dose history — my 20-week log, condensed into one table
dose history — my 20-week log, condensed into one table. I have gone back and forth on this for months.
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.
Exported the whole thing to a plain text file after nearly losing it in an app that shut down.
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.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
marit_laurent is right about blanks. Silent gaps make the series lie.
export it somewhere you will still be able to read in two years
Yes — log what happened rather than what you intended. My retrospective entries were quietly wrong every time.
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
waist monthly, weight weekly, notes whenever
Added the Log flair and a date range to the title so it is findable later.
What are you actually recording each week?
Added a sleep column late and immediately understood two of my worst weeks.
Right, and the payoff arrives around month six when a pattern becomes visible that nobody could hold in their head.
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.
Not convinced by the retrospective reconstruction. Memory smooths things and the smoothing is systematic.
log what you did, not what you meant to do
What is the one column you added late and wish you had from the start?
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.
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.
Annotation is what makes a log survive contact with your future self.
This is the whole discipline in one line. Contemporaneous, consistent, minimal.
one line a week beats a spreadsheet you abandon
Small fix — that is a reconstructed entry rather than a contemporaneous one, and the post presents it as the latter.
Are the missed weeks in there as blanks or dropped entirely?
- 1waist monthly, weight weekly, notes whenever6 comments in this branch · started by u/jonas_cardoso