Seth Roberts has been touting the impressive effects of percentile feedback on productivity. I concur. The problem is twofold:
1. What to measure?
2. How to adhere to measuring?
It is settled that we should track percentile improvement. The question is how.
Seth tracks time spent working on a key project. He tracks it with an R program that presents a nice graphical display.
There are some problems with this:
1. You have to be at the computer to input tracking data
2. Time spent working on main project is a poor proxy for overall life performance.
As I’ve been leveling up, I gradually found the purely strategic aspect of the leveling game was insufficiently motivating. I also needed daily self-competitive measurement at a tactical level.
At first I considered running three stopwatches on my Android phone – one for time spent being shitty, one for time spent being ok, and one for time spent being good. I decided that these should be relative ratings, with e.g. “ok” meaning equal to yesterday’s average. This would focus me on self-competition and continuous improvement, much like the bedtime hand koan did.
But my phone had no way to easily support three concurrent stopwatches. I considered ways to use just one stopwatch and track time increments on my hand. Then I realized I should just track “incidents” on my hand, and forget the stopwatch.
I had troubleshot away the problems that necessitated the hand koans described in previous posts. So I had some empty hand space. This is the tracking system, implemented on my left hand, as of this morning:
As you can see, I’m having a pretty good morning, relative to yesterday.
Note that no computation is necessary before results are displayed in a way the brain can understand. Either I have more hashmarks for “good”, and I am improving, or more hashmarks for “shitty”, and I am getting worse. As everyone knows by now, the more immediate the feedback, the better.
Meanwhile, on my right hand, I want to track the strategic level. I’ve identified the key step in leveling up as Tim Ferriss’ “deconstruction” step, of his DiSS system, as described in his book, “The 4-Hour Chef”.
I want leveling up to be a stressless process. So I put the koan “E4D” on my right hand, which stands for “Easy [level-number] Deconstruction”.
This reminds me to apply intelligence to solve my life problems. Doing so requires focused, relaxed learning, rather than cortisol/adrenaline bursts, which are an unsustainable growth model.
Whenever I complete a deconstruction step relevant to the targeted level, I make a hash mark. For example, this post represents one deconstruction hashmark.
I am not actually at level 4 right now. That will take a day or three longer. However I have completed all the deconstruction steps possible at level 3, so my focus has shifted to stabilizing level 4. I will not attempt to deconstruct the critical path to level 5 until I am actually at level 4. It’s important never to get ahead of oneself.
I will track performance on both these hand koans in my journal at the end of each day. Or, if I am not journaling, I will take a photo of both hands with my phone, which I can easily transfer to my journal later.
Failure to transfer tracking data to a medium that permits analysis of long term trends does not destroy the usefulness of this system. But I want to at least “save” my progress somewhere so I can go back and be proud of myself later, if I want to reconstruct the past. Given this inherent motivation, I doubt I will forget to record my daily performance in one way or another.