A mandala chart for any goal worth keeping

What is a mandala chart?

A mandala chart is a 9×9 grid for breaking a single goal into concrete next steps. The center cell holds the goal. Around it sit eight themes — the areas you have to develop to reach the goal. Each of those themes then expands into eight specific actions, for a total of 64 things you can actually do this week.

The Ohtani version

The format was popularised by Shohei Ohtani. As a 16-year-old at Hanamaki Higashi High School in Iwate, he filled out a 9×9 grid with the goal of being drafted by all eight Nippon Professional Baseball teams in the first round. Themes included pitch control, mental, body, sleep, luck, and human relationships. He went on to become the first MLB player since Babe Ruth to seriously hit and pitch — and a unanimous MVP.

The same structure works for anything where progress depends on many small habits across multiple dimensions: a career, a business, a fitness goal, a recovery, a project.

How Mandara works

• Pick a template (soccer or blank) or start a new mandala from scratch.
• Click any cell to edit it in place. Press Enter to save, Esc to cancel.
• Tap the small circle at the top-left of any cell to cycle its status: not set → to do → in progress → done → blocked. The cell glows with a matching ring colour.
• Hover an outer cell and click the small + to expand it into its own 3×3 sub-grid (useful when an action turns out to be a sub-project of its own).
• Drill into any cell with the ✨ icon to focus on it as the new centre; the breadcrumb walks you back.
• Save any mandala as a personal template you can clone for future goals.
• Hit Printfor a clean monochrome version sized for an A4 wall poster — your browser's “Save as PDF” handles the rest.

Where your data lives

Everything stays in this browser's localStorage. There is no account, no server, no database. That means:

• You can use it offline.
• It doesn't sync between devices.
• Clearing site data — or using a different browser — starts you fresh.
• Nobody (including us) can see your mandalas. There is no “us.”

Why Mandara and not Mandala?

Same word, different journey. The Sanskrit मण्डल (maṇḍala) means “circle” — a visual schema for the whole of something. When Buddhism crossed into China and then Japan, the script became 曼荼羅 and the sound became mandara (Japanese has no l; the closest sound is ra).

The 9×9 matrix-chart format used here didn't come from Sanskrit cosmology or Tibetan sand-painting. It came from Hiroaki Matsumura, a Japanese management consultant who in 1979 designed the mandala chart (マンダラチャート) as a business tool — and from Shohei Ohtani, who filled one out as a 16-year-old in Iwate and made the format famous. The chart is a Japanese invention.

Calling it “Mandara” keeps the lineage honest: it credits where this particular tool actually comes from, and it sidesteps the spiritual / sand-painting connotations of the English word mandala, which describe something quite different.