How to Use the diyfish Pentagon

Some of you may remember that I once had a blog post explaining how to use the diyfish Pentagon. Unfortunately, that post was lost because of a server problem, so I thought it was time to write it again—with a few more examples this time.

The Pentagon has appeared on many diyfish pages over the years. At first glance, it may look like a decorative detail, but it was designed to be used. It is a small and flexible visual tracker that can hold many different kinds of information without taking up much space on the page.

There is no single “correct” way to use it. You can use time, quantity, colour, patterns, or your own symbols. The following examples are simply ideas to help you get started.

The basic structure

The design is made from a row of connected pentagons. Each pentagon is divided into five small triangles, and the repeating shapes create a continuous strip across the page.

The basic structure of the diyfish Pentagon..

This gives you two ways to look at the design: you can follow the triangles horizontally across the whole strip, or treat each five-triangle pentagon as a small group of its own.

Use it as a 24-hour timeline

On most diyfish Daily Pages, the middle row contains 24 consecutive triangles. If you wish, each triangle can represent one hour of the day: 12 for a.m. and 12 for p.m.

You can colour the triangles according to how you spent your time. For example:

• black for sleep
• purple for meetings
• orange for family time

A 24-hour timeline combined with a water-intake tracker.

Once the colours are added, the Pentagon becomes a compact visual timeline. You can see the general shape of your day at a glance without writing out a full hourly schedule.

The additional triangles around the 24-hour row can be used for something else. In the example shown here, each blue triangle represents one glass of water. This allows the same Pentagon to show both how the day was spent and how much water was consumed.

Let one triangle represent one unit

The triangles do not have to represent hours. You can also decide that one triangle equals one unit of anything you would like to track.

For example:

• one pink triangle = 1 kilometre walked
• one blue triangle = one glass of water
• one triangle = one hour of sleep
• one triangle = one cup of coffee

Complete one unit, fill in one triangle. Colour coding makes it easy to track several things in the same design and still tell them apart.

The unit can be a kilometre, a glass, an hour, a session, a chapter, or simply one completed action. It depends entirely on what is useful to you.

Track by individual pentagons

You do not always have to fill the design from left to right. You can also work with one pentagon at a time.

Because one complete pentagon contains five triangles, it naturally creates a group of five. If you drank seven glasses of water, for example, you could colour one full pentagon for the first five glasses and then colour two more triangles.

The same design can hold several different types of information:

• seven blue triangles for seven glasses of water
• two brown triangles for two cups of coffee
• six grey triangles for six hours of sleep
• green triangles for kilometres jogged

It can also be used as a simple rating scale. For a headache tracker, one coloured triangle might mean very mild, while all five triangles could mean very severe. In this case, the triangles are not counting separate events; they are showing intensity on a scale from one to five.

This is one of the useful things about the Pentagon: some sections can record actual quantities, while others can record levels or ratings, all within the same small space.

Add patterns, symbols and drawings

Colour coding is only one possibility. You can also fill the triangles with patterns to make the tracker more personal and more fun.

Patterns, colours and drawings can become your own visual language.

For example, you might use:

• flowing or wavy lines for water
• circles for gardening
• stripes for work or study
• dots, checks, or your own repeating patterns for different activities

Colours and patterns can also represent different people. If you are tracking your children’s reading, for example, orange could represent one child and yellow another. You can then use the number of triangles, or the size of the coloured area, to show how much each person read.

You do not need to stay strictly inside the outline either. A colour, pattern, line, or small drawing can extend beyond the Pentagon when that helps tell the story. The printed shape is there to give you a starting structure, not to limit your creativity.

How it looks on a Daily Page

On a diyfish Daily Page, the Pentagon sits neatly within the daily layout. It takes up very little room, so there is still plenty of space for appointments, tasks and notes.

Even with just a few lightly coloured triangles, it creates a useful visual record of the day. Over time, those small marks can help you notice patterns that may be difficult to see from written notes alone—how much you slept, when you were busiest, how regularly you exercised, or how your energy and symptoms changed.

The Pentagon in use on a diyfish Daily Page.

Use it for monthly tracking

The Pentagon also appears on many diyfish Month-on-2-Page layouts. Most of these pages contain six pentagons. Since each pentagon has five triangles, that gives you 30 small tracking units.

If each triangle represents one day, you can use the design to see a monthly trend. Some ideas include:

• mood or energy
• sleep quality
• exercise
• reading
• water intake
• pain or other symptoms
• progress on a personal or work goal

You can also ignore the calendar and use the 30 triangles as quantity-based units instead. They might represent 30 workouts, 30 kilometres, 30 glasses, 30 focused work sessions, or any other total you want to work towards.

Make it your own

The diyfish Pentagon was designed as a framework, not a set of fixed rules. One triangle can be an hour, a glass of water, a kilometre, a task, or a level of intensity. One pentagon can represent a set of five. Colours can separate activities or people, while patterns and drawings can add another layer of meaning.

Start with whatever you would genuinely like to notice in your day. Choose a simple key, fill in the shapes as you go, and let your own way of using the Pentagon develop naturally.

I hope these examples give you a few ideas—and perhaps inspire some uses that I have not thought of yet.