The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life | Hacker News Reader

The Surprising Benefits of Relentlessly Auditing Your Life

nytimes.com

127 pointssajid47 comments

When I used to do conscious self improvement, I journaled. I simply answered the prompt: what did I do to achieve my goal today, and what can I do better?

This had the same effect as their quantitative approach: you start to see patterns.

I’d suggest: the profound enabler of change isn’t the quantitative aspect of it, it is that you’re logging data in the first place.

Our brains can’t log that much. Notepads and spreadsheets can.

Of course, quantitative va qualitative have some trade offs, but the low hanging fruit is data logging, not Excel.

so... I'm with this, but... I know the results my logs would be.

I want to work out and be in great shape. Run, stretch, weights, yada yada.

I can log all day. It won't change the fact that I'm lazy/just don't have the work ethic to actually do it.

I (and others [1]) have found that the act of logging itself helps you build and maintain momentum. For some people not wanting to "break the chain" of visible squares/X's/dots is enough motivation to continue.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/theXeffect/

I am not sure if that helps you, a tech salary (or similar) might be necessary to pull it off this way :

I am not exactly disciplined, I have thought for years about working out instead of actually doing it.

Until one year ago. I have started working with a trainer. It is insanely expensive BUT it helps a lot in establishing a routine. The exercises themselves are pretty standard, but having somebody to give you a program adapted to your current condition and to correct your movements help tremendously.

I have changed from not working out to working out 4-5 times a week.

That's exactly what did it for me, too. Except it wasn't a trainer, but a Couch to 5k like podcast. I found one that was much much more beginner friendly than C25k and also gave a strength and rest plan. Using the podcast and seeing hte weeks go by has made me much more motivated to get out and run, even on wet 5 degree centigrade days, let alone the 30 degree days.

Just something to hold yourself accountable to, really. I've also found it's why many of my other projects/ideas/desires don't pan out. There's nothing to hold me accountable, so I get bored and move on. It sucks, because it feels like I'm trapped in a rutt, but I don't know of a way to really manage that.

Last year I started a "streaking" program. You have to run at least one mile every day for a year. Eventually it becomes a habit like coffee. Once you get so many days in you don't want to break the streak. I went 430 days without a day off. Worth a try.

This may help too, I was lazy about it too, and I found that once I had a goal I wanted, it really helped me actually achieve something.

If you want to work out, two suggestions I can give is check out starting strength. That's a very good workout routine. Another if you ha e the money is to hire a personal trainer. Both of those have really helped me.

"I want to work out and be in great shape."

This is really vague actually, and you could chase that goal forever. I need you to set a small goal, like being able to do 50 pushups and then train specifically for that over the next few weeks whenever you can. Even if you don't become able to do 50 pushups, you'll have gotten slightly stronger along the way. Once you become stronger, you'll start feeling strong and motivated enough to do more stuff.

Set small goals that you can reasonably work toward and progress gradually. What do you mean by running? If you mean like running outside around your neighborhood, that's too easy to excuse yourself from by scapegoating the weather or that the time is bad. I recommend learning to skip/jump rope, which you can do without even leaving your home if you're feeling lazy. Once you get more fit with the jump rope, you'll be able to feel up for running when the opportunity does come instead of pushing it off.

Good luck!

There are a couple of tricks. It'll be more work than what it would take if you were a stereotypical high achieving individual but its still possible to increase the likelihood of achievong your goals.

One is habits. Start with a low effort commitment that establishes the habit. For the gym that might be going to the gym. Not working out, or even entering the building. Literally just driving to the gym twice a week. And most of the time you'll end up working out anyway.

Another is planning. Plan exactly exactly when and how you'll go to the gym in detail. Ok Thursday I will leave work early to make it to the gym on time.

Another is imagining how your life would be different if you worked out and what you need to do to achieve it. Imagine all of the benefits as wellnas the sacrifices. Imagime how hard its going to be to motivate yourself to drive the gym after a hard day. Imagine rescheduling friends for dinner to work out.

Do you understand how to do that? Do you have a workout an, exercises, schedule, measureable goals as milestones?

Often it's the nebulous goals ("be in great shape") that are hardest to work on, simply because tjey're vague.

Run a 5-minute mile. Or a 2-hour marathon. Climb Whitney. Ride a century. Deadlift 500#. 32" waistline.

Those are specific goals. The list isn'tan encompassing one -- pick one of those, or a congruent set. Bodybuilding or powerlifting and endurance sports tend not to be highly compatible, though strength training, as an adjunct to a primary goal, can help almost any activity. Another key is to pick goals appropriate to your morphology and abilities: smaller, thinner, long-limbed people make better distance runners, larger are better at power/strength sports, including sprint events. High coordination makes skill sports possible, competitive spirit and youth; lacrosse or ice hockey.

Logging can help you discover your interests, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as progress toward goals.

But showing up at the gym with "get into shape" is pretty vague. If you're starting at a tyical baseline, almost any introductory fitness programme incorporating strength and cardio will benefit.

Group, team, or club activities are another option.

Sounds like a refreshingly simple method. Why did you stop?

I've been a diarist before logging my mood. I stopped because it was homework. Yet it was worth doing.

I had the same experience. I was really surprised about my 4 month+ patterns. I am quite self reflective, but I didn’t see any of those patterns by simply observing my mind.

I have a secret startup plan - MOOPs

Massive Open Online Psychology.

You wire your house with iPhones or Alexas recording your daily conversations with your family - it records things like "number of positive responses" vs "number negative responses" when replying to your spouse or children.

There are dozens of simple verbal checks one can pull out of even fairly raw speech to text, let alone visual dances.

And imagine if you had a monthly review with a therapist how had all this data at their fingertips- and could coach you and your spouse to improve the worst of it.

I saw a TV show many years ago where the therapist simply set up a video camera in the dining room of a family to record, every day, the family dinner. After 2 or 3 weeks, the family forgot about the camera and reverted to their normal behaviors.

After a few months of this, the therapist took the videos and then showed each member of the family how they behaved. They were horrified, and it turned out to be excellent family therapy.

It's like the best way to teach someone to be a better public speaker is to record them speaking, and play it back to them.

Oh god no. Tell me this idea is a joke.

If you ignore the privacy complications, this is actually quite an interesting idea.

If someone did it, it’d likely be opt-in and only for a short, finite period (1 week?) with the data being destroyed after it’s used.

Yeah this is great. To make it scale, you need to put one additional camera in the bedroom of the parents. /s

This sounds like a dystopian nightmare come true

It’s all about ownership and agency. If a company gathers this data, does this analysis, and uses it for their own reasons without giving the monitored people a say - that’s a distopian nightmare. BUT as GP describes, it’s a tool within your control, helping you improve your life. That’s ok with me.

Slight tangent: somehow I cannot find it, but there is an amazing TedX video where a Google engineer tracked how his child learned words by effectively doing this and recording and tracking everyone’s voices and paths in the home. The amount of data he stored and crunched was impressive.

You may want to hit him up for his tech setup :)

Heh I remember that. Pretty sure it used the classic “force an army of grad students to manually review everything “ approach

yes. deb roy from mit media lab.

> Our spreadsheets hammered home that what contributed most to our happiness was time spent together or with friends — while, crucially, not working — and there was no way to get more of that if we continued to live in the Bay Area, one of the most expensive parts of the country. So I proposed an idea that would have seemed radical were there not so much data backing it: “I think you should quit your job, we should sell our house, and we should move somewhere cheaper,” I told my husband matter-of-factly one day. So we did.

Will be kind of hard to meet with friends, as they have all stayed in the Bay Area?

You are allowed to make new friends, even as an adult. As someone who has lived in a dozen cities in my adult life, it does take effort. But it seems like, as the author is willing to take the effort to track and adjust their life, they are likely willing to put in time to make new friends.

I've found meetup.com to be an excellent way to make friends, as well as hobbies. (for me, standup comedy and DJing were excellent).

Group fitness classes at some gyms have a stable cohort that you’ll bond with over time.

We need a different word than "friends" for such bonds though... Someone who does not know your birthday is not a friend.

acquaintance ?

Repeated interaction is a necessary first step to friendship, you cannot befriend someone you don’t see. My gym buddies are now my friends, and we see each other regularly outside of the gym context.

Also, most of my friends don’t know when my birthday is, so that’s a bad metric imho. Birthdays are not universally important across the population.

I read a metric on a different thread recently: good friends help you move.

lol wut. I have friends now of several decades who I see regularly (make effort to visit cross country) none of whose birthdays I know or who know mine.

> Someone who does not know your birthday is not a friend.

You and I have very different ideas of what is important in life and friendship.

Re: DJing- I recently got into this. Do you DJ private/house parties or at nightclubs? From the forums I’ve read, people say it takes a lot of networking to get a gig/slot at a nightclub. I guess you make friends along the way too?

>We’re in a much more precarious place financially now, after a few non-spreadsheet-related surprises, but we’re still determined to make whatever decisions we can to improve our lives.

This, imho, shows the issue with basing life decisions so relentlessly on personal data no matter how well collected. Either the unexpected catastrophic scenario hasn't happened so you don't hedge for it or it has happened and you hedge too much on it happening again. Just like basing stock decisions on the recent past is great right until a recession or bubble hits to wipe you out.

You're basically describing the black swan problem [1], but I'm not sure what your argument has to do with the premise of the article, which I understood as "tracking your life in a mechanical manner allows you to make better, more objective decisions."

Are you saying we shouldn't track aspects of our lives because that could lead to essentially "overfitting" decisions based on personal data? I don't think the data or the collection of the data is the problem - it's ignoring black swans.

I'd argue that our decisions are always influenced by our personal, recent past. If it's not explicitly written down in a spreadsheet, it's imprinted on our subconscious and associated with related emotions.

At least spreadsheets/journals allow us insight into details that we're likely to forget in our day-to-day lives. I think personal tracking is a net positive for anyone.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_...

> I think you should quit your job

> We’re in a much more precarious place financially now

Hmm...

You forgot the part immediately following your out of context quote where she says they had multiple large expenses that were inexpected.

You suggest (by placing those two quotes together) that seeking happiness in a less expensive area will put people in financially precarious situations.

I'd like to know why you decided these quotes go together, and why they don't merit being quoted in proper context?

I dunno, in my view this seems like the sort of thing that should show up if you are relentlessly auditing your life - surely one of the pillars you would optimize for is stability, and thinking 'hey, what happens if one of us gets laid off' or 'hey, what happens if I get pregnant' or both at the same time sort of thing. Once you've worked out what the current fires are in your life, it makes sense to work out where fires could come from and do some prevention (to torture the metaphor a bit here)

> You suggest (by placing those two quotes together) that seeking happiness in a less expensive area will put people in financially precarious situations.

That may be true.

The Bay Area has expensive housing, but a lot of things cost the about the same everywhere in the country -- an iPhone, a Honda Civic, a lawnmower, a water heater, clothing, school supplies, etc.

The salaries in the Bay Area are also a lot higher than elsewhere. People spend a lot of money on housing, but all of the other stuff they buy costs a smaller portion of their income than it does in other places.

Something about this article felt disjointed. I read back over the jarring part to see if I had somehow skipped over a section or read it in the wrong order.

I felt something amiss as well, and then I realized what it was, it was built to force compliance in a family dynamic

One of the reasons for this feeling is that the author only sees herself. For example,

> Because the really intractable problems — like the social expectations placed on mothers, the gendered division of labor in homes, the invisibility of all sorts of care work — are not going to magically disappear.

All three problems she mentions are on her "side." As the reader you are left wondering…

But still a worth read, her overall point is IMHO solid.

I have often thought about ways of optimizing my life, but doing so in a minimally invasive/time suck matter.

One element, mentioned in the article, is coming up with your “happiness score”. However the way they suggest it seems a bit onerous. I almost wonder if it would be easier to do a “happy or not” style of data collection. Basically like the ones you see at airports, but maybe tied to facial recognition so you know who in the family is recording it.

Ideally you would add more metrics (like sleep monitor), but I feel having just that much would be beneficial.

Thoughts on this? Can anyone think of an easier method for the basic data collection (which doesn’t involve someone filling out a spreadsheet?)

As the saying goes, "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans".

I've been curious about this for a while. Seems like it is a lot of work but could be useful in small sustained bursts of effort (maybe 2 months) - much like diet logging. Will yield some insights and benefits and you don't have to keep it up forever.

Anyone have suggestions for software or other tools? The article explained motivations but was pretty light on the methods. To stretch the analogy above, is there a MyFitnessPal for this or do people's aims vary enough the everyone just rolls their own spreadsheets?

A live organized and optimized like a Toyota factory seems absurd to me.

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