Changes in February

During Februray I trialed a few changes to my daily tracking.

  • I stopped using black to indicate complete failures
  • I stopped tracking negative behaviours
    • E.g. consuming shit content (social media, binge watching, etc.)
  • I switched to tracking what I work on instead of how long I worked

Changes Review

Surprisingly all the changes had either a positive or neutral impact, there were some adverse affects but overall it has been positive.

Stopping using black and stopping tracking negative behaviours was an attempt to actively focus on positive things and not look back at negatives. I was trying to correct the spirals that occured when one bad thing happened and then my mind concluded the day was lost. Largely this is what I have experienced this was the first month ever where I have put green for every habit, every day. This is a big improvement and shows that I have at least tried for each day and stopped bad behaviour spiralling.

There were some side effects however. The barrier to what defines green, orange or red for a habit has never been defined and what constituted a green appears to have slipped. Some days a minute of mindfulness constituted green for meditation. I’m not sure if that is right because I can’t then differentiate between days where I went well with meditation and days where I just didn’t do it much. That is indicative of a larger problem with tracking habits it doesn’t distinguish between things well. When reality and the tracking diverge we can’t get meaningful insights from the data. So I need to put more effort into making the tracking system robust to bullshit data. Another issue that felt as if it came up but I don’t have the data to back it up is the consumption of shit content. Just because I stopped tracking it doesn’t mean it went away and perhaps it increased. But the reality is that it doesn’t matter, if it’s not reflecting in your other data points why does it matter that you watched youtube for 3 hours or played video games for 8.

Although I am slowly starting to accept that I don’t have to be perfect the slip for what defines “green” does need to be addressed. To do so I have defined some simple thresholds for each habit. That way we can be a little more thorough with our tracking and better reflect reality.

Tracking what I work on instead of how long I work was a natural consequence of always forgetting to track how long I worked for. Which meant the tracking was no longer reflecting reality. So tracking what I work on allows me to simplify and keep it more aligned with reality (its also just easier).

New Changes

Along side the added thresholds I am making a change to how I plan. Previously you calling my planning ad hoc would be generous. For weekdays it was generally write out a task list for work and on weekends it was generally pick something you are going to do and often don’t bother to write it down. So I have come up with a new structure for planning that will help me define what, where and when for a few habits and a few other things I want to work on.

Another new thing that I am trialling is defining what I would have to do to call March a successful month. Focused on setting reasonable and achievable goals. I realised that now at the end of February it is really hard to tell how the month has been because I haven’t consciously been working towards anything I could see. So all the incidental little things just get forgotten. Expanding on this I will endeavour to also to answer this question daily. What would I have to do to call this day successful?

What I did in February

  • Landed first PR for new project and first in the main repo for work
    • Although it seems trivial this is pretty big for me
  • Started using agents and have begun transforming how I work
    • My agents are called “big dog” and I would highly reccomend giving them nicknames and getting them to give you a nickname its so much fun
  • Went to the beach a lot (10 plus times)
  • Played a lot of Fallout 4 until I had to delete steam to control myself
  • Had 3 naps
    • Need to pump this up, this is a rookie number
  • Started learning Spanish
  • Came 3rd in the local quiz night once
  • Played a lot more basketball
    • Didn’t get a bad injury this month (shoulder is fucked but that happened end of January so it doesn’t count)

Final Thoughts

To finish just want to think about a few things I am looking forward to in March. I think the biggest one is one of my brothers is moving back to Perth, will be cool to have him around again. A second would be landing some more PRs for work and getting majority of this project done. A third would be getting back into the gym and training more.

I will be very surprised if anyone actually read this, but thanks if you did I guess. Apologies for the ramble but I am really just trying to think about how the systems in my life can be improved and how I can be better. Moving beyond tracking data for its own sake and trying to draw some useful conclusions from it.