log — my 20-week log, condensed into one table
log — my 20-week log, condensed into one table. Change my mind, genuinely — I have no stake in being right about this.
The attribution problem, which is the reason most logs on this board cannot answer the question their owner is asking.
If dose, training, intake and sleep all changed in the same fortnight, no analysis of the resulting numbers can tell you which one moved the outcome. That is not a limitation of your spreadsheet; it is a limitation of the design.
The fix is unglamorous: change one thing at a time, leave it long enough to see, and annotate the weeks where something else intruded anyway — because life will intrude. A log with honest annotations answers questions. A log with four simultaneous changes and a confident conclusion is the most common thing posted here, and it does not.
Annotated the fortnight I changed training. Without that note the numbers around it would look like a mystery.
The four columns that survive, after several people here have tried and abandoned much more elaborate systems.
Date. Dose. One number measured under consistent conditions. A short note when anything unusual happened. That is it. Anything more and you will stop, and a log you stop keeping is worth less than a crude one you maintain.
Add a waist measurement monthly if you can be bothered, and a sleep column if you want the one variable that explains the most confusing weeks. Everything else can be reconstructed from those, and nothing can be reconstructed from a log you abandoned in week nine.
Please do not ask me what dose you should be on. I genuinely do not know and neither does anyone else here.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Retitled — a log is a record, not a protocol, and the original read as a schedule for others to follow.
one line a week beats a spreadsheet you abandon
a log is not a plan and it is not advice for anybody else
waist monthly, weight weekly, notes whenever
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.
A log is only interpretable if the conditions are consistent.
ireland_drugs_pay is right about blanks. Silent gaps make the series lie.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
Kept one line a week for 11 months. It was pointless for the first eight weeks and then it was the most useful document I owned.
a missed week is data, write it down
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.
- 1Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift…7 comments in this branch · started by u/nils_ferreira