Daily Log (introduction)

Date published: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:00:00 -0800.

I like talking about ideas. I like logging stuff. Writing this blog has vastly increased my thinking output. (Which is good, and unexpected.) I see people use daily logs of what they did and these people kick my ass when it comes to achievements, even though for each individual day, they don’t do more than I can. It’s just the pure, raw consistency. They still do the same shit 6 months from now and by then, they utterly outperform me.

Time for some algorithmic magic! I’m now retrocausally turning myself into someone more like such a person, so I have decided - rippling back from the distant future! - to keep a daily log. (Good thing I don’t have a sense of privacy.)

Some rules:

  • I already track time investments. That’s fine, but I also need to track content. I can’t easily quantify “5 interesting things” per day. But interestingness correlates with word counts, and I can track that. So each log entry must have a minimum amount of 300 words per day. (I might still experiment with the exact number. I want it small enough to not be an additional chore, but large enough to force me to do stuff. I also want to make it possible to catch up when I miss a day, but not easy. This ain’t kindergarten, yo.)
  • Only ever talk about something I did this day. No “building up a buffer”. No “talking about that weird idea I got 3 weeks ago” or some philosophical implication I noticed. Only what happened on that day. Only what I did. (And rant-y remarks when I can’t help myself.) Ideas go to the blog, not the dlog.
  • Absolutely daily. Not weekdays. Not “significant improvements”. Not deadlines. Daily, ruthless, brutal practice. (The mindset I’m currently in makes “brutal” awesomely fun. Fun is crucial, not protestant work-ethics. Fuck protestant work-ethics.)
  • Only actual improvements. No “I played games all day to relax” bullshit. I know me, I know I would totally write this if I didn’t include this rule.
  • No copy pasta. If I get bored of writing the same entry again, I must do something different.
  • Time goes midnight to midnight, not waking to waking. Sleep? Practice don’t care.

Because not everyone might be interested in the daily log entries, I’m moving them to a separate location. They will be less content-y than this blog, but more personal, which you might still find interesting. (Or motivating. I like reading other people’s logs from time to time.)

(And because I’m lazy, I’m using Wordpress again instead of a proper nanoc setup I’ve been intending to get up and running for months now. Meh, whatever works now. I can fix it later.)

So starting today: muflax becomes a saint, over at daily.muflax.com.