finding patterns with little near-term trackers
For the last several years, I have enjoyed doing Tim Ferriss’ past year review some time in late December or early January. Ferriss has you take a retrospective look at your calendar from the prior year and identify your highlights and low lights week by week. Then you rank those highlights and lowlights, looking for the ones that recur most often and the ones that are truly exceptional.
Then — and this is key — you take your new understanding of the patterns of your past year and use it to a) protect and b) promote your well-being in the year to come. That is, you pre-book versions of your peak or highlight experiences and you eliminate or minimize the presence of the lowlights. This helps set an elevated baseline for your year ahead. Not only are you likelier to do things that lift you - you get the zest of looking forward to them, too.
A thing I have found challenging about this is looking back over the course of an entire year. Sometimes my calendar isn’t a complete or faithful account of what I did or what I enjoyed. I also forget what even happened back in, i dunno, April.
So I am finding increasingly that it’s useful to run smaller versions of this exercise during the year. You can apply the simple tracking approach to things that are not just favorite and least favorite moments. If you like, you can then have an LLM analyze the data you’ve collected on yourself. Often the AI will find patterns or implications in your data that aren’t obvious to you. Or they are obvious, but you are biased against them and try to avoid them :D .
Here are a few other things you might track for a few days or a few months, then bring to Claude or GPT and ask what they make of It:
aliveness tracker. When did I feel most alive during the day altogether or at work in particular? (Most alive might not be the moment that was most fun or enjoyable - often it’s a moment that has stakes or risk of some kind)
negative self talk tracker. When did I think critically about myself during the day? What was the thought? What happened immediately before or immediately after?
our very favorite around here: recognition frequency tracker. When did you acknowledge someone for taking values aligned action? Who was it? What was the action?
I like these three because they can enrich your understanding of how things are going with more data and less reliance on vibes.
-eric
