reading dose history threads from 2024 and half of it aged badly
Thinking out loud about this: reading dose history threads from 2024 and half of it aged badly.
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.
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.
Contemporaneous records do not drift; reconstructed ones do, and the drift is systematic rather than random because memory smooths.
I will update this if the picture changes rather than quietly leaving it up.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Missing entries recorded as blanks preserve the shape of the series. Dropping them silently makes the remaining points look more regular than they were.
Not convinced by the retrospective reconstruction. Memory smooths things and the smoothing is systematic.
This. Annotating the weeks where something else changed is what makes the log interpretable later.
Not convinced by the retrospective reconstruction.
nightowl_injector is right about blanks. Silent gaps make the series lie.
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.
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.
That template is elaborate enough that you will stop using it by week ten. Mine was.
Logged the missed weeks as blanks rather than skipping them. The gaps turned out to be the informative part.
nobody else needs your log to be pretty
Correcting my own log post above: I had the dose recorded wrongly for one fortnight and have amended it.
Cosigning on missed weeks. Leaving them blank makes the whole series misleading.
a log is not a plan and it is not advice for anybody else
I would not draw a trend line through that. Two points and a gap is not a series.
record the dose, the day and one number, that is enough
retrospective logs drift, contemporaneous ones do not
export it somewhere you will still be able to read in two years
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.
Push back: a log with four variables changing at once cannot attribute anything to any of them.
- 1Attribution requires that one thing change at a time. A log with dose,…8 comments in this branch · started by u/emil_agyeman