[Question] weight — what am I missing here
Slightly embarrassed to be asking this, but: weight — what am I missing here.
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.
Choose a format you will still be able to open in two years. Plain text or a spreadsheet you export beats an application that may not exist.
Annotation is what makes a log survive contact with your future self. A single note beside an unusual week saves an hour of puzzled reconstruction later.
Happy to answer the boring questions. Those are usually the ones worth asking.
best — the order this archive was captured in
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.
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.
Wrote the concentration into the log as well as on the vial. Have referred back to it more than once.
the column you will wish you had is sleep
log what you did, not what you meant to do
Cosigning on missed weeks. Leaving them blank makes the whole series misleading.
Careful — posting a log as a schedule for other people to follow is not what this board is for.
Agreed that consistent conditions matter more than frequency. Daily weights under varying conditions are noise.
Built an elaborate spreadsheet, abandoned it by week nine, restarted with four columns and have kept it ever since.
Attribution requires that one thing change at a time. A log with dose, training and intake all moving in the same fortnight cannot assign anything to any of them.