, Mantra, Study...any other activity for your spiritual, mental, and/or physical wellbeing (what time and for how long)
8. Dreams
9. What did you do today for someone else
   

Try to be consistent. For example, if you meditate at 7am, make it 7am every morning. Do this with your diet too. Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time daily. Practice asana at the same time daily. As much as you can. This will make everything more beneficial. Be open to taking months to experiment with different times until you find a schedule that really works well with your system. But, if you are meditating once a day -- there is no decision-making necessary -- the time is early morning.