Changes in 12019

In 12018 I found myself nto logging all fo the data I thought I would. Direction turns out to have been mostly useless, or else recoverable from the text. I ended up not using level-of-detail, because things that are important enough to be logged are important enough to get a real note. Spheres of action did get used, but I know there are several things which were ambiguous.

I ended up using the calendar to review each time I actually did a review. Since my review frequency dropped off, that ended up being not as much as expected. Nevertheless, it did come in handy during my yearly review.

In 12019, I’m going to treat the calendar a little more naturally. One thing I’ve developed is using another color to represent non-agentive actions. For example, I may not have written down my actions on a day and then forgotten them, in which case I use a question mark. Other times, I get distracted by something unimportant, and I write that in as non-agentive.

Changes in 12018

In 12017, I kept a record of “important” things that I did each day, but since there were no further rules, I wasn’t very consistent. I also ended up not using the data for review or reflection. In 12018, I’d like to track a few different things, not necessarily with the same drive as last year ended up having, and I’d like to complete the action-analysis loop.

The principles are:

Agentive

I’ll only log it if I take an active part and I consciously made the decision to do it. I’m no longer counting video games unless I weighed other options first. However, I may well count watching video if I actually decided to.

Spheres of Action

I’ll log whether the action is biological, economic, social, memetic, meta, or downtime. I was inconsistent last year about whether “chores to stay alive” counted.

Direction

I’ll log whether an action was self-improvement or world-improvement.

Level of Detail

I’ll write specifics about non-regular actions, but not regular ones. So, budgeting will simply be a note that I did something economical for myself, but reading a book will be the name of the book.

The mechanics are:

• Each sphere gets its own color.
• When direction applies to an action, it will be a left arrow for recieving and a right arrow for giving. When both happened, it’s a two-way arrow, and when the concept doesn’t apply, it’s a simple dot.

To complete the action-analysis loop:

• I will write a small review as a regular part of garbage collection. It may be more effective to keep a running weekly review and use the last Friday of the month to perform an edit.
• In the review I will make reference to the previous review(s) to help maintain continuity.