[Meta] the log rule is doing its job and people should stop complaining
the log rule is doing its job and people should stop complaining, and it will stay as it is unless somebody makes the case to change it.
Reconstructed six weeks from memory once and later found receipts that contradicted my own log. Never again.
A log is a record of what you did. It is not a protocol, and posting one as a schedule for other members is a different thing that this board does not do.
Kept one line a week for 19 months. It was pointless for the first eight weeks and then it was the most useful document I owned.
Would rather be corrected in public than confident in private.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Retitled — a log is a record, not a protocol, and the original read as a schedule for others to follow.
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.
Built an elaborate spreadsheet, abandoned it by week nine, restarted with four columns and have kept it ever since.
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.
Careful — posting a log as a schedule for other people to follow is not what this board is for.
Push back: a log with four variables changing at once cannot attribute anything to any of them.
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.
Yes — log what happened rather than what you intended. My retrospective entries were quietly wrong every time.
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.
write the concentration in the log too
Is the concentration recorded anywhere in the log?
[removed by moderator]
Wrote the concentration into the log as well as on the vial. Have referred back to it more than once.
Agreed that consistent conditions matter more than frequency. Daily weights under varying conditions are noise.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
Disagreeing with this bit: daily weighing gives you noise and costs you something.
the column you will wish you had is sleep
Same conditions each time for the weigh-in?
one line a week beats a spreadsheet you abandon
Annotated the fortnight I changed training. Without that note the numbers around it would look like a mystery.
Annotated the fortnight I changed training.
Agreed — and the payoff genuinely arrives in month six, not week two.
Small fix — that is a reconstructed entry rather than a contemporaneous one, and the post presents it as the latter.
- 1Agreed that consistent conditions matter more than frequency. Daily weights…11 comments in this branch · started by u/diego_almeida
- 2Choose a format you will still be able to open in two years. Plain text or a…7 comments in this branch · started by u/rasmus_kuipers