My solution is to design policies that evaluate to real numbers rather than binary choices (i.e., rather than asking “did I break policy X,” I ask “to what extent did I fulfill policy X”). I aim to have “policies” (though I call them “metrics”) that range from 0 to 1, update in real time, and are easy to compose with other metrics.
I have a program that calculates these metrics in real time, and embed the output of that program into my desktop on my primary viewport. Since I’m usually working on my secondary viewport (a large external monitor) this allows me to have an eye on my metrics most of the time.
If I start feeling bad about the state of my metrics, I can usually do something to fix that. If I can’t (if there isn’t enough time in the day) I can just resign myself to having a bad day, and go back to whatever I was doing.
I prefer this because it allows me to see how fast I’m improving and how far I’ve improved. It also lets me ‘fail’ some days without much penalty.
minutes in the category ‘social’ / minutes in a day
(minutes in productive categories—minutes in my ‘waste’ category) / minutes in a day
Success rate of all habits
habits succeeded today / number of habits
(I’ve had this data for a long time, but these scripts are relatively new, and I plan on making it more configurable so that I can drop the “sleep” metric from my HUD, since it doesn’t usually change over the course of the day.)
My solution is to design policies that evaluate to real numbers rather than binary choices (i.e., rather than asking “did I break policy X,” I ask “to what extent did I fulfill policy X”). I aim to have “policies” (though I call them “metrics”) that range from 0 to 1, update in real time, and are easy to compose with other metrics.
I have a program that calculates these metrics in real time, and embed the output of that program into my desktop on my primary viewport. Since I’m usually working on my secondary viewport (a large external monitor) this allows me to have an eye on my metrics most of the time.
If I start feeling bad about the state of my metrics, I can usually do something to fix that. If I can’t (if there isn’t enough time in the day) I can just resign myself to having a bad day, and go back to whatever I was doing.
I prefer this because it allows me to see how fast I’m improving and how far I’ve improved. It also lets me ‘fail’ some days without much penalty.
Can you give an implementation example like a screenshot?
This is what I have on my desktop:
http://imgur.com/snqht
They refer to:
minutes asleep / minutes in a day
minutes in the category ‘social’ / minutes in a day
(minutes in productive categories—minutes in my ‘waste’ category) / minutes in a day
Success rate of all habits
habits succeeded today / number of habits
(I’ve had this data for a long time, but these scripts are relatively new, and I plan on making it more configurable so that I can drop the “sleep” metric from my HUD, since it doesn’t usually change over the course of the day.)