The human log (imitative)
First things first, none of the ideas are mine (a few example and irrelevant statements are, though). All the credits to Neil Kakkar and his blogpost.
Log — to track activities.
Literally means a log of wood. Unrelated but interesting, as the tree ages, number of rings in the log’s cross section keep growing i.e. keeping a track of the age of the tree :)
Two prominent points where logging helps — Crash investigation, and Pattern recognition or Behaviour detection.
- Airplane crash investigation — black box logs every single measure of what happened
2. Sports — every movement is captured. I’ll observe all your techniques from your previous recordings now and slay you later.
3. Software — every activity is logged. No bug can escape!
Every tangible system works with some kind of log, except for the human body.
Just like systems -
- Humans crash too — feeling lethargic, unable to focus, wasted the entire day. Had it been for spikes in a software, we wouldn’t have let it pass, right! We would have tried to figure out what’s going wrong in the system and would have resolved the bug. Because spikes make the system unstable.
- Humans also need behaviour detection — what is it that’s causing me to act like this lately? Since when have I been so impatient?
And unlike in systems, we let go of the data from human activity. A slack in a habit would escalate to ultimately that habit being gone before we realise — and if we want to find out why that happened, we don’t have any idea when it started going downhill and what went wrong. Only if we had logs in human system just like other systems, we could have root caused the issue and would have prevented it from repeating itself.
I’ve registered in hundreds of online courses and till date, haven’t finished one! Have started reading so many books which were left midway with no tangible reason. Have read and consumed so much information which got lost in the nerve connections, never to be recalled again. Things repeat, unless we do something about it.
So yeah, start logging. Question is, why is maintaining human log harder?
We haven’t built the system, so we don’t know the variables which come into play.
Good part, we can still work on what’s in our hand. Can set goals and work with parameters around them.
- Say, I want to work on increasing my focus. On a daily basis, can log the focus hours and the distractions incurred. A daily note of the distractions will help understand what is going on wrong. And seeing the focus hours grow will be a boost!
Start logging about yourself. While it’s good to log everything as we don’t know what variables are important, it’s not really feasible because of there is so much to track! Hence, start with a goal and track information which might affect it. And if the system still crashes despite the parameters trajectory looking good, maybe we need to update our variable list.
Maintaining a daily journal is a super useful tool. And don’t just write about anything — work with an agenda. Let everything else be extra. Don’t miss on the important parts which relate to the goal. Data Driven Journaling, as Neil calls it.
Added advantage of this methodology — we can also use this same framework for building habits. It takes consistency to build a habit (some number of days here), and the recommendation is to start a chain and trying not to break it. It’s okay to miss workout the 3rd day, but DO resume it on the 4th. And how do we know how our chain is building up — easy peasy, we write it down. Building habit needs us to come to some tracking tool everyday — having the daily log / journal in place, we can leverage the same page for this habit tracking as well.
And do have a specific time of the day when you come back and journal. Having an irregular schedule rarely works, not for me at least.
A brilliant read indeed.
Next Steps -
- Read more about journaling. How to do it optimally to waste the least brain cycles and maintain continuity.
- Further reads -
- https://neilkakkar.com/Dealing-with-information-overload.html
- https://neilkakkar.com/understanding-systems.html
- https://neilkakkar.com/second-order-thinking.html
What changed -
- Got to start daily journaling, this time seriously :)
