tried tracking for 5 weeks. here is what happened.
Something I keep coming back to: tried tracking for 5 weeks. here is what happened.
To save the first four comments: 5 weeks.
Choose a format you will still be able to open in two years. Plain text or a spreadsheet you export beats an application that may not exist.
Annotation is what makes a log survive contact with your future self. A single note beside an unusual week saves an hour of puzzled reconstruction later.
Ask me anything specific. Anything general I will probably get wrong.
best — the order this archive was captured in
A log is only interpretable if the conditions are consistent. Same day, same time, same state, same scale — otherwise you are recording measurement variability rather than change.
Push back: a log with four variables changing at once cannot attribute anything to any of them.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Correction: those two entries are 6 weeks apart, not consecutive, which changes how the middle of that series reads.
one line a week beats a spreadsheet you abandon
waist monthly, weight weekly, notes whenever
Agreed. One line a week that actually gets written beats an elaborate template abandoned in month two.
Attribution requires that one thing change at a time. A log with dose, training and intake all moving in the same fortnight cannot assign anything to any of them.
Retitled — a log is a record, not a protocol, and the original read as a schedule for others to follow.
Yes — log what happened rather than what you intended. My retrospective entries were quietly wrong every time.
Small fix — that is a reconstructed entry rather than a contemporaneous one, and the post presents it as the latter.