Hey friends,

The guided portion of Conscious Creation is wrapping up this week, but I hope you’ll continue to track on your own. To help you along your continued journey, I built an interactive prompt library that contains every prompt from the entire program, including new prompts from this week, that you can revisit any time you want to run or rerun your data moving forward. For future reference, you can find the prompt library (and all other subscriber tools) by visiting tools.badgirlmedia.com. I also added it as a link on the homepage. (Passwords are at the bottom of this post.)

When I designed Conscious Creation back in the fall, I mapped out twelve weeks of guided content: essays, frameworks, AI prompts, weekly reflections, etc. I chose twelve weeks because that’s how long I believed it takes for tracking data to become genuinely useful, for the patterns to get undeniable, and for the habit of paying attention to your own life to actually stick.

And I still believe that twelve weeks of data is better than eight. The patterns get sharper and the self-knowledge gets deeper with every additional week of data behind you.

But by the time I finished writing Week 7 (and had real user feedback to reference against my initial syllabus) I realized the remaining four weeks of planned content were repackaging ideas you already have. The frameworks were built, the AI prompts were delivered, the crucial concepts like systems thinking, keystone habits, feedback loops, and failure points have already been shared. What was left in my outline was essentially the same material we’ve already covered: “energy and the cascade effect” (which is just systems thinking applied to your body), “input curation” (systems thinking applied to consumption), “identity vs behavior” (which the entire program has been teaching implicitly since Week 1).

I could have written those weeks and they would have been just fine, but this program is built on a very specific premise—that you follow the evidence instead of the plan when the evidence tells you the plan is wrong—and it would be pretty hypocritical to ignore that premise just because my original plan said twelve weeks.

There is still lots of work to be done, but the rest is application, and you now have everything you need to continue on your own. The remaining weeks are about you using the tools you already have as your dataset continues to grow.

As such, this week’s post is built differently from the others. It’s less essay and more reference material. I want this to be the thing you can come back to in a month, or a quarter, or six months, when you want to re-run your analysis or you’ve noticed yourself drifting and need to figure out where your system is breaking down.

Quick note before we get into the final post: So far, I’ve built the prompt library, but I’m currently working on an interactive toolkit that will cover the entire Conscious Creation program. This will be as useful for newbies as it will for people continuing along on their current journey. It will include the full prompt library with additional prompts, help with creating and/or editing your tracker, finding your tracker archetype, understanding and creating graphs and other visuals from your dataset, weekly/monthly/quarterly review assessments, and more. You’ll also be able to build a personal dashboard that will track your insights along the way. I hope to have it done in the next couple of weeks, and I’ll update you when it’s ready.

Here’s a sneak peek of the dashboard:

One last check-in.

Before we shift from guided to self-directed, I want to offer you a few things to reflect on.

How has your relationship with the tracker changed since Week 1? Most people start out treating it like a chore and end up treating it like a mirror. If you’re still filling it in every day, something has shifted in how you relate to your own data, even if you can’t articulate what that shift is yet.

Is the system you built in Week 6 still running? If it is, that’s a meaningful accomplishment. Most behavioral changes don’t survive two weeks, so give yourself some credit for that. If it broke, look at why, and look at whether the Week 7 systems analysis told you it was aimed at the wrong target. You can adjust this as many times as you need to.

And the big one: do you trust the data more than your memory now? Because if the answer is yes, the program did what it was supposed to do. Everything else is just technique.

So, what changes now?

The guided essays stop after this one, but the tracking doesn’t have to. I've been tracking for 90 days, and plan on continuing mine as well. I’ll be running experiments and integrating my data into my life in other ways. Plus, I am a huge data nerd so I can’t wait until the end of the year when I can look at an overview of everything. (How stupidly exciting!)

You now have a set prompts, frameworks, and an understanding of how your specific system runs, and these will work on any amount of data. The more data you feed them, the better they work. Eight weeks is enough to see the patterns, but twelve weeks makes them undeniable. At six months they’ll become predictive, and a year makes them transformative.

But the thing about any structured program is that the default outcome is that you will gradually start to drift. This drift is predictable though, which means you can plan for it. You don’t need to track everything forever and you don’t need me writing essays to keep you honest. But you do need a minimum viable system that catches the drift before it compounds, and you need to set it up now, while the habits are still warm, not three months from now when you’ve already slid back to your defaults.

What I’m giving you below is everything you need to keep going on your own: an inventory of what you learned, a reassessment of where you are now, archetype-specific guidance for what to focus on next, the complete prompt library from the entire program, and a sustainable rhythm for checking in with your data going forward. (Plus the interactive dashboard builder that’s coming soon!)

This is your toolkit. I hope you’ll continue to use it :)

First, write it down before you forget it.

Before anything else, I want you to document what this program actually taught you. Not in vague terms like “I learned a lot about myself,” but in specific findings, written down, so you can reference them in a month when the details start to blur.

Fill this out now, while it’s fresh. This becomes the reference document you check against during your monthly and quarterly reviews.

(These will all be available to fill out on the interactive dashboard, as well. If you answer these now, you can simply transfer them over when the tool goes live.)

KEYSTONE DISCOVERIES:

What one or two habits, when maintained, create positive effects across multiple areas of your life?

1. [Specific keystone habit from your tracking data] Evidence: [How you know this matters — what correlations you observed]

2. [Specific keystone habit from your tracking data] Evidence: [How you know this matters — what correlations you observed]

Keystone example from my personal data:

FAILURE POINT DISCOVERIES:

What breakdowns create the widest negative cascades?

1. [Specific failure point from your tracking data] Evidence: [What happens across other domains when this fails]

2. [Specific failure point from your tracking data] Evidence: [What happens across other domains when this fails]

CORRELATION DISCOVERIES:

What reliably predicts what in your system?

1. When [X happens], [Y] consistently follows

2. When [X happens], [Y] consistently follows

3. When [X happens], [Y] consistently follows

PATTERN DISCOVERIES:

What patterns about yourself did tracking reveal that you genuinely didn’t know before?

1. [Specific pattern about your energy, behavior, output, etc.]

2. [Specific pattern about your energy, behavior, output, etc.]

3. [Specific pattern about your energy, behavior, output, etc.]

CONFRONTATION DISCOVERIES:

Where did your data contradict the story you were telling yourself?

• I thought I was [identity claim] but my behavior showed I’m actually [behavioral reality]

• To close this gap, I need to consistently demonstrate [specific behaviors]

These are your core insights. Everything else was useful for pattern recognition but doesn’t need to be remembered in detail. This list is what you’re protecting going forward.

Reassess your archetype.

In Week 5, I introduced five archetypes based on what your data looked like at that point: Pattern Finder, System Validator, Discoverer, External Reactor, and Confronter. You used that archetype to guide what kind of system you built in Week 6.

Eight weeks in, it’s worth reassessing, because your archetype may have shifted.

Note: If you’re in the prompt library, you can sort “by archetype” and the reassessment is located at the top, and all archetype-specific prompts are under it:

If you were an External Reactor in Week 5 because outside forces were dominating your data, but you’ve since built a minimum viable routine that holds even on chaotic days, you might now be a Pattern Finder with enough stability to start seeing real correlations.

If you were a Discoverer who found one key insight and built around it, and that system has been running for two weeks, you might now be a System Validator, someone whose data is consistent enough that the next move is experimentation rather than pattern-hunting.

If your Week 7 systems analysis revealed a gap between what you believed and what your data actually showed, you might have picked up Confronter as an additional layer, regardless of what your primary archetype was.

Here’s the thing I want to make explicit: you can be more than one, and you will shift over time. A System Validator for your physical health and a Pattern Finder for your creative output. A Discoverer in one domain and a Confronter in another. Your data is multidimensional and your archetype will be too.

Every time you come back to this material (monthly, quarterly, whenever) re-run the archetype assessment. Ask yourself: is my data consistent or variable right now? Can my tracked behaviors explain the variance? Am I seeing multiple patterns or one key insight? Does my data match my self-image? The answers will change as your system evolves, and the guidance you follow should change with them.

Where to focus next, by archetype.

If you’re currently a Pattern Finder:

You see how things connect. Your Week 7 analysis probably revealed multiple feedback loops and correlations. The risk for you now is analysis paralysis, seeing so many connections that you don’t know which one to act on.

Your focus for the next month: pick the ONE upstream lever with the highest downstream impact and protect it obsessively. Don’t try to optimize five things. Optimize the one thing that your data says moves the most other things, and let the downstream effects take care of themselves. Re-run the Keystone Finder prompt monthly to check whether your highest-leverage behavior has changed.

Your ongoing prompts: Keystone Finder, Loop Mapper, Upstream/Downstream Audit.

If you’re currently a System Validator:

Your systems work and your data is consistent. Your risk is complacency, staying comfortable in a stable routine without testing whether a better version exists.

Your focus for the next month: design one controlled experiment. Change one variable for two weeks and track what happens. You have the stable baseline that makes experimentation meaningful, which is an advantage most people don’t have. Use it. If the experiment improves things, integrate the change. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing because your baseline is solid.

Your ongoing prompts: Before/After System Check (run it after each experiment), Full System Map (quarterly, to see if your stable system has any hidden weaknesses).

If you’re currently a Discoverer:

You found the thing and you built around it. Now your job is to decide whether that one finding is still the most important lever, or whether the system you built around it has revealed a new insight that matters more.

Your focus for the next month: re-run the full analysis suite from Week 7 with your updated data. Your system change may have shifted the dynamics enough that a different behavior is now the keystone, or a different failure point has emerged. Discoverers who don’t reassess tend to keep optimizing around their original finding long after the system has evolved past it.

Your ongoing prompts: Keystone Finder (monthly), Failure Point Detector (monthly), the full suite (quarterly).

If you’re currently an External Reactor:

Outside forces still drive a lot of your data, and that’s fine. The question isn’t whether external disruption exists because it always will. The question is whether your minimum viable routine is holding even on your hardest days.

Your focus for the next month: refine your floor. What’s the absolute minimum set of behaviors you maintain even when everything else falls apart? Track your adherence to that floor specifically. If you’re hitting it 80% of the time, start raising it slightly. If you’re below 60%, the floor is too high and you need to lower it until it’s actually sustainable under real-world stress.

Your ongoing prompts: Failure Point Detector (to identify what breaks first under pressure), Before/After System Check (to measure whether your floor-holding days produce meaningfully better outcomes than your floor-breaking days).

If Confronter applies to you right now:

Your data showed a gap between your self-image and your behavior. The constraint you built was designed to close that gap. The question now is whether it’s working.

Your focus for the next month: measure the gap again. Run the same comparison you ran in Week 5 or 7 and see if the numbers have moved. If the gap is closing, keep the constraint and give it more time. If the gap is the same or wider, the constraint isn’t addressing the real issue and you need to redesign it, probably by looking upstream of the behavior you targeted.

Your ongoing prompts: the Confronter-specific prompt from Week 6 (re-run monthly), Upstream/Downstream Audit (to check whether you’re targeting the right level).

Read more

Conscious Creation is a guided behavior tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

If you’re just joining us —

The program is self-paced. The weeks build on each other, but you can start anytime and move through at your own speed. Start with Week 1 where you’ll build your tracker and figure out what to track.

START TRACKING TODAY

You’ve probably heard some version of the advice that says you should only change one thing at a time. Don’t overhaul your whole life, pick one habit, start small, focus.

It’s good advice, and I give it myself too, but there’s a second part to that advice that almost nobody talks about, and it’s the part that actually matters. When you change one thing and hold it long enough, other things start to change on their own. Because your life isn’t a collection of separate projects, it’s one system, and when you move one piece, the rest of the system has to adjust.

I’ll give you an example from one of our Conscious Creation participants. He decided his one system change was going to be leaving for work ten minutes earlier on office days. That’s it... ten minutes. He wasn’t trying to redesign his entire morning, or fix his stress, or improve his fitness routine, or become a different person. He simply moved his morning departure time.

Here’s what it changed, in his own words:

So, to leave ten minutes earlier, he started prepping the night before (picking out his clothes, packing his kid’s lunch) , which wasn’t part of his original plan. It just became necessary once the departure time moved. And because his mornings weren’t rushed anymore, he stopped arriving to work already stressed, he stopped spending the first hour of his day recovering from the chaos of getting out the door, his commute became calmer because he had a buffer for traffic, and ultimately, his mental energy at work improved because he wasn’t starting the day depleted.

But then something else happened that he definitely didn’t plan. Since he’s using AI to help him read his tracked data, it suggested that he start keeping resistance bands in his car. He’d been wanting to add an extra workout day but couldn’t figure out how to do it without cutting into family time, sleep, or the occasional long work day. Once the rest of his routine settled into this slightly calmer groove, a solution appeared, and now he’s getting a workout in on days when the gym isn’t realistic, because the resistance bands are just there in his car, ready when he needs them.

One decision, just ten minutes, and it touched his evenings, his mornings, his stress, his commute, his energy at work, and his fitness. He pulled one thread and the whole fabric shifted.

And that’s exactly what this week of Conscious Creation is all about. Finding your highest-leverage thread, and pulling.

What happened with that ten-minute change wasn’t random, and it isn’t just a nice anecdote about morning routines. It’s an example of something called systems thinking, and it’s one of the most useful mental models that most people have never been formally introduced to. (And if you’ve been reading with me for a while, you likely know by now, it’s my personal favorite and I yap about it constantly—and I’ve been dying to get to this week so I can finally work it into Conscious Creation!)

Systems thinking is a discipline that’s been around since the mid-20th century, and it shows up everywhere from engineering to urban planning to organizational management to ecology. The core idea is deceptively simple: most outcomes aren’t produced by a single cause, they’re produced by a web of interacting factors that influence each other, and you can’t understand the outcome—or change it—by looking at any one factor in isolation.

The classic example is traffic. A traffic jam isn’t caused by one bad driver, it’s the product of road design, traffic volume, speed differentials at merge points, signal timing, and the way humans react to brake lights three cars ahead. You could scream at every individual driver to “just drive better” and it wouldn’t change anything, because the problem isn’t any single driver’s behavior. It’s how the system is structured. The fix isn’t behavioral, it’s structural: widen the merge lane, adjust the signal timing, add a roundabout. Change the structure and the traffic resolves itself without anyone needing to become a better driver.

Businesses work the same way. A company with declining sales can fire every salesperson and hire new ones, but if the real issue is that the product is overpriced relative to what competitors are offering, or that the marketing is attracting the wrong audience, or that customer support is so bad that word of mouth is killing them, then the new salespeople will fail just like the old ones did. The CEO who only looks at the sales team is treating a symptom. The CEO who maps how product, pricing, marketing, support, and reputation all interact with each other and finds the actual bottleneck, is taking advantage of systems thinking.

The reason this matters for how you think about your own life is that most people approach personal change the way a bad CEO approaches declining sales. They identify the thing they don’t like (I’m not going to the gym enough, I’m not creating enough, I can’t focus, I eat like garbage in the evenings, whatever) and they attack it directly. More discipline, more willpower, more guilt when it doesn’t work. And when it doesn’t work, they assume the problem is them. They assume they’re not trying hard enough or they’re not disciplined enough, or worse, something is wrong with their character.

But the problem is rarely the individual behavior. The gym isn’t happening because you’re sleeping poorly, which means you’re exhausted by afternoon, which means you don’t have the energy for a workout, which means you scroll instead, which means you feel bad about yourself, which means you stay up late ruminating, which means you sleep poorly again. In that scenario, “just go to the gym” is the equivalent of screaming at drivers in a traffic jam. The intervention is aimed at the wrong level. The leverage point is the sleep, or the evening routine, or the stress that’s causing the rumination. It’s something upstream that, if you fixed it, would make the gym attendance resolve on its own.

That’s systems thinking applied to your life. And now, six-plus weeks of tracking data means you actually have the information to do it, instead of just guessing at what’s connected to what.

Here’s an example from my own data (I’ll explain in more detail below):

In this post:

Quick check-in

Why your system evaluation is only half the picture

What “seeing the system” actually means (and why it matters more than any single habit)

Keystone habits: the behaviors that move everything

Failure points: where one breakdown takes the whole day down

Feedback loops: the cycles that either compound your progress or keep you stuck

AI prompts for mapping your specific system

What to track this week + end of week reflection

Need to revisit previous weeks?

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6

Read more

Conscious Creation is a guided behavior tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

If you’re just joining us —

The program is self-paced. The weeks build on each other, but you can start anytime and move through at your own speed. Start with Week 1 where you’ll build your tracker and figure out what to track.

Join Conscious Creation

Most people resist structure because it feels like losing something. Like giving up spontaneity, flexibility, or the ability to just go with whatever you feel like doing in the moment. And I get it. Nobody wants to live inside a spreadsheet.

But here’s what I’ve learned from tracking my own behavior for years, and from watching some of you do it over the past six weeks: the less structure you have, the more your defaults run your life. And your defaults were not designed by you. They were built by convenience, by whatever app is closest to your thumb, by what requires the least effort when you’re tired, by habits you picked up years ago that you’ve never actually examined. When you “go with the flow,” you’re not being free, you’re being operated by a system you didn’t choose.

Structure is what gives you back the choice.

When you decide in advance that your phone charges in the kitchen at 9pm, you’re not restricting yourself, you’re removing a decision you were going to lose anyway, because at 9pm when you’re tired and your willpower is gone, you were always going to scroll. The structure doesn’t take away your freedom, it protects it from the version of you that doesn’t have the energy to choose well.

When you decide that creative work happens before email, you’re not being rigid. You’re making sure the thing you actually care about doesn’t get edged out by the thing that just happens to be louder. Without that structure, email wins every time.

This is the part most people get backwards. They think discipline means forcing yourself to do hard things through sheer willpower, white-knuckling your way through a day of choices you don’t want to make, but that’s not discipline. Real discipline is designing your environment and your day so that the right choice is the easy choice, and the wrong choice requires effort. You front-load one good decision and let the structure carry the rest.

That’s what this week of Conscious Creation is all about. You’ve spent five weeks collecting data, finding patterns, and identifying what’s actually happening in your life versus what you thought was happening. Now you’re taking the most important insight from that data and building one structural intervention around it. Not five, not a total life overhaul. Just one system, designed at the right altitude, tested for two weeks, tracked to see whether it actually works.

For my Conscious Creators, the full breakdown is below: what to build based on your archetype, how to design a system that holds, AI prompts for your specific situation, and the weekly assignment.

In this post:

Why you’re building one system (not overhauling everything)

What “one system” actually means (and why it can hit more than one area)

What to build based on your archetype

How a good system simplifies your tracking too

How to design a system that actually holds up

AI prompts for designing your archetype-specific system

What to track this week + end of week reflection

Need to revisit previous weeks? Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5

Join Conscious Creation

Why one system, not more.

When people get motivated by new insights, they tend to redesign their entire life in a weekend. New morning routine, new evening routine, new meal plan, new workout schedule, new screen time rules, new boundaries, new everything. It feels productive, feels like progress… and it almost always collapses within a couple weeks because you’ve replaced your entire operating system at once and your brain doesn’t have enough bandwidth to sustain all of it simultaneously.

What actually works is changing one thing, testing whether it holds, and then adding the next thing once the first one is automatic. This is boring and slow and unsexy, but it’s how durable change actually happens. You’ve seen this in your own data if you’ve been paying attention: the habits that stuck in your life weren’t ones you adopted in a burst of motivation alongside twelve other changes, they were ones you added one at a time until they became default behavior.

So this week, you’re picking one structural intervention based on your data from Week 5. Ideally, you’re targeting your highest-leverage insight, meaning the one finding that, if you addressed it, would create the biggest ripple effect across your day. Sometimes one change fixes three things at once, and that’s the kind of insight you want to build around if you can spot it.

But if you’re staring at your data and can’t figure out which insight would have the biggest ripple effect, don’t stall out trying to pick the perfect one. Start with the lowest hanging fruit: the easiest, most obvious thing you could fix right now. Get that win, prove the system works, build some momentum, and then work your way up the tree to the harder stuff. A good system built around a “small” insight will always beat a perfect system you never started because you couldn’t decide which insight was important enough.

You’re going to build it, implement it, and track whether it works. If it holds for two weeks, you’ll add another one. If it doesn’t hold, you’ll redesign it based on what the data shows went wrong.

What “one system” actually means.

I want to clarify something because “pick one thing” can sound underwhelming, especially after a week of deep analysis. When I say one system, I don’t necessarily mean one narrow, small change. I mean one structural intervention designed at the right altitude for your situation.

For some people, the right altitude is targeted and specific: you found one correlation, you build one constraint around it. For example, you discovered that skipping breakfast tanks your afternoon energy, so you build a system to eat within an hour of waking up.

But for others, the right altitude is broader. You might need one constraint that restructures a chunk of your day and creates downstream benefits across several areas at once. That’s still one system, it just operates at a higher level.

Here’s an example based on a fellow Conscious Creator I was working with last week:

This person is tracking their creative output, their daily steps, their screen time, and their general productivity. When they run their data through AI, nothing dramatic surfaces. They’re hitting most of their targets on most days, falling slightly short on a few. Not much to work with, right?

But when we dug into what’s actually happening in their day, we found out that their mornings are getting eaten alive by low-leverage busywork. They sit down to do their creative work but first they check email, then they tweak something on their website, then they spend forty-five minutes perfecting a social media post that didn’t need to be perfect, and by the time they actually start the important work it’s early afternoon and their best energy is gone. Their creative output isn’t bad because they lack discipline. It’s inconsistent because nothing is protecting their best hours from being consumed by tasks that feel productive but aren’t.

One system fixes this: creative work happens in the first 90 minutes of the day, and nothing else is allowed to start until those 90 minutes are done. No email, no admin, no social media, no busywork. That single constraint protects creative output, reduces time wasted on low-value tasks, eliminates the daily negotiation about when to start the real work, and likely improves the quality of the busywork too because it gets compressed into a defined window instead of sprawling across the whole day.

That’s one system, but it addresses four or five areas simultaneously because it’s designed at the right altitude. The person didn’t need five separate systems for writing more, spending less time on social media, being more productive, procrastinating less, and managing their screen time. They needed one structural change that cut through all of it.

So when you’re designing your system this week, ask yourself: is my most important insight specific enough that a targeted fix is the right move, or is it broad enough that I need a structural change that reshapes how a portion of my day works? Both are valid. The point is to match the system to the actual problem your data revealed.

What to build, based on your archetype.

Your archetype from Week 5 tells you what kind of insight you’re working with, which means it tells you what kind of system you need to build. If you’re not sure which archetype you are, go back to last week’s post and figure it out before continuing here, because the guidance below won’t make much sense without it.

Read more

Conscious Creation is a guided behavior tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

If you’re just joining us —

The program is self-paced. The weeks build on each other, but you can start anytime and move through at your own speed. Start with Week 1 where you’ll build your tracker and figure out what to track.

GET STARTED TODAY FOR 20% OFF

I’m going to be honest with you, this is a long post. It’s probably the most technical essay in the entire program, and there’s a chance it might feel overwhelming when you first scroll through it. I almost split it into two weeks, but I didn’t want to slow down momentum, so instead, I’m going to ask you to trust the process.

You don’t need to absorb everything in one sitting. Bookmark it, come back to it, use it as a reference. The prompts alone are worth the read, and the visualizations will make your brain do that satisfying tingle thing when patterns you didn’t see before suddenly become obvious.

This is the week where tracking stops being data entry and starts being insight. Five weeks of numbers are sitting in your tracker, and it’s finally time to step back and look at the whole picture. This is the part where you can finally stop guessing about your life and actually start seeing it.

Here’s what I’ve learned from talking to dozens of you over the past month: what you discover depends entirely on what kind of tracker you are.

Some of you are going to find strong correlations that explain behaviors you thought were random. Others are going to realize your data proves you’re more disciplined than you gave yourself credit for, and that discipline is about to become your greatest asset. Some will uncover one specific insight that solves a mystery you’ve been living with for years. And some of you are going to confront data that contradicts the story you’ve been telling yourself.

All of these are valuable and none of them are failures, but they do require different approaches.

The work you do here is the payoff for doing the tedious task of daily tracking. If you’ve been wondering when the dopamine spike will hit, today’s the day!

In this post:

The five tracker archetypes (and how to figure out which one you are)

A quick stats primer (so the numbers make sense)

What I discovered analyzing my own data

How to visualize your data so patterns become obvious

Correlation prompts to use with AI (general + archetype-specific)

What to do this week + EOW reflections

Need to revisit previous weeks? Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4

The five archetypes.

I didn’t set out to categorize people, but after weeks of conversations, I started noticing patterns in the patterns.

The pattern finder

Your behavior varies. A lot. Some days you crush it, other days fall apart, and you’ve never fully understood why. Your data has high variance across multiple fields, which means there’s signal to find. When you run correlation analysis, you’re likely to see clear relationships between what you do and what happens next. This is what most “analyze your data” advice is written for, and you’re going to get the most dramatic insights this week. Your job is to find the connections, then build systems that interrupt the negative patterns and reinforce the positive ones (we’ll get into systems building next week in Week 6).

The system validator

Your behavior is remarkably consistent. Your numbers don’t swing wildly, and your habits happen most days. When you run correlation analysis, the relationships might look weak, and you might wonder if your data is boring or if you did something wrong.

You didn’t. Here’s the reframe: correlations are weak because you’re not generating enough variance to measure. And you’re not generating variance because your systems are working.

This is evidence of discipline most people never achieve. You’ve built something that runs smoothly, probably without giving yourself full credit for it.

This matters because consistency creates capacity. When your baseline is stable, you have the bandwidth to experiment. You can test adding a new habit without your whole system collapsing. You can try a new supplement, a new workout split, a new morning routine, and actually see whether it moves the needle, because the rest of your life isn’t introducing noise.

Your data this week might not reveal problems to fix, but it reveals a foundation solid enough to build on. Next week is about designing new systems, and you’re entering it with an advantage most people don’t have: a stable base to build from.

The discoverer

You’re not finding system-wide correlations, but you found one thing. One specific pattern that explains something you’ve wondered about for a while. Maybe it’s a trigger-to-symptom connection with a delay you never noticed. Maybe your difficult days cluster around something external you hadn’t consciously linked. Maybe a behavior you thought was random actually follows a cycle.

You don’t need twenty insights, you just need to understand the one you found and build around it.

The external reactor

Your data shows variance, but the correlations are weak because your outcomes are driven by things you’re not tracking. Work stress, relationship dynamics, health flares, or general life chaos that overwhelms your personal behaviors. Your data might show that bad days cluster, but it can’t tell you why, because the why lives outside your tracker.

The insight here is either to start tracking different things (maybe work stress or external events need a field), or to accept that some variance isn’t yours to optimize and focus instead on maintaining your baseline when things get chaotic.

The confronter

Your data contradicts the story you’ve been telling yourself. You thought you were consistent with something, but the numbers say otherwise. You thought a behavior was occasional, but it’s more frequent than you realized. You thought you were “pretty good” in some areas, but the data disagrees.

This is uncomfortable, but it’s also the most valuable position to be in because the gap between your self-perception and your actual behavior is exactly where change becomes possible. You can’t fix what you can’t see, and now you can see it.

You might be a blend of a few of these. You might fit one archetype for your health data and another for your productivity data. That’s fine. The point is to recognize what your data is actually showing you, so you know what to do with it.

Which archetype are you??

Leave a comment

A quick stats primer.

[You can also brush up on 4 basic types of charts and graphs in this post]

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always believed I’m terrible at math so I’ve always felt intimidated by things like statistics. When I first started tracking my data, I was a bit confused when it came to actually reading and interpreting it, so I wanted to add some of the basics to this post. If you’re a math nerd, you can probably skip to the next section.

Below are a few of the most common terms AI will likely throw at you if you’re using it for data interpretation and pattern recognition, and what they mean in plain English.

Correlation (r): A number between -1 and +1 that measures how strongly two things move together.

• Strong (0.5 to 1.0 or -0.5 to -1.0): When one changes, the other reliably changes too. This is a relationship worth paying attention to.

• Moderate (0.3 to 0.5 or -0.3 to -0.5): There’s a real connection, but other factors matter too.

• Weak (0.1 to 0.3 or -0.1 to -0.3): Might be real, might be noise. Worth noting but don’t bet on it.

• None (0 to 0.1): These things aren’t meaningfully related.

Positive vs. negative: A positive correlation means both things move the same direction (more sleep, more energy). A negative correlation means they move opposite directions (more screen time, less sleep). Neither is inherently good or bad; it just describes the relationship.

When AI tells you “the correlation between X and Y is r = -0.58,” you now know that’s a moderate-to-strong negative relationship: when X goes up, Y tends to go down.

Sample size (n): How many data points you’re working with. “n=15” means 15 days or instances. More is better for reliability. With 35+ days of data, you have enough to see real patterns, though some will still need more time to confirm.

Average (mean): The typical value. Useful for knowing your baseline.

Variance: How spread out your numbers are. High variance means big swings. Low variance means consistency. Neither is inherently better; they just tell you different things about your data.

Z-score (standardized deviation):

A way to express how far above or below your personal average a value is, accounting for normal variability.

Instead of looking at raw numbers (steps, calories, protein), a z-score asks: Is this day unusually high or low for me?

• 0 = exactly your average

• Positive = above your average

• Negative = below your average

• Larger absolute values = more unusual days

Note: this is what I use to color-code my charts (example in visualization 2 below).

What I discovered in my own analysis.

Now that we got the boring terms out of the way, and before we get into how to analyze your data, I want to share what happened when I analyzed mine, because it illustrates why the archetype framing matters.

First, some context: I’ve tracked things for years, but never like this. My usual approach was logging one or two things at a time and typically involved trying to ditch or create a new habit. Quit drinking alcohol, quit smoking weed, lose weight, etc. Simple, isolated experiments. But for this program, I’m tracking around 30 different fields daily, which is new territory for me. I’m learning alongside you, and some of what I’ve already found has genuinely surprised me.

What I expected to find: Strong correlations between my behaviors and my outcomes with clear cause-and-effect patterns. Satisfying “aha” moments, if I’m being completely honest.

What I actually found: Most of my correlations were weak. My meal size and snack intake had a modest inverse relationship (bigger meals meant fewer snacks, but not dramatically). Stress eating was real but small, maybe an extra 30 calories on high-stress days. My readiness score didn’t impact my output even when it was at its lowest. Nothing that screamed “here’s your problem.”

At first I thought my data was boring, but then I looked at what “weak correlations” actually meant in context.

My key metrics stayed in a tight range for five straight weeks. My nutrition was consistent, my movement was consistent, I cooked at home 36 out of 40 days, made 39 unique dishes, and only ate out three times. My gym attendance held steady and while I didn’t hit my goal of 5x/week, I managed to get there 3x/week, which was still nice to see! My protein intake averaged 75 grams with minimal variance (my goal is 80g/day).

The correlations were weak because my systems were already working… I’m a System Validator.

Once I realized this, I stopped looking for problems to fix and started seeing capacity to use. My consistency isn’t the end of the story, it’s actually what makes experimentation possible for me.

For example:

Because my baseline is stable, I can test variables and actually see whether they do anything. I’ve been experimenting with different supplements, logging each one and checking whether they correlate with changes in my sleep or recovery. A few weeks of data isn’t enough to draw real conclusions, but I can run these experiments precisely because the rest of my life isn’t introducing noise. If my data were chaotic, any supplement effect would be lost in the chaos, but my “boring” consistency makes controlled experimentation possible.

I’m also a Discoverer, because buried in that consistent data was one genuinely surprising pattern:

My skin breakouts weren’t random like I’ve always assumed they were. They follow a predictable cycle tied to my period, appearing two to four days after it ends, right in the window when androgens spike. I’d been treating breakouts as bad luck for years, or using the “it must have been something I ate” justification, but when I mapped them against my cycle and layered in my skincare routine and the actual foods I’m consuming daily, the pattern was obvious.

In the first cycle I tracked, I had full active breakouts, and I wasn’t doing consistent, targeted skincare. By the second cycle, with a routine in place (recommended by ChatGPT when I fed it my first 3 weeks of data), the same hormonal trigger produced only minor activity. The breakouts weren’t random bad luck and they weren’t caused by my diet. They were predictable, and now they’re preventable!

That single insight, one I’d never have found without tracking both my cycle, my skin, and my diet in the same place, was worth five weeks of logging even if I’d found nothing else.

Your turn: see before you analyze.

Whatever archetype you are, the first step is the same: visualize your data before you try to interpret it.

Numbers in a spreadsheet are hard to read because your brain isn’t wired to spot patterns in rows and columns. But the same numbers in a chart allows patterns to jump out and makes trends more obvious. Outliers more readily announce themselves.

Before you run correlation prompts, make your data visual. Below are seven types of visualizations worth creating, what they reveal, and prompts to generate them. For each one, I’ll give you a universal prompt you can adapt to whatever you’re tracking, plus the specific prompt I used to create my example.

Section 3: visualization prompts

Visualization 1: the correlation heatmap

What it is: A matrix showing how every numeric field you’re tracking relates to every other field, color-coded by strength and direction.

What it reveals: Which of your tracked behaviors actually connect to each other, which relationships are strong versus weak, and where to focus your deeper analysis. This is your map for deciding what’s worth investigating.

Why it matters: You might assume two things are related and be wrong, or you might never think to connect two fields that actually move together. The heatmap checks everything against everything, so you don’t have to guess.

Universal prompt:

Create a correlation heatmap for my data. Include all the numeric fields I’m tracking. Use a color scale where green means positive correlation, red means negative correlation, and gray or white means no meaningful relationship. Display the correlation number in each cell. Only show the lower triangle to avoid showing the same relationship twice.

The prompt I used:

Create a correlation heatmap including: meal calories, snack calories, total calories, protein, steps, active calories, readiness, next-day readiness, sleep latency, coffee, and stress level. Use a red-to-green diverging palette centered on zero. Display r values in each cell rounded to two decimals. Show only the lower triangle.

In my heatmap, the strongest relationship that jumped out was between today’s activity level and tomorrow’s readiness: a moderate negative correlation, meaning higher activity days were followed by lower recovery scores the next morning. To be honest, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with this information yet… part of it is just physics (I’m less recovered after high physical activity, makes sense), but maybe there are ways to mitigate that… something I’ll be thinking about moving into next week’s “Systems Designing.”

Visualization 2: the day-of-week heatmap

What it is: A grid showing your average for each tracked metric broken down by day of the week, color-coded to show which days run above or below your personal average.

What it reveals: Weekly rhythms you didn’t consciously choose. Patterns in when you tend to do more or less of certain behaviors. Days that consistently run hot or cold on specific metrics.

Why it matters: You might think every day is roughly the same, but the data often shows otherwise. Maybe you’re more consistent on weekdays, maybe weekends throw off a specific metric, or maybe there’s a day that’s secretly your best or worst, and you never noticed.

Universal prompt:

Create a day-of-week heatmap for my data. Calculate my average for each numeric field by day of week, Monday through Sunday. Color-code each cell to show whether that day is above or below my overall average for that metric. Green means above average, red means below average. Display the actual value in each cell so I can see the numbers, not just the colors.

The prompt I used:

Create a day-of-week heatmap for: meal calories, snack calories, protein, total calories, and readiness. Days on the x-axis, metrics on the y-axis. Use z-score normalization to color-code above/below average. Display actual values in each cell.

My heatmap showed that Mondays had my lowest meal intake but highest snack intake. I wasn’t consciously snacking more on Mondays, but the pattern was consistent. Saturdays showed the opposite: bigger meals, fewer snacks, but also my lowest protein intake. Seeing this laid out by day made it obvious in a way that scrolling through a spreadsheet never would.

Visualization 3: the ecosystem view

This is one of my personal favorites!

What it is: A multi-panel breakdown of one category in your tracking, showing frequency, timing, and patterns within that category.

What it reveals: What you actually do versus what you think you do, which choices dominate a category, whether your habits within that category have shifted over time, and how choices in that category relate to other metrics.

Why it matters: Categories like “snacks” or “workouts” or “evening activities” contain a lot of variation. This visualization unpacks a category so you can see what’s actually happening inside it.

Universal prompt:

Create an ecosystem visualization for [category you want to examine]. Panel 1: A frequency chart showing how often each specific choice or item within this category appears in my data. Panel 2: A timeline showing when each of the most common choices appears across my tracking period, so I can see if certain choices cluster at certain times or if new habits emerged. Panel 3: How this category relates to another metric I care about.

The prompt I used:

Analyze my snack data and create a snack ecosystem visualization. Panel 1: Horizontal bar chart of snack frequency, counting how often each distinct snack appears. Panel 2: Timeline scatter plot showing when each of my top 6 snacks appears across the 40 days, with snack type on the y-axis and day number on the x-axis. Panel 3: Scatter plot of meal calories vs snack calories, colored by protein intake. Panel 4: Day of week breakdown

This showed me that Rx Bars were my most frequent snack by far, followed by beef sticks and apples. But more interesting was the timeline: Greek yogurt barely appeared in my first two weeks, then became a near-daily habit starting mid-January. This is what Costco had on sale… it ended up in my fridge, so that’s what I consumed (this is why one of my constraints is not bringing snacks I don’t want to eat in my house at all. Because they will get eaten!)

The day-of-week panel revealed something else: Saturdays had my biggest meals but my lowest protein, which feels counterintuitive, and is exactly the kind of pattern you don’t notice in real time (at least I didn’t).

Visualization 4: the achievement report

This one is so fun!

What it is: A summary visualization that highlights what you’ve actually accomplished over the tracking period, with concrete numbers and context.

What it reveals: The reality of your behavior framed as evidence of what you’ve done, not what you’ve failed to do. Often, you’re doing better than you realized.

Why it matters: Tracking can feel like surveillance if you only look for problems. This visualization reframes your data as proof of discipline, consistency, or effort. Especially useful for System Validators who might otherwise think their data is “boring.”

Universal prompt:

Create an achievement report for [area of tracking]. Include: a headline metric showing my overall success rate or main accomplishment, a breakdown of categories or types within that area, any variety or consistency stats worth highlighting, and context that frames this as an achievement. Make it feel like a report card I’d be proud of, based on what the data actually shows.

The prompt I used:

Create a home cooking achievement report. Show: what percentage of days I cooked at home versus ate out, how many unique dishes I made, the protein breakdown by type (chicken, beef, pork, etc.), the variety of cuisines I cooked, and a list of standout dishes. Frame this as proof of consistency and creativity, not just data.

This was genuinely surprising. I knew I cooked a lot, but seeing “90% home cooking rate” and “39 unique dishes in 40 days” in a visual made me realize the extent of what I’d been doing without thinking about it. I only ate out three times in six weeks! I almost never repeated a dish. That’s not nothing.

Visualization 5: the comprehensive dashboard

This one will make your brain tingle 🥹

Read more

Conscious Creation is a guided behavior tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

If you’re just joining us —

The program is self-paced. The weeks build on each other, but you can start anytime and move through at your own speed. Start with Week 1 where you’ll build your tracker and figure out what to track.

GET STARTED TODAY FOR 20% OFF

Over the past few weeks, about eight different people in the Conscious Creation program have told me the same thing: they want to stop doomscrolling. They know it’s eating their time, they know it’s making them feel worse, and they genuinely want to quit, but they’re finding it almost impossible.

What struck me most about these conversations wasn’t the struggle itself, which is apparently pretty universal, but how consistently wrong people were about how much time they were actually losing to doomscrolling. Someone would say they scrolled “maybe sixty or ninety minutes” and then check their screen time data and discover it was closer to four hours. Not because they were lying to me, but because they genuinely believed it was ninety minutes. Their memory had edited the experience down to almost nothing.

This is the thing about doomscrolling that makes it uniquely difficult to quit, it doesn’t register as time spent. You’re not doing anything that feels like a decision. You’re not starting a task or committing to an activity. You’re just... there, thumb moving, until suddenly you’re not, and the entire experience collapses in your memory to a brief moment of “I was on my phone for a bit.”

But this isn’t just about scrolling. This is about how your memory systematically lies to you about where your time actually goes, and why you can’t trust your own perception of what you’re doing with your days.

This week is about why awareness alone doesn't change behavior, and how to build constraints that do the work your willpower can't.

In this post:

Why your memory lies about how you spend your time

The effort bias (and why scrolling is the worst offender)

What actually works: tracking vs. constraints

Why awareness alone isn’t enough

Four constraint options for scrollers (with implementation steps)

How to design a constraint for any stubborn behavior

The three features of constraints that actually hold

What to track this week + end of week reflection

The effort bias.

Memory doesn’t record your day like a security camera, rather it reconstructs your day based on what felt significant, and significance is heavily biased toward effort and emotion.

When you sit down to do something hard, whether that’s writing, building, creating, or any work that requires actual focus, your brain registers it as a big deal because it required something from you. So when you look back on your day, that hour of difficult work looms large. You remember it. It feels like a substantial chunk of your day.

When you do something effortless, whether that’s scrolling, browsing, watching videos, or any consumption that requires nothing but the ability to absorb what’s in front of you, your brain barely registers it. Each individual session feels like nothing. Ten minutes here, fifteen there, twenty while waiting for something. None of it registers as significant because none of it required effort.

The result is a systematic distortion where effort gets overweighted and passivity gets underweighted in your memory of your day. You remember the forty-five minutes you spent working on your project, but you don’t remember the three and a half hours you spent consuming content in scattered sessions throughout the day. So when someone asks what you did, or when you ask yourself, you genuinely believe you spent most of your time being productive.

This is why people can go months or years believing they’re working toward their goals while making almost no progress. They’re not necessarily lazy or undisciplined, they just genuinely believe they’re putting in the time because their memory keeps telling them they are. But they’ve never tracked it, so they’ve never seen the gap between perception and reality.

The scrolling problem, specifically.

Doomscrolling is the worst offender because it’s designed to be invisible to your memory.

There’s no natural stopping point. You don’t finish a scroll session the way you finish a chapter or an episode or a task. You just eventually stop, which means there’s no clear endpoint for your brain to anchor the memory to.

There’s no effort involved. Nothing about scrolling requires focus or energy, so nothing about it registers as significant time expenditure.

There’s no single session either. You don’t sit down to scroll for two hours. You scroll for ten minutes, six separate times, scattered across your day. Your brain remembers six small moments, not one large time investment, even though the math is exactly the same.

And the content itself is designed to be forgettable. You’re not processing information or building toward anything, you’re just experiencing a stream of stimuli that disappears from your consciousness the moment you look away. There’s nothing for your memory to hold onto, so it doesn’t.

This is why screen time data is so consistently shocking to people who check it for the first time. They’re not in denial about their scrolling, they genuinely don’t know. Their memory has been systematically underreporting the time cost because the activity is designed to be invisible.

What actually works.

There are really only two approaches that work for changing behaviors your memory keeps lying about.

The first is tracking. Not trusting your perception, but actually recording the data. If you want to know how much you scroll, you check screen time. If you want to know how much you create versus consume, you log it. If you want to know where your time goes, you write it down. The tracker doesn’t have the same biases your memory has. It just shows you what happened.

The second is constraints that don’t require awareness (this is my personal method). Instead of trying to monitor your behavior in real-time, which requires you to notice what you’re doing, which you’ve already established you’re bad at, you build systems that make the behavior harder or impossible by default.

I track what I consume, but I don’t count hours. I track which show I watched, and I keep it limited to one episode per day. I track what I created, so I can see at a glance whether a day had output or just input. The constraint is built into the system so I’m not trying to monitor myself in real-time and make good decisions. I’m making the decision once, in advance, and then the system enforces it.

For scrolling specifically, this might mean app limits that actually lock you out, deleting apps from your phone entirely, or keeping your phone in another room during certain hours. The point is that you can’t rely on noticing you’re scrolling too much because you’ve already established that your perception of how much you’re scrolling is unreliable. You need a system that doesn’t depend on your awareness.

The broader pattern.

This isn’t really about scrolling though. It’s more about the gap between what you think you’re doing and what you’re actually doing, which exists in almost every domain of your life.

You think you eat pretty healthy, but you’ve never tracked your actual food intake. You think you exercise regularly, but you’ve never looked at the data on how many days you actually moved your body. You think you’re working on your goals, but you’ve never counted the hours you actually spent on them versus the hours you spent doing everything else.

Your memory is a storyteller, not a recorder. It’s trying to construct a coherent narrative about who you are and what you do, and that narrative is always going to be more flattering than the raw data. You remember the salad, not the snacks. You remember the workout, not the week you skipped. You remember the hour of focused work, not the three hours of distracted browsing.

The only way to see what’s actually happening is to stop trusting your memory and start tracking reality. Not because tracking is magic (though I do think data is a kind of magic), but because tracking is the only tool that doesn’t share your brain’s bias toward a comfortable story.

If you’ve never tracked something you think you’re doing well at, there’s a good chance you’re not doing as well as you think. And if you’ve never tracked something you think isn’t that bad, there’s a good chance it’s worse than you believe.

Your memory will keep lying to you because your memory works for your ego. But your data won’t lie. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Read more

Conscious Creation is an eight-week guided tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

Read more

Conscious Creation is an eight-week guided tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

If you’re just joining us —

Start with Week 1 where you'll build your tracker and figure out what to track. This post picks up where that one left off.

You made it through Week 1.

That’s not nothing, seriously. You set up a tracker, you showed up most days (hopefully), and you recorded things about your life that you’ve never written down before. That alone puts you ahead of most people who started the year with intentions but no system.

Before we get into the Week 2 content, let’s check in. How did it actually go?

Was it easier than you expected? Harder? Did you forget for two days and then panic-fill everything in on day five? Did you start with 20 fields and realize by Wednesday that was insane? Did you track perfectly for three days and then life happened?

Leave a comment

All of that is normal. Week 1 is supposed to be messy because it’s learning-mode. You’re not failing if it didn’t go smoothly, you’re just figuring out what works and what doesn’t, which is literally the point. The people who succeed at this aren’t the ones who nail Week 1 perfectly, they’re the ones who notice what didn’t work and adjust.

Got questions? Ask me.

Here’s something I’m adding starting this week: a Q&A section in every post.

If something’s confusing, if you’re stuck on a specific problem, if you want to know how I handle something in my own tracker—ask me! Reply to this email, drop it in the Chat, DM me. Whatever.

I’ll collect questions throughout the week and answer the most relevant ones in the next post. Starting Week 3, there’ll be a “Your Questions Answered” section where I address what’s actually coming up for people.

This isn’t just for you, because your question is probably someone else’s question too. Questions also help me iterate on the framework, so asking helps everyone. So tell me: what do you want to know? What’s tripping you up? What would make this easier?

By the way, I encourage you to drop by the Chat from time to time and share small wins, challenges, or just say hello to other Conscious Creators. Not a requirement by any means, but it’s there if you want it.

Please reserve the chat for messages related to the program, though. If you have questions or concerns that aren’t relevant to others, please send me a separate DM.

Now that we got the housekeeping out of the way, let’s get into Week 2!

This week, we build on the foundation you started building in Week 1. You’re not just tracking anymore, now you’re starting to see. You’re figuring out how to make this sustainable for the next eleven weeks, and beyond. And if you’re wondering whether this ever stops feeling like homework, it does. Some of what I found in my own data this week genuinely surprised me. I’ll share more on that later in this post.

What’s in today’s post —

Week 2 checklist

The memory test — memory vs reality (your first real insight)

Making tracking sustainable — finding your rhythm, not fighting it

Troubleshooting Week 1 — common issues and fixes

What 14 days reveals — early patterns worth noticing

New view unlocked — Calendar view

Using your tracker as a laboratory

AI prompts to try — discovering your own data stories

Introduction to charts — what they show, when to use them

Daily guidance + end of week reflection

Before you look at your data: the memory test.

I want you to do something before you scroll through your Week 1 tracker. Without looking, write down what you think happened last week:

• How many days did you work out?

• How many days did you hit your protein goal (or whatever your main metric is)?

• What was your average mood or energy?

• How many days did you create something vs just consume?

• Did you do the thing you said you’d do every day?

Write it down with actual numbers, then go look at your data. How close were you?

This is the whole point. Your memory of your week is probably wrong, not because you’re lying to yourself (though sometimes we do that too), but because memory is reconstructive. You remember the highlights and the lowlights while forgetting the boring middle, and you round in your favor without meaning to. But the data doesn’t do that. The data just shows what happened.

If your memory matched your data perfectly, congratulations—you have unusual self-awareness. But for most people, the gap is jarring. You thought you worked out 5 times; you actually went 3. You thought you were “pretty good” about eating at home; you ate out 4 of 7 days.

This isn't failure, this is the first insight. You now know something true about yourself that you didn't know before, or that you knew but were avoiding.

The gap between what you think you did and what you actually did is exactly why tracking matters.

Here’s an example of something I would have guessed about why my skin was suddenly breaking out vs what my data actually proved instead. I thought sugar caused me to breakout, but it turns out, my chin breakouts correlate exactly to my cycle. I never knew this before this past week!

Because of this new information, I was able to adjust my skincare routine (which I also added to my tracker, of course). I’ll share all of that in a later week because I don’t want to risk overwhelming you with data this early. But at a high level, this is how tracking continues to improve my life—by helping me see my patterns more clearly so I can actually interrupt feedback loops to make real, lasting changes.

Making tracking sustainable.

Read more

Conscious Creation is an eight-week guided tracking program. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently, how to see correlations, identify systems, and recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. Plus prompts that help you use the data strategically, and frameworks for making course corrections based on what your data reveals about you.

The story behind the program, and how it works:

Welcome to Week 1 of Conscious Creation!

You’re here. You committed. Now it’s time to build the foundation.

Week 1 isn’t about insights or breakthroughs (yet), it’s about establishing the practice of daily tracking so it becomes automatic. By Sunday, you’ll have seven days of data and a rhythm that starts to feel sustainable.

Before you start —

Make sure you’ve built your tracker and figured out what to track. If you haven’t done those yet, start there. This post assumes you’re ready to go.

What’s in today’s post —

The basics (behaviors, time, trackers as living documents)

Power features (consolidation, wearables, calculations)

Advanced context (why I track more, accountability, real-world applications)

Week 1 tools (daily guidance, reflection, checklist)

Join the chat (share small wins, engage with other Conscious Creators)

A note on when to expect Conscious Creation materials and emails: I like to send the weekly posts out on Monday mornings (PST). This allows you to collect data throughout the week (the “easy” part), then use the weekend to sit with it, reflect with the prompts, and make any adjustments needed, before starting a fresh week on Monday.

Behaviors build habits.

I know a lot of people call it “habit tracking”, but when you first start, you’re not really tracking habits, you’re actually tracking behaviors—the small daily choices that, over time, reveal your habits.

A habit is a pattern, and you can’t see a pattern from just one data point. But you can see it from 30, 60, 90 data points stacked together. The behaviors are the raw material. The habits emerge from the data.

So don’t worry about whether something is a “habit” yet. Just track the behavior. Did you do it or not? How much? The patterns will show themselves.

How long this actually takes.

Daily tracking: as little as 90 seconds.

Once your tracker is set up, you’re just checking boxes and entering numbers. That’s it.

But Week 1 takes longer than future weeks because you’re building your foundation and learning the system.

This is my Week 1 time investment. Yours may vary depending on how many things you’re tracking and how familiar you are with your tool.

By Day 4 or 5, you’ll have a rhythm. By Week 2, it’s becoming semi-automatic. By Week 4, you’re feeling dialed in.

The weekly reflection takes longer—maybe 15-20 minutes if you engage with the deeper prompts. They’re optional but recommended. But the daily tracking itself should really only take about 90 seconds before bed (or whenever you decide to do it)*

If it’s taking longer, simplify.

*Quick note on when you do it: I personally open my tracker a few times throughout the day. I have a tab open in my Notion workspace and if I remember I just “did a thing,” I’ll open it, log the thing, and move on. But I do the bulk of my tracking after dinner or right before bed.

Your tracker is a living document.

You won’t know what you need until you’re doing it.

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Who I am, and why I built Conscious Creation

What the program actually is

How the tracking works

Examples of data stories from my personal tracker

What you'll get when you join

Who Conscious Creation is for (and who it isn't)

Most people have no idea how they actually spend their time.

They think they’re consistent, they think they’re making progress, they say they value health, creativity, relationships, and they genuinely believe their behavior reflects that. But if you asked them to prove it, they couldn’t. They’re operating on vibes and memory, and memory is a liar that works for your ego.

I know because I was that person. And I stayed that person until I started tracking my behaviors.

I spent most of my life believing I knew myself pretty well. I valued discipline, so I thought I was disciplined. I cared about creativity, so I assumed I was creating consistently. I said relationships mattered, so surely I was investing in them properly. The story I told myself about who I was felt true because I wanted it to be true, and wanting something to be true is a powerful form of self-deception.

But data typically tells a different story than feelings.

A simple spreadsheet is how I lost 35 pounds. Tracking my triggers and physiological responses is how I quit weed. Writing down what I actually did every day—not what I meant to do or what I remembered doing—is how I finally closed the gap between who I thought I was and who I actually was. That gap between my self-image and my actual behavior became impossible to ignore.

Tracking is boring and incredibly unsexy, which is likely why nobody really posts about it. But it’s the thing that made every hard choice I’ve made in the last decade possible.

That’s why I built Conscious Creation, and that’s why I’m so excited to share it with you.

But before I tell you how Conscious Creation works, let me answer a question I’ve never addressed directly:

Who the f*ck am I to ask you to do any of this?

I often ask people to do hard things.

Quit the habit. Walk away from the money. Choose discomfort over stagnation. Sit with the thing you’ve been avoiding. Build systems instead of waiting for motivation. Stop lying to yourself about what you actually want.

I’ve been writing essays like this for almost 2 years now, and I’ve never once stopped to explain why I think I get to say any of it. Who am I to tell you to choose better? Who am I to ask you to do things that hurt or feel uncomfortable?

So, allow me a moment to introduce myself properly.

In 2015, I left the small California beach town where I’d spent my entire life.

I moved to Las Vegas where I knew no one. I had no friends, no network, no safety net, just a retail job I hated and a rented room in a stranger’s house. I was an introvert relocating to a city built for extroverts, starting from zero in every possible way.

It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever done.

I’m not going to romanticize it, there was no “finding myself” montage. It was lonely and disorienting and I questioned the decision constantly, but I also knew that staying where I was comfortable meant staying who I was, and I wanted to become someone else.

So I sucked it up on my own and embraced the unfamiliar. Eventually a rented room became a rented house with a roommate. The roommate situation eventually became my own place. Retail job became career became entrepreneurship. The life I have now—the one where I live in the desert mountains with my dogs and write for a living—exists because I got in my car a decade ago and drove toward something that scared the living shit out of me.

My entire life is different because I made that one choice in my mid-twenties.

After the novelty of Vegas wore off, I decided to quit drinking in 2020.

Not because I had a rock-bottom story or a dramatic intervention. I quit because I was tired of the brain fog, tired of “recovering” from the night before, or operating at 70% capacity and wondering why I couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t write well, couldn’t access the version of myself that I knew was in there somewhere.

The downstream effects had become impossible to ignore. Poor sleep, low energy, muddled thinking, a constant, low-grade haze between me and my own potential. I wasn’t an alcoholic by any clinical definition, but I was someone who couldn’t become who she wanted to be while maintaining the habit. So I stopped.

On January 1, 2025, I quit weed for the same reasons. Different substance, same calculation. I’d been using it to wind down, relax, “take the edge off,” or whatever other story I was telling myself to justify continuing using it—and it was costing me clarity. Costing me mornings, costing me the sharp, fully-present version of my mind that I need to do the work I want to do.

I didn’t go to rehab or join a program. I used willpower and the same boring systems I write about on this site. I tracked my triggers, built replacement habits, and white-knuckled through the discomfort until it became my new normal.

It wasn’t easy by any means, but I wanted my mind back more than I wanted the comfort of staying numb to the things I didn’t want to face or feel.

Sobriety ended up teaching me a lot about myself and what I actually valued.

In 2021, I walked away from my six-figure Instagram account.

I’ve written about this before, but the short version is that I’d built something that looked like success but felt like slow spiritual death. I was making tens of thousands a month posting brand partnerships, and I was absolutely miserable. The performance had colonized my entire life. Nothing was mine anymore. Everything was content.

So I deleted it. Not “took a break” or “pivoted my strategy.” Deleted. Disabled the account, bailed on upcoming partnerships, walked away from the money and the momentum and the trajectory that everyone around me said I’d be insane to abandon.

It wasn’t brave in any capacity. It was necessary. The gap between who I was performing and who I actually was had become unbearable, and I value authenticity more than I value comfort. So I ditched it.

Around this same time, I also walked away from a corporate job that was paying me very well to be treated very poorly.

I’m not going to name the company or the CEO because that’s not the point, and I’m not interested in public drama, but I will say this: when I resigned, I was offered a substantial sum of money to sign an NDA. The kind of money that makes most people shut up and move on.

I told him, in more colorful language, where he could put it.

Not because I planned to go scorched earth—I didn’t, and I haven’t—but because I’m not the person who gets bought into silence. If the only way to keep me quiet is to pay me off, then you already know what that says about what happened. I’d rather walk away broke and intact than comfortable and complicit.

I don’t say this to sound noble, I say it because it cost me. It was a hard choice. But I made it anyway because the alternative was becoming someone I didn’t respect.

2021 was a busy year for me. The downstream effects of sobriety and finding my authentic voice and inner clarity were pouring over into every aspect of my life.

I lost 35 pounds this year.

I’d been feeling terrible for months, if not years—constant fatigue, nausea, joint pain, a general sense that my body was working against me instead of for me. So I opened an Excel spreadsheet, started tracking what I ate, and committed to a painfully boring routine: eat less, walk more, lift weights a couple times a week.

That’s it. No special diet, no expensive program, no biohacking protocol or optimization stack. Just a spreadsheet and consistency.

I hit my goal weight in less than six months.

Furthermore, after losing the weight, I was able to stop taking all NINE of the prescription medications I’d been on—some for almost a decade! I had been taking everything from anxiety meds, to anti-nausea pills, to pain killers for the joint pain. Not to mention, I was early in the process of being tested for rheumatoid arthritis, which is a whole other story, but the point is: all these ailments “miraculously” disappeared when I took control of my health and intentionally changed course.

I’m telling you this not because I think weight loss is the measure of anything important, but because it’s a clean example of what I actually believe: simple systems, applied consistently, produce results. The unsexy truth is that this is what change actually looks like. Not transformation porn or before-and-after theatrics. Just a spreadsheet and the willingness to do the boring thing every single day.

Enter 2026, and I still live this way.

I wear my Oura ring, I track my meals, I have routines that would put most people to sleep just hearing about them, but those routines are the scaffolding that keeps my life stable enough for me to do the work I actually care about.

I’m not sharing this to impress you, nor do I think any of this makes me special. Plenty of people have walked away from more, quit harder things, lost more weight, built better systems, or moved to a new state.

I’m sharing it because I ask people to pay me for what I write. I offer frameworks and guidance and calls to intentionality, and if you’re going to spend money on that, you deserve to know that I’ve pressure-tested this stuff on myself first, over the course of many years. I’m not dispensing advice from some theoretical perch. When I say “choose the hard thing,” I’ve chosen it—repeatedly, at real cost, with real consequences.

I know how hard it is to leave everything familiar and start over. I've left it.

I know how hard it is to leave the money on the table. I’ve done it.

I know how hard it is to quit the thing that’s numbing you. I’ve quit it.

I know how hard it is to build uncomfortable systems when you’d rather just wing it. I’ve built them.

I know how hard it is to choose discomfort when comfort is right there, available, easy. I’ve chosen it anyway.

I’m not a “do as I say, not as I do” person. That’s the whole point. Everything I share here—every framework, every essay, every call to build a more intentional life—comes from someone who’s living it. Imperfectly, but actually.

I don’t ask you to do anything I haven’t done myself. And when I ask you to do hard things, I’m not asking from a lectern, I’m asking from the other side. I know how good it feels to write your own story, and if I can help even one person start writing theirs, I have done my job.

Radical self-responsibility is terrifying. It’s also the only way to become truly free.

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Don’t just take it from me. Here’s what readers had to say.

These are the shifts that happen when someone stops blaming circumstances and starts seeing their life as constructed.

Constructed by choices. Built by patterns. Shaped by what they do every single day—not what happened to them, not what they meant to do, but what they actually chose.

That realization is powerful, but it’s also fleeting.

Most people have that moment of clarity, feel inspired for a week, then drift back to their default patterns. Not because the insight wasn’t real, but because insight without evidence fades.

Conscious Creation is what comes after the realization.

It’s twelve weeks of guided tracking that turns “I’m in charge of my life” into proof. 84 days of data showing exactly what you’re choosing, what’s working, what’s not, and how your behavior across different domains creates the life you’re living.

By March 31st, you won’t just feel like you have power, you’ll have evidence showing exactly how you’ve been using it—and how to use it better.

Data is just truth, uncomfortable or not.

This is why I built Conscious Creation.

Not because tracking is virtuous or because data is inherently meaningful, but because most people stay stuck in the same patterns for years without realizing the patterns exist. They try harder with willpower, they set “better” goals, they read more self-help books, and nothing fundamentally changes because they’re treating symptoms instead of seeing the system. You can’t fix a system you can’t see, and you can’t see a system when you’re living inside it without any way to step back and look at the structure.

Twelve weeks of tracking gives you that vantage point. It shows you the feedback loops—positive and negative—that are running your life automatically. It shows you what actually predicts what, which keystone habits create cascading improvements across multiple domains, and which failure points create cascading breakdowns. It shows you whether you’re actually moving toward what you say you want or just drifting while telling yourself you’re making progress.

Before you track anything, you have to get clear on what you’re actually trying to build. This is where most tracking systems fail. They hand you a generic template and hope it fits. Conscious Creation starts with YOUR life.

Not sure what to track? Start here.

Ask yourself:

• What do I say matters to me? (health, creativity, relationships, wealth, peace)

• What would I be doing daily if I were the person I want to become?

• What behaviors do I suspect are helping me—or hurting me—but I’m not sure?

• What do I keep saying I’ll “get better at” but never actually measure?

Then translate those into trackable behaviors:

The key is making it binary or numeric whenever possible:

• Did I go to the gym? Yes/No

• How many grams of protein? [number]

• Did I publish something? Yes/No

• Mood today? 1-10

If you can’t answer it in under 5 seconds, simplify it.

You don’t need to track everything. Start with 5-10 things that align with your top 2-3 goals. You can always add more later once the habit is solid.

Once your tracker is set up, you're just checking boxes. Yes or no. A few numbers. That's it. You're not reflecting yet, you're just building the habit of noticing your own life and figuring out the most sustainable routine for jotting things down.

Here’s a screenshot of a portion of my personal tracker. I like to use Notion because it allows for checkboxes and recurring tags. The initial tracker takes a little longer to setup than a spreadsheet, but it’s quicker for day-to-day recording.

You can create your own Notion tracker using this simple template. Once it’s in your Notion workspace, you can tweak it to fit your goals and needs.

After you’ve collected data, you give it to Claude*, ChatGPT, Gemini (whatever LLM you prefer will work) and ask questions:

• “What patterns do you see?”

• “Show me my consistency.”

• “What am I building without realizing it?”

• “Create a visualization that shows [specific thing].”

The AI does the analysis. You get the insights. No spreadsheet skills required.

* I personally prefer to use Claude because I think it has the best coding skills, which translates to the best graphs and charts. ChatGPT can translate the data just as well, but the outputs aren’t as “pretty” and customizable as what you can get with Claude.

Here are 6 examples of prompts I used with Claude after uploading my initial 2 weeks of data (“data stories”)

Example 1: Raw Data

What it is: The raw inputs, visualized. Every checkbox, every number, laid out day by day.

How it got made: I gave Claude two weeks of tracking data and said “show me what I tracked.”

Time to track: 90 seconds/night

Time to create this: One prompt

Your version will likely track different things, but the format stays simple: checkboxes, numbers, 90 seconds. AI handles the rest.

Example 2: Life Dashboard

What it is: Everything at once—key metrics up top, trends over time in the middle, habit consistency at the bottom.

How it got made: “Take my data and create an overview dashboard I can update over time.”

What it shows you: You stop seeing individual days and start seeing systems. Where you’re consistent. Where you’re not. How things connect.

The best part: You don’t need to know how to build dashboards, you just ask for one.

Example 3: Walking Data

What it is: My walking data turned into a journey. 42 miles in two weeks = 1,097 miles/year = the distance from Las Vegas to Portland.

How it got made: “Show me something interesting about my walking data.”

Why it matters: I’m going to walk to Portland next year. I didn’t know that until Claude showed me.

This is what I mean by data stories. The AI takes something invisible and makes it tangible (and often, fun). What are YOU building without realizing it?

Example 4: Protein Intake Streak

What it is: A streak tracker showing hit vs. miss days, overall consistency percentage, and yearly projection.

How it got made: “Show me my protein consistency as a visual streak.”

What I learned: I hit my target 57% of the time. Getting to 80% = 84 more days per year of my body having what it needs.

Works for any consistency goal—sleep, creative output, screen time, whatever you’re trying to maintain.

Example 5: Overall Consistency

What it is: A radar chart showing all habits at once. Each spoke = one behavior. Further out = more consistent.

How it got made: “Show me all my habits on one chart so I can see where I’m strong and where I’m slipping.”

What I learned: I’m tight on homemade meals (93%) and loose on gym (43%). No judgment, just information about where to focus or refocus.

Example 6: Compounding Data + Future Projections

What it is: The cumulative view. Not percentages—just totals. What did 14 days actually produce?

How it got made: “Show me the totals of everything I tracked, with yearly projections.”

What I learned: 42 miles walked, 1,098g protein, 6 gym sessions, 5 essays published. Small daily actions compound faster than you think.

Creating the above visuals took me 14 days of recording data (around 90 seconds per night), and about 10 minutes of back-and-forth with Claude. That's it. It really can be as simple or as detailed as you want.

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The nuts and bolts.

Conscious Creation is a twelve-week guided tracking program that runs January through March. Every week, you get an essay that teaches you how to read your data differently—not just “track your habits,” but how to see correlations, identify systems, recognize patterns you couldn’t see while living them. You get prompts that help you use the data strategically instead of just accumulating it. You get frameworks for making course corrections based on what the data reveals instead of what you hope is true.

You’re tracking the same domains every day: physical state, creative output, decisions, energy, input quality, relationships, all of it (whatever you’ve chosen to track). The tracker doesn’t change week to week, but the lens through which you understand the data evolves. Week one is about learning to track without judgment. Week three is about seeing how memory lies to you. Week six is about decision alignment. Week eight is about the cascade effect from physical state to everything else. Week twelve is about integration—how to maintain what you’ve learned after comprehensive tracking ends, and how to continue using it and adapting it to your life moving forward.

By the end of twelve weeks, you’ll have a complete map of your behavioral patterns, your correlations, your feedback loops, your gaps between stated values and actual behavior. You’ll use AI to generate a dashboard like the one I’m sharing, turning your daily tracking data into visual proof of what changed from week one to week twelve. Not what you hoped changed, not what you tried to change, but what actually changed based on accumulated evidence.

90-day overview —

This is not for everyone.

This isn’t for people who want to be inspired without doing the work, or want their transformation to happen through intention alone, or people who would rather stay comfortable than see themselves clearly. Tracking is uncomfortable because it removes your ability to lie to yourself about how you’re spending your time, where your energy goes, and whether your behavior matches your stated priorities.

Most people will quit by week three when the novelty wears off and tracking feels boring. Some will quit by week five when the resistance shows up and their brain manufactures convincing reasons why tracking isn’t necessary anymore. The ones who make it to week twelve are the ones who decided that seeing themselves clearly matters more than staying comfortable, and that twelve weeks of daily tracking is worth having a level of self-knowledge most people never get.

If you’re still reading, you’re probably the type who finishes things.

You’re probably tired of operating on vibes and assumptions. You’re probably ready to see the gap between who you think you are and who you actually are, even though seeing it will be uncomfortable. You’re probably willing to do something boring and unsexy because you understand that real change happens through systems and evidence, not through inspiration and hoping things will just be different this time.

Conscious Creation starts January 5th. Twelve weeks, daily tracking, weekly essays and prompts, frameworks for reading your data and making strategic changes. By the end of March, you’ll have your own dashboard, your own evidence, your own map of the patterns that have been running your life automatically. What you do with that information is up to you, but at least you’ll know what’s actually true instead of what you’ve been telling yourself is true.

You have the power to change your life. You just have to decide that you will, and then prove it through twelve weeks of behavior that builds someone different than who you are right now.

Questions? Leave a comment or shoot me a message. I read everything.

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January 5th. Hope to see you there. x

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If you’re joining us for Conscious Creation starting January 5th, or even just curious about what daily tracking looks like, this guide will get you set up in 15 minutes or less, so you’ll be ready to go on day 1.

This is the anti-resolution.

Instead of declaring who you’re going to become, you’re going to track who you actually are, and let the data show you what’s working, what’s not, and where the gaps are between what you say matters and what you actually do.

The program provides weekly essays, prompts, and frameworks for recording and understanding your data. You don’t need fancy software or apps or a complex system. In fact, the foundation is super simple: a tracker you’ll actually use every day for 12 weeks.

This post shows you exactly how to build one, and includes basic, entry-level templates for Google Sheets and Notion, including the one I use myself. No spreadsheet experience required!

Note: I recommend doing an audit of 2025 before getting started.

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Quick links:

How to build your tracker in Google Sheets

How to build your tracker in Notion

What to track

Sample tracker

Common mistakes to avoid

How to go even deeper

I recommend doing an audit of 2025 before getting started.

OPTION 1: GOOGLE SHEETS (Simplest)

Best for: People who want zero friction and don’t care about aesthetics.

Setup time: 5-10 minutes

How to build it:

1. Open Google Sheets → New blank spreadsheet

2. Row 1 = your headers (Date, then each thing you’re tracking)

3. Each row after = one day

4. That’s it. You’re done.

Example headers: | Date | Gym (Y/N) | Protein (g) | Sleep (hrs) | Published (Y/N) | Mood (1-10) |

Tips:

• Use Y/N or numbers whenever possible—faster to fill in

• Put your most important metrics first (you’ll see them faster)

• Don’t over-engineer it. You can always add columns later.

• Bookmark it or add to your phone’s home screen for easy access

To export for AI (after 1-2 weeks of tracking):

File → Download → CSV. Then upload that file to Claude/ChatGPT (or LLM of your choice).

Here’s a super simple Google Sheets template to help get you started if you’re unsure how to begin.

OPTION 2: NOTION (More Customizable)

Best for: People who like a cleaner interface and want filtering/sorting options later.

Setup time: 10-15 minutes

How to build it:

1. Open Notion → New page → Add a Database (Table view)

2. First column = Date (property type: Date)

3. Add columns for each thing you’re tracking:

   • Y/N stuff → Checkbox property

   • Numbers → Number property

   • Ratings → Select or Number property

4. Each row = one day

Example setup:

• Date (Date)

• Gym (Checkbox)

• Protein (Number)

• Sleep (Number)

• Published (Checkbox)

• Mood (Select: 1-10 or Number)

Tips:

• Use checkboxes for anything binary—one click and done

• Create a “template” row if you want default values

• You can add a Calendar view later to see patterns visually

• Notion mobile app works great for quick nightly entry

To export for AI (after 1-2 weeks of tracking):

Click ••• on your database → Export → CSV. Then upload to Claude/ChatGPT (or LLM of your choice).

Here’s a basic Notion template to help you get started. Open the link, create a free Notion account if you don’t already have one, and select “duplicate” in the top right corner. The template will then be fully customizable within your own Notion workspace and will only be visible to you.

WHAT TO TRACK (START HERE IF YOU’RE STUCK)

Don’t overcomplicate this. Pick 5-10 things max that connect to your actual goals.

The rule: If you can’t answer it in under 5 seconds, simplify it.

WHAT A GOOD (SIMPLE) TRACKER LOOKS LIKE

This is a “table view” of the last few days of my personal tracker (make your own here). I like to track mine in Notion because you can simplify responses by using checkboxes or creating reusable “tags” for recurring events. For example, if you look at my “Gym” category: it’s technically a “Y/N” response, but I’m killing 2 birds with 1 stone by selecting the type of workout I did. My gym tags include: upper, lower, intentional rest day, too lazy. Having the “too lazy” option helps keep me honest with myself.

You’ll notice I do the same thing with “Miles Walked”—if miles = 0, the answer was “no.” Miles logged = “yes.” Try to consolidate and simplify your responses as much as possible to reduce friction at every turn. The less friction you encounter, the easier it will be to build momentum and keep going. I designed mine to take about 90 seconds total to fill out at the end of each day.

If you wear an Apple Watch, Oura Ring, or other type of fitness tracker, you can also merge that data here. I like to add my miles walked and my sleep hours to my tracker, which I get daily from my Oura Ring. It’s not necessary and is technically double-tracking, but it allows for more options for charts and graphs at the end of the week/month, which makes the overall data stories more interesting.

Here’s just one example of what I mean by “data stories”

COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID

• Tracking too many things → Start with 5-10. Add more later if needed.

• Making it too complicated → If it takes more than 90 seconds to fill in, simplify.

• Waiting for the “perfect” setup → Done beats perfect. You can adjust as you go.

• Forgetting to do it → Set a daily phone reminder. Attach it to an existing habit (after brushing teeth, before bed, etc.)

ALREADY HAVE A SOLID JOURNALING HABIT? YOU CAN GO DEEPER.

The 90-second tracker is designed for building the habit from scratch. Minimum friction, maximum consistency. If you’re new to daily tracking, start there and don’t add anything else until it feels automatic.

But if you’ve been journaling or tracking for a while and you know you’ll show up regardless, you can add richer data points that take more time but pay off in interesting ways.

Some things I track that AREN’T yes/no or numbers:

• Quotes I loved — Lines from books, podcasts, articles that stuck with me. At the end of the year, I’ll have a collection of everything that shaped my thinking.

• Media consumed — What I watched, read, listened to. Not a rating, just a record. Helps me see where my attention actually went vs. where I thought it went.

• What I created — Not just “did I create?” but what specifically. “Wrote 800 words on Jung.” “Edited Studio B draft.” This becomes a log of output I can look back on.

• Things I found interesting — Random stuff that caught my attention. Patterns emerge over time.

Why this works for me: I’ve been journaling daily for years, so the habit is already sticky. Adding an extra 5-10 minutes doesn’t threaten my consistency. (My non-negotiables take 90-seconds to track, as I mentioned above. I consider these my “extra curriculars.”)

Why this might NOT work for you (yet): If you’re just building the tracking habit, every extra minute is friction, and friction kills habits before they become automatic. Start with checkboxes. Graduate to the richer stuff once showing up feels effortless.

Earn complexity. Don’t start with it.

I hope you’ll join me in being a data nerd in 2026. It’s so much fun to see your life through this lens! 🤓

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