After optimizing my diet, sleep, and exercise, I learned my mood and energy levels were always primarily related to two things:
1) Working hard but nothing to show for it. If I get stuck too long on a problem, I now work on a simpler problem or take a break. Otherwise I just wind-up depressed and tired.
2) Interactions with people. I am aware of when interactions with co-workers, family members, etc. turn from energizing to energy draining and then either end the interaction or ask them to avoid this topic in the future.
I applaud your ability to recognize topics you don't like but it's worthwhile to ask yourself if you are avoiding those topics because they are not worth your time or because they make you uncomfortable. Without exploring that discomfort -- even just on your own -- those topics will always haunt you.
I doubt all of them will always haunt. I could probably see what you mean in some instances. In many others absolutely no. Just ending it is fine. Like talking to HR. They're usually more than useless and just take up your time for no good reason. If you can end a conversation early or satisfy whatever they make you do to the letter and the letter only, go for it, don't ever think about it ever again.
I've had literally one HR person in my career so far that seemed to actually care about people and tried to make things better. And one other that was at least good at her job and did what she promised though the circumstances we needed to work together for weren't the nicest experience (for both of us, coz we had to lay off a bunch of people)
I think it boils down to bad faith, dishonest, or hypocritical conversations. Why explore that further especially if you previously set boundaries, explained the dishonesty or hypocrisy, and they still bring it up ?
And having these assholes around one leads to measurable declines in health over the decades. I don’t have an answer. When I was young I thought we could argue them into decency, then for a while I thought the new people are better than the dying people, Now I try to speak out to protect people from th anssholes, without arguing, just actions. Also tho relatives are especially hard to avoid. My wife and I are both many thousands of miles away from our family. It helps.
One thing I learned after tracking key life criteria for a few years is it's easy to be hyper-focused on tracking at the detriment of living your life. If you sample more than a few times a day, you'll wind up 'living to track' instead of 'tracking to live' because of the constant diligence it requires. Also if you ever track pain, you wind up bringing attention to it, which you might not want to do too much.
Personally I only found one clear trend after tracking for years: my energy levels determined my mood, but not visa-versa. If I was fatigued, my mood plummeted. A very useful insight for future behavior, especially rest/sleep, and one I had to learn through tracking to really it get to stick.
I still track things every day but I do so as a form of accountability to myself. I use it to get perspective on my day and week, to identify and address trends early that I might otherwise dismiss, etc. Useful for behavior change, not data analysis.
Overall, it's a good practice like a form of journaling, but one you want to do somewhat infrequently - I wouldn't track any one thing more than 3x/day, and for everything you should be able to fill it in later (usually the eve) if you are too busy living life.
That whole decisioning tree, hungry, depressed, or sleepy. Surprisingly tricky from inside.
Re the tracking too much, there is the old joke about a bicycle odometer that bings whenever you pass a beautiful site so you don’t miss it in your obsession with velocity.
I was planning to start writing the software to analyze causations when I have 10k entries. But I recently started already. It turned out to become a new project that feels a lot like a javascript based jupyter alternative running in the browser.
My tool so far does not output p values. At the moment, it visualizes possible cause/effect relationships in kind of a dot cloud. It shifts all effects in time relative to the possible cause. So an effect would look like a dent in the graph on the right side of the origin.
Some cause/effect pairs look interesting. But I want to gather more data and implement appropriate statistical tests before I publish something.
It is an interesting question, which statistical tests to apply to this kind of open log format. If anybody here has ideas about this, I would be very interested in hearing them.
Super interesting question! Some combination of NLP and classical time series stats will probably show lots of interesting things.
What's the density over time of the entries? I.e. How many entries per day? And are you consistently recording the same kinds of events and information about them? How many different kinds of events?
Impressive and this is awesome, but you've only covered one aspect of it: logging. Logging is of no use (perhaps except the conciousness it brings in the process of writing things down) unless you have a way to query, analyze and gain meaningful insights from all this data. Have you done that? Thanks for camping out at the summit of HN's peak :-)
I find these tools to be the ultimate form of unhelpful navel-gazing. If you already feel good, what’s the point? If you’re feeling low, you become obsessed and frustrated.
Personally - and I know this isn’t for everyone - I find a combination of open-ended journaling, prayer and meditation, and talking with people I love and trust to be much more effective at achieving balance in life.
I guess it varies from person to person. For me, these tools are counter-productive - what’s really important bubbles up during that time, while these tools mask it.
I'm in a relationship with someone who can't quite put together that certain activities and certain moods are correlated. They've put a bit more structure in their life to preclude the randomness that they usually pursue and it's helpful.
A little more tracking in other areas -- exercise and nutrition -- has been helpful as well. We're all self-employed, working from home, so knowing when you're being orderly versus free versus random is a good lens to employ.
I can feel that wish for randomness though. I really hate having my days tightly ordered. It makes life really boring for me if I know exactly what I'll be doing at what moment during the next week. The same with holidays, I can't stand when I'm with someone that wants to plan every part of a trip in advance. I want the freedom to explore, and to spend more time on the things I find interesting.
The flip side of randomness is the lack of a feeling of accomplishment and of feeling of working towards a goal. But I do think these things are largely societal values imposed on us. When I realise I don't care about spending my time wisely it bothers me a lot less.
I manage to be plenty successful in work too. Not super much but at a level I'm comfortable with.
Nothing makes me happier than to go down a new road and see where it leads. I am glad I don’t live with anyone judging my behavioral correlates (just kidding my wife can glance at me and tell how much I have eaten or how much coffee excess I have enjoyed; it much judging really but awareness for sure.).
What is the retort to hyper-optimizing your life: life so that when you wake up each day you know just what you are going to do. When you love it, you won’t need to track it so much. I mean some todo lists are good especially when it comes to convincing others, but the passion and the sincerity make it all fun and easy.
Tangentially related. I have fairly unorganized folder with a ton of markdown journal entries, notes, observations, shopping lists, etc. I would like to go through organizing, archiving, and editing these entries.
Has anyone done something like that before? How did you do it in a sane way? Do you just start at the end and work forwards? Do you have some kind of #tagging system and then you applied something like elasticsearch or sqlite to filter them?
I've never gone back and logged old notes but I did start doing something that's worked well for me...
I log, "stray thoughts". I put these in a physical notebook but Google Keep or Apple Notes works just as well. Anything goes and everything goes in the same place.
At the beginning of my day, I "translate" my hastily written thoughts into more complete notes in a flat text file. Each thought is written on a single line in a way that I could read and understand it out of context.
I use hash tags to categorize and to link other ideas (by line number).
I also created a biblio.txt file that has URLs, names, book titles, and other references in it. I use curly braces to link a note to a reference.
Example:
Pencils are longer lasting than pens. #324 #327 #writing {26}
The real magic happens when I use my text editors search feature to research all my previous thoughts about something in my flat text file.
Just went through this process myself with a similar rag-tag collection of snippets. I used the zettlekasten process and a plug-in for visual studio code to help with the organization of said information.
Then is an activity and mood diary that helps you analyze how you spend your time and how things you do influence your emotions. You can easily track what you do, how much time it takes, and how it makes you feel.
Whether you choose to focus on just one activity, like time spent working, or record everything you do during the day, detailed insights will help you identify patterns and get a breakdown of positive and negative influences in your daily life. Its goal is to offer a simple, clean and calming experience to help you be more mindful about your time and emotions.
I love the concept of these sort of apps. I am a data nerd, and would really enjoy having a birds eye view of how I spend my time. The problem for me is building a habit of consistent data entry. If I miss a few days it is hard to remember what I was doing and backfill old data.
Being data nerds as well, we were scratching our own itch with Then.
We tried to add a few things to make it a part of our routine, like push notifications and homescreen widget.
But what worked the best for me personally was seeing the value (i.e insights on my activities): after that it got easier to remember to track.
One other thing was focusing only on things that mattered. At first I was trying to track every single activity every day, but then realized that things like showering didn’t really give much insight. So now I primarily focus on activities that are energy draining or which I want to be conscious about (focused work, meetings, side projects, walking, sport etc.)
You didn’t record the difference between a shower that produced great insight into your software problem of the day and the ones that merely cleaned and relaxed you?
Actually if any cohort of the population that really needs fine-tuned optimization strategies.. are parents. Every week I try to find a way to gain a free hour here and there for professional growth. I found Clubhouse app to be a godsend in terms of being able to absorb high-quality info/networking while on the-go.
re: Thankless hole
For a minority yes perhaps.
Its really the best long-term investment that you hope pays off in both seeing them flourish into beautiful adults who will either do something beneficial for humanity and ideally take care of your old broke ass when you are too old and frail.
I agree, I think what I should have said is that the tips you'll tend to find out there are often poorly suited to parents. If you try to hold yourself to those standards, you're going to have a rough time.
But yeah, it's almost a necessity to become better at time management and improving executive function as a parent. If you can't, you lose out in so many areas. It really compounds. I don't know of any sources of good advice on how to accomplish that though; I think families are complex so the 'one size fits all' advice that's more common will tend to cater towards people who have far more control over their environment.
As for the thankless rabbit hole, I was referring to the struggle to meet the standards of others with more time and resources to optimize their lives better. My kids are, overall, one of the most thankful aspects of my life. They're well worth the loss of optimization.
I run a problem validation platform called needgap, There's a problem titled 'Getting things done at individual level '[1] which you might be interested in.
There have been different solutions to the problem, But I don't think there's one which has mood tracking as part of task management. It would be interesting to see if mood tracker as part of task manager turns out to be better for productivity.
Okay. Did You have to provide meta-data for it to show up in the macOS App Store, or did Apple make it available auto magically because you publishes an iPad version?
I like seeing these types of apps, but they’re not for me. I’m a pen and notecard type of person. Perhaps I’ll create a notecard implementation of this :) Best of luck. I’m curious to see how it will evolve.
Opposite to many of mood journals (including Daylio), Then is about more than just mood.
First, it’s focused on understanding your emotions through your activities (i.e. there is no way to track mood without capturing what you did) and showing you correlations between them.
Second, it also allows you to capture time spent on each activity and helps you reflect on it, irrespective of the mood (we actually have some users who use Then as a time tracker alternative).
In a way, you can think of it as a tool that marries time trackers and mood journals.
Wanted to check this out but it requires iOS 14. I’m on 13 in my primary phone until 14 gets jailbroken or iOS gets a proper equalizer. If there are no actual dependencies could you consider rebuilding for 13+?
1) Working hard but nothing to show for it. If I get stuck too long on a problem, I now work on a simpler problem or take a break. Otherwise I just wind-up depressed and tired.
2) Interactions with people. I am aware of when interactions with co-workers, family members, etc. turn from energizing to energy draining and then either end the interaction or ask them to avoid this topic in the future.