Hello bees, I’m looking for a way to record lifestyle changes to correlate them with productivity metrics.
Sob story: how I nuked my productivity by consistently eating a suspicious white powder
I’ve started to up dosage of a certain medication a few weeks ago, and a side effect was excessive sleepiness (like 15 hours a day - waking up only because I’m forced to).
As you can imagine, I felt pretty miserable, but somehow, my brain blamed it on poor willpower, etc. Instead of the pretty obvious thing: taking an insane amount of an insanely powerful medication.
The catch is the following: this already happened to me, but this memory was not activated at all; I’ve already lived through this hell, but I needed two whole weeks to find the connection, and that was because of Beeminder.
At last, my productivity setup alerted me that something was wrong:
- paying $30 on my work goal - which I was completing pretty easily a few weeks ago, and even upped.
- RescueTime and WakaTime showing me that I’m spending way less time on work than 2 weeks ago.
- Complice goals being stuck
Since I’ve encountered this situation in the nebulous past, I knew that I only need to reduce the overall intake
(which I started doing yesterday, and I already feel like I’m living again)
For drug nerds: I’m talking about Duloxetine, a pain-medication/antidepressant.
Possible homemade solutions that feel wrong
- recording medication intake in Beeminder (I don’t want to pay $50/month to be able to have pledgeless goals, but I don’t want to cheat either)
- recording medication intake in a spreadsheet (doesn’t feel right either; I want to track multiple lifestyle properties; like waking up early, etc… Ideally, it would be nice to sync Beeminder and the app so that I can correlate things; e.g. taking a morning walk improves mood)
I aim to record multiple metrics:
- mood
- medication intake
- all beeminder goals
So, nothing really feels right. Ideally, there should be tons of inputs (heck, even automatic code quality scoring) and automatic correlation.
Ideal solution
I’ve been thinking of creating an app that records lifestyle inputs + lifestyle outputs and does automatic statistical correlation stuff.
This could be considered as the inverse of Beeminder; a way to look back in time and say: ok, waking up early improves my mood, but makes me a bit tired.
I believe that this “looking back” problem might be common among Akratic people, so I’m interested in knowing if there is a solution. If not, that could be an interesting project.