tracking — 17 things I got wrong before I got it right
tracking — 17 things I got wrong before I got it right, which sounds obvious until you try to state the evidence for it.
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.
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.
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.
Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Why contemporaneous beats reconstructed, with the failure mode.
Memory smooths. Reconstructing a fortnight from recollection produces a series that is more regular, more consistent with your current beliefs, and quietly wrong in a direction that flatters the story you are already telling.
I found this out by reconstructing six weeks and later finding order receipts that contradicted my own entries. The log was not a little wrong; it was wrong in exactly the direction that made my narrative work. Write it down on the day, even the boring days, especially the boring days.
Wrote the concentration into the log as well as on the vial. Have referred back to it more than once.
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.
A log is a record of what you did. It is not a protocol, and posting one as a schedule for other members is a different thing that this board does not do.
annotate the weeks where something else changed
Annotated the fortnight I changed training. Without that note the numbers around it would look like a mystery.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Are the missed weeks in there as blanks or dropped entirely?
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.
the value of a log is in month six, not week one
Retitled — a log is a record, not a protocol, and the original read as a schedule for others to follow.
That template is elaborate enough that you will stop using it by week ten. Mine was.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
consistent conditions or you are logging noise
retrospective logs drift, contemporaneous ones do not