A life in 1s and 0s — Part 1

On the advice of a co-worker, I started a simple Excel document to track how I feel at the end of each day. If I felt like the day was good and I would like to repeat it, I give it a 1. Otherwise, a 0. I also leave myself commentary on the side. (I could go all out and give my day a full Net Promoter Score, but that seemed unnecessarily complex.)

The goal is to study the trends to gravitate towards 1-type activities. The other implication of too many “0s” is that perhaps I need to do something else with my life.

It’s been 29 days, and I’ve had 18 “1s” and 11 “0s”. While I’m happy that I’ve had more 1s than 0s, it’s not a good sign that nearly 50% of my days do not inspire repetition. Then I look into the comments and noticed the following trends:

A “1” generally means the day was either completely devoted to fun (e.g., camping trip) or super productive in two ways:

• If I am doing something I’m not really good at but still pushing along (e.g., coding) I almost always put a “1” even if I made very little progress
• If I am doing something I’m good at (e.g., networking), a “1” is reserved for extraordinary progress (e.g., meeting someone amazing)

A “0” generally means I:

• Divided the day between work and fun and got less done in both camps (i.e., split attention doesn’t make me feel good)
• Did a lot of what I call errand-type activities (mail, shopping, cleaning, random fixing apartment, too much cooking, sitting in transit, gym)

The key conclusion is that I tend to define “1" and “0" purely on the basis of work productivity (perhaps I’m trying to live the “meaningful” life). Yet, this is somewhat of a problem, because it’s not realistic. I can’t have full days of “fun” because other people’s schedules don’t revolve around mine, and errand-type activities are actually important!

Therefore, for the next month, I’m going to try to add more granularity:

• A 1-P for productive days
• A 1-F for fun days
• A 1-P/F for days split between productive & fun
• A 1-O for days that were necessary (e.g., errand-type activities)
• A 0 for everything else (i.e., the days where I’m truly drooling into a cup)

I hope this doesn’t turn out to be giving myself excuses to award “1s”… but we’ll see—stay tuned for part 2!

This blarticle was written in the context of building a product that helps people borrow occasional-use items (e.g., sleeping bags, electric drills) from their friends & neighbors. Check out the prototype here.