What I Actually Use to Track Feng Shui Readings
Most people I talk to have no system for tracking their own readings. They pull a BaZi chart, arrange a floor plan, take some notes, and then forget half of it within a month. I built something called a Feng Shui Logbook Top 10 framework after burning through about eight different notebooks and three failed spreadsheets over twelve years. It is not fancy. It works because it forces you to record the things that matter later when a client calls back asking why a cure stopped working or what you originally recommended. Here are the ten data points that actually hold up over time. Anything less and you will be guessing on the follow-up visit. Anything more and nobody finishes their log. 1. Client ID and date of reading — This sounds stupid until you have three clients with the same name showing up six months apart. Use a code like FS-2024-087. Put the full date. If you ever need to reference this later, you will be grateful.
2. Property type and layout reference — Apartment, detached house, office floor. Attach a photo of the floor plan or at least a hand-drawn sketch. Label the compass orientation clearly. I learned this the hard way after doing a reading on a corner unit and confusing the facing direction because I did not mark which wall was the true south. Took me three weeks to realize my error. 3. Facing direction and sitting direction — Record both in degrees and in the eight/trigram label. A compass reading of 178 degrees is not the same as 182 degrees even though both sit in the same trigram zone. Precision matters when you are checking annual flying stars later. Include the measurement tool you used and note any magnetic anomalies in the building. Steel-framed buildings will throw off your reading completely if you do not account for it. 4. Bagua overlay position — Write down whether you applied the Kun trigram to the entrance wall or the far wall. Different schools use different methods and this decision changes every other recommendation you make. I once spent twenty minutes recalculating a cure placement because my notes did not capture which Bagua method I had used during the initial reading. Never again.
5. Key Feng Shui observations — This is where you put the actual findings. Missing corners, rushing Sha Qi from a road, a staircase directly facing the front door, a bedroom positioned in the health sector with a bathroom overlapping it. Be specific. "Bad energy near the bed" is useless. "Bed headboard against a wall shared with the toilet plumbing, located in the Southwest Kun sector" is something you can act on six months from now. 6. Elemental analysis of the space — Note which elements dominate and which are missing. A kitchen in the center of the unit creates excessive Fire element. A basement office with no windows is Earth-heavy and deficient in Wood. This matters when you are balancing cures and when you are diagnosing why a particular remedy did not work as expected. 7. Annual and period flying star charts — Write out the current period chart and the annual stars for that year. Period 9 started in 2024 so if you are pulling old readings from Period 8, note that explicitly. The difference between these two periods completely changes which sectors are favorable. I had a client return in 2025 complaining that a wealth corner I had identified was now bringing problems. The annual star had moved. The original reading was correct for its time, but the context had shifted.
8. Recommendations and cures applied — List every recommendation with the element and placement. Water feature in the Southeast. Mirror on the North wall. Crystal in the bedroom corner. Include the reasoning for each. "Mirror on North wall" means nothing later. "Mirror on North wall to activate Water element in career sector per Xuan Kong Fei Xing annual star analysis" is traceable. 9. Client feedback and follow-up dates — This is the part most practitioners skip. Schedule your follow-up. Record what the client reports back at thirty days, ninety days, and one year. Some cures take time. Some cause unintended side effects. One of my clients installed a mirror cure for a hallway and his sleep quality actually degraded because the mirror was reflecting the bed at night. The cure was technically correct but the placement needed adjustment. I caught this because I had follow-up notes scheduled. 10. Lessons and adjustments — After a reading closes out, add a final note on what worked, what did not, and what you would change next time. This turns your logbook into a reference library instead of just a filing cabinet. After about forty entries you start seeing patterns in your own work that you would never notice otherwise.
How I actually set this up
I use a simple digital table with the ten fields above as columns. A spreadsheet works fine. Airtable is better because you can attach photos and floor plans directly to each row. A physical notebook is fine too if you prefer pen on paper. The medium does not matter. The consistency matters. The format I recommend is a single row per client reading. If you do a follow-up visit, that is a new row linked to the same client ID. Never overwrite a previous entry. The history is the point.
Where this approach falls apart
The Feng Shui Logbook Top 10 system assumes you have access to a reliable compass and you can take reasonably accurate readings. If you are doing readings remotely or on secondhand floor plans without verified orientation data, most of these fields become guesses. In those cases, the logbook will still help you organize your thoughts, but the flying star charts and directional analysis will need heavy caveats attached. Be honest about what you know and what you are estimating. Future you will thank you when a client asks for documentation. There is also a time cost. A thorough logbook entry takes about fifteen to twenty minutes per reading. If you are doing six readings a week, that is roughly two hours of documentation time on top of your actual work. Some practitioners compress the fields into a shorthand version and only use the full Ten Field format for complex cases. That is a reasonable compromise. If you need something more structured than a plain spreadsheet and do not want to build your own system, there are a few practitioner tools available online that include logbook templates. Search for "Feng Shui Logbook Top 10 template" and you will find a handful of free options. I have tried several and they tend to either oversimplify or overcomplicate. The ten-field version I described above is simpler than most paid templates and more complete than most free ones. You can build it in about ten minutes in whatever tool you already use.
The real value shows up after the sixth or seventh entry. That is when you start cross-referencing cures across different clients and noticing that certain placements consistently produce certain results in certain sectors. That pattern recognition is what separates a technician from someone who actually understands the system. The logbook is just the tool that makes it possible to see those patterns clearly.
