Since 2009, I’ve been obsessed with all things quantified self and designing feedback loops based on personal data. I keep a blackjack card-counting style budget tracker of every expense over the last 5 years. When I worked in an office, I used IFTTT and GPS tracking to log every hour I worked. I use run trackers and health trackers regularly. But the most dedicated project I have is my Weekly Life Tracker. It has two components:
- Every 6 months, I track every activity I do for a week and analyze everything by category.
- Every Sunday, I track roughly 8-10 variables for that week that all correspond to wellness.
This is basically what it looks like after 6 years. It’s taken a lot of iteration to get it right.
The model is designed to deconstruct and measure the factors that contribute to wellness. I break down 10 major categories for wellness and rate each factor on a scale of 1 to 5 each week. Each score corresponds to some kind of easy-to-measure metric. Each factor has a self-assigned weight that relates to what is most important to me that year. The total score for the week is out of 100%. (the best week of all-time was a 94%, BTW)
It started out as a kind of crappy, ugly system in the beginning.
There was no weighting system in the beginning. I didn’t consider one factor more important than any other. I just rated everything 1-5. This was a pretty lean start to the whole thing, and I quickly realized that these factors weren’t all equal in importance and I needed a better way to define what a 3, 4, or a 5 actually meant. You can see that at one point I used an “Imbalance Score,” which applied a standard deviation formula to see if I was imbalanced, even if the total numbers might be okay. Maybe I had decent scores, but I was highly imbalanced. That had to be a bad thing, I thought.
Adding the time tracking component helped to solidify the model and expose other insights
These are Monday-Friday numbers for one week in 2015. When I tracked weekends, I found the data to be far noisier and less reliable.
The time tracking piece seems tough, but it only requires you to carry around a little pad of paper for 1 week. It’s not so bad, and the insights from this part are super valuable. I highly recommend it even if it’s once or twice per year.
As you can see in this week, I didn’t get the ideal amount of exercise, and definitely didn’t spend enough time reading/learning. Another thing I’ve found is that tracking down the minute shows you how much time you actually spend on work, which we chronically overestimate as a society. One crazy week, I actually tracked 87.5 hours of work (including the weekend), but I also only averaged 4.8 hours of sleep, and basically ate super unhealthy fast food in 15 mins. All the maniac investment banker bros and young corporate attorneys who tell you they work 100-hour weeks (including weekends) are either (1) counting commute time, bathroom time, eating, socializing, and other activities related to and around work OR (2) they are actually psychotic and live really unhealthy lives. Take your pick.
One year, I added way too many categories, followed by a year where I cut them down.
Like any model, if you create too many variables, it can be difficult to maintain and potentially distracting. Complex models are great when they are built with sound assumptions, careful design, and quality inputs. Otherwise, I would say it’s best to start simple and then drill down later.
I like to plot the movement over time to see which life changes affect the model
At the end of each year, I use my Google Calendar and this tracker to study how different life events might have effected the model. There are some profound insights I’ve uncovered. You can see the honeymoon effect of a new job or relationship, the impact of stress and overworking, the impact of holidays, and the volatility of travel on sustaining good habits.
There’s a theory behind this project that comes from my education in social sciences, specifically psychology. Basically, if you tried to design a journal or tracker where you reported how happy you felt, you would be extremely biased by physiological factors that affect short-term mood, noisy recent events that distort the data (like having a fight with a friend), and you wouldn’t get a sense of the long-term wellness. Instead, you can attempt to dissect the semi-objective ingredients of wellness. Better to design sustainable systems and be consistent than try to achieve short-term goals that are fleeting and hard to maintain. For example, I would define wellness for myself as the following:
- Getting 7-8 hours of sleep each night
- Maintaining 3-4 strong personal relationships
- Spending less money than you make
- Exercising 3+ times per week for 30 mins+
- Spending at least 7 hours per week learning / reading
- Participating in at least 1 community activity each week
- Achieving a sustained state of meditation each day (15 mins+)
- Eating fruits and vegetables each day and eating fast food less than 2 times per week
- Talking with my family once per week
- Accomplishing at least one important work task / project each day
I should note that there are a handful of factors that are conveniently absent from this model. That reflects the privilege of being male in a safe neighborhood, having a stable long-term girlfriend, and having no chronic illnesses. Some people might choose to include safety, clean environment, lack of violence, lack of harassment, and sexual health in their personal wellness models.
Happiness and Wellness are different. Let’s explore what they mean.
The more you drill down, the closer you get to measuring objective building blocks for wellness instead of something like “how do I feel?” I would say I subjectively feel happy around 90% of the time, but I would also say that was true even when I wasn’t well. For example—times when I would sleep too little, work too much, let my relationships slip, eat poorly, spend too much money. On those exact days, I might have felt “happy” at the moment I measured, but if I zoomed out far enough, it wouldn’t be sustainable. Happiness is more easily manipulable by changing your mindset, which is a double-edged sword. Wellness is a holistic issue that means we nurture our physical, mental, and social being.
I deliberately take a side between environment (extrinsic) and mindset (intrinsic) in how the model is created. While I believe mindset is critical for happiness, I think it has a lesser impact on wellness. Some people place a large emphasis on attitude or mindset. If you reprogram your thought patterns with new associations, you can change the way your mind interprets every experience. Your internal narrative shapes your perception of events, both good and bad.
You’ll find that many self-help professionals, life coaches, and motivational speakers place a large emphasis on positive psychology and its children as a tool to become happy. My perspective, which is shared by the majority of clinicians and researchers in psychology, is that you can change attitudes and perspectives to kickstart desirable behaviors and external states, but without discipline and habit, you will not achieve wellness or long-term happiness. You will simply create cognitive dissonance, which means you’ll believe one thing and observe another thing that is inconsistent with the first.
My model is highly subjective and personal, but I did do a fair amount of research into what academics had discovered about wellness. Over the years, I’ve worked through 12 books on happiness and a few dozen studies on wellness. Here are a few materials that shaped my model:
Gallup / Wellbeing: the Five Essential Elements
William & Mary: Eight Dimensions of Wellness
Abraham Maslow: Toward a Psychology of Being
This isn’t hard science, I know. It’s just an attempt to reflect and understand myself and try to step back from the noise and come to know what I value the most. It has taught me which things I should prioritize. It has helped me maintain some amazing habits.
This Weekly Life Tracker started out as a fun little project, but it’s taken on a new meaning over the years. By request, I’ve shared a copy of the model with over 30 people so they could go and build one themselves. If you’d like your own, I’m happy to send over the Google doc/ Excel file and help you out. Just send me a little note here.
-Henry