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Comment by a-dub | Hacker News Reader

i would say, be generous with yourself in terms of tracking showing up at all since that alone is huge (and most important for sustaining the behavior). if you notice that you're slipping and showing up late too often, maybe create another habit for being on time?

i don't understand the rationale behind cheating one's own self improvement journal. what's the end game?

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Self-destruction, via small acts of self-sabotage.

Next day, your inner critic and saboteur tell you something along the lines of: "You shouldn't go today - you're tired, there's so much work that you should do instead, and you're not even doing the gym actually/properly (AGAIN), just look at yesterday, you couldn't even do 25 min, you've cheated and have now tainted it". Even though it was the same exact voice that led you to do it yesterday.

i don't think that computer vision gates or even an ai agent trying to enforce accountability are going to help all that much in that case. maybe try a therapist or a real-life accountability partner.

I’ve tried it all. No real life partner can be there on the hour (most accountability partner systems work on a daily/weekly basis). “Friends” definitely don’t work.

An automated measurement system is the way to go. Like the poster above you said, the “cheating” rarely happens in a binary Yes/No situation or me going into a log and editing it (that would obviously be silly). It happens in the rolling measurements, the 22mins vs 25 mins hard day gray zone situations

yeah in that case, use a binary for "did you do it that day?" and a measure for "how much of it did you do that day?". loop habit tracker supports both, i bet this one does too. a built-in stopwatch to make time tracking specifically easy would be cool.

i have done things like "do x at least once three times a week" and then had a separate counter for how many times. it's good to track intensity or progression, but i think the most value comes from "did you do it at all that day?" and then sticking to a plan that involves n days a week.

the finer grained tracking can contribute to "i am not on target, so maybe it doesn't matter" sort of thinking where maybe the most valuable thing is "i am setting time aside n days a week and sticking to at least attempting the activity on that schedule."

ymmv of course, this stuff is deeply personal!

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