Life reviews - how and why you should collect data on yourself
Every day, week, month, quarter and year, I sit down and record data on myself. It's very powerful. Here's why and how I do this.
Summary
I wanted to be more self-aware, notice patterns in my life, achieve my goals and maintain habits better.
I started reviewing my life on a weekly basis, asking myself the same set of questions about my feelings, goals and habits.
Because it worked so well, this gradually expanded into a five level review process of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reviews.
These reviews have helped me achieve goals, maintain habits, and understand myself much better (and I’ve made some cool graphs).
This post outlines what I do, what I’ve learned, mistakes I made, and some general advice about life reviewing.
How and why I started reviewing my life
At some point in my twenties, I realised that I had no idea what had happened to me. When I looked back at my life so far, I had mostly vague memories, and a few photographs. I only had vivid memories of particularly emotionally salient events; firsts, lasts, house moves, breakups, job offers, and particularly happy, scary, painful or embarrassing moments. What was it really like to be me 5 years ago? What was I thinking about or feeling on a daily or weekly basis? Was I happy? I had no idea.
I was uncomfortable with this lack of self-knowledge. I was sad that I might not be known or understood by my future self. I also realised I had no way of noticing patterns. If something in my life got better or worse, I would only have a vague intuition. I didn’t trust this, I wanted hard data. Alongside this, I wasn’t very good at maintaining habits or achieving goals that I set myself. I was typically enthusiastic about some new habit or goal to start with, but the commitment would fizzle out over a couple of weeks without me even noticing. This cycle seemed to repeat itself for most of my key habits.
With these questions and issues in mind, four years ago, after a friend explained the idea, I started my first “weekly review”. This was a point every week where I would ask myself the same set of questions and record the answers.
It had two purposes:
a kind of structured diary
a place to gather data on habits.
Here is the first set of questions I asked myself (I used a Google form):
This was immediately and obviously useful. After a few weeks - I could already look back, and see how much things were varying. For example, here is the graph of my alcohol consumption and screen time for the first couple of months:
These first weekly reviews were very obviously valuable for being able to identify trends, progress, patterns and issues I needed to address. For example, I took steps to start addressing my alcohol consumption after noticing the above pattern (I then eventually stopped tracking it because it was no longer a concern). I won’t try to explain the full evolution of my review processes, but over the next few years it expanded a lot…
My current review system
I currently have five regular review processes.
Daily review (~1 minute)
I do this on work days only. I plan my tasks for the next day and record how much work I have done that day.
Weekly review (~10 minutes)
This hasn’t changed a huge amount from the first time. It's about recording data on habits and listing key things that I did or felt. Here are the current questions:
Diary:
What happened this week?
What went well this week?
What went badly this week?
Mood and habits:
General mood
Total social media use
Number of days you did cardio
Number of days you worked out
Review the habits that you're building - do you need to change strategy? - If so, how?
Difficult emotions (shame, anger, fear):
When this week have you felt shame
When this week have you felt anger (see here for my thoughts on the importance of noticing anger)
What have you been worrying about this week? (see here for my thoughts on the importance of noticing fear)
Make explicit quantitative prediction for the most important 1-3 worries
Monthly review (~1 hour)
Is similar to the weekly review, but with less numerical data and more focus on how larger goals are progressing. I also record any music that I’ve listened to a lot that month and pick out photos that seem particularly meaningful. Here are the current questions:
Goals
Review your current goals - write a couple of sentences about each one. Are you happy that they are still good? What else could you do to help achieve them?
Review the learning spreadsheet - does anything need changing?
(I have a spreadsheet of things I want to learn)
Action points
Looking back
Have you looked at the last month's weekly reviews?
What have you done too much of?
What new thing(s) have you experienced?
What is your biggest achievement this month?
Milestones, losses or major life events:
Important realisations:
Looking forward
Who do you want to spend more time with next month?
What do you want to do more of next month?
What are you looking forward to at the moment?
Reviewing reviews and tasks
Have you reviewed the weekly review form?
Have you reviewed your habit spreadsheet?
(I have a spreadsheet of every habit I am trying to maintain)
Have you reviewed the recurring tasks?
(my task manager has recurring tasks that pop back up regularly)
Fun
Songs of the month (you can see my monthly music playlist here)
Have you added some pictures to the monthly pictures folder?
Quarterly review (~2 hours)
The quarterly review is mostly focussed on reviewing and setting longer term goals. Here are the questions:
Reviewing reviews
Review all the weekly and monthly reviews for the quarter- anything that you can learn?
Review the monthly review process
Setting goals
Write about the success or failure of each of the last quarter’s goals
Set goals for next quarter
Action points
The goals I need to set are usually very obvious when I look back at what has happened in the previous months. Examples of quarterly goals I set recently: (I try to make them unambiguous - so I know exactly when I have completed it)
Start blog and add at least four entries
Reestablish workout habit - find accountability buddies for each type of exercise and do stuff together
Find and have at least 5 sessions with a new therapist
Annual review (~8 hours)
The annual review is about systematically reviewing every part of my life. This review is closely based on Alex Vermeer’s outline here, using Peter Slattery’s spreadsheet here, so I won't go into details.
I also review the quarterly review process during the annual review, along with the annual review itself. I previously used this to set annual goals also, but decided that the gap is too big between reviews, so I moved the goal setting to every quarter.
Key things I’ve learnt or achieved by reviewing my life so much
I’ve been able to build and maintain my habits - Key habits such as good sleep, exercise, meditation, not doom-scrolling, not drinking a lot are all very clearly good for me. They improve my mood, health and productivity. In all these cases, the local temptation to just stop doing the habit is high. Before doing reviews I would let habits slip without noticing, and my only strategy to improve was to shame myself into being more committed. But now, my review process makes it very clear when habits are slipping and encourages me to make deliberate steps to get them back on track. Examples of things I’ve done, in response to my weekly reviews to get the above habits back on track include:
Training myself to get up immediately when my alarm goes off (this gives me time to meditate and read each morning)1
Buying a cheap second phone that I use in the bedroom (so I can listen to audiobooks and set an alarm without all the other distracting apps on my main phone to the bedroom)
Installing Cold Turkey and blocking social media sites during work hours.
Deciding to just not drink for months at a time.
Setting up regular exercise sessions with a friend.
I could have done these without the review process, but I doubt I would have.
I’ve improved my self-awareness by noticing patterns in my emotional life - A lot of the free-text questions tell me a lot about what I was thinking about and feeling each week or month. In many cases, there are clear trends to how I was feeling, or certain emotions that consistently jump out from the text. This led me to adding the more specific questions about worries to my weekly review, and meant I could start thinking about ways to manage fear/anxiety better. You can see the breakdown of the things I was worrying about in my previous post (producing the graph in that post was particularly helpful as it highlighted how often my worries were connected to shame).
I have developed much more self-trust around completing goals - This one is subtle, and crept up on me over time. But I now just have a very strong sense that if I decided to do a thing, I would definitely do it. Or at least I’d have a very good reason for failing. If I set myself a goal or try to build a habit, I know that there are going to be many times over the succeeding weeks and months where I check in with it and identify ways I can improve. Being able to trust my future self to get things done is incredibly powerful.
Mistakes I made in my review processes
Poorly optimised questions - At one point I was using the monthly review to gather data on the number of times I worked out. This wasn’t regular enough - I needed to reflect on this more regularly to encourage habit maintenance and notice issues.
Conversely, as you can see from the first weekly review I did - I was reviewing the contents of the weekly review form every single week. This was probably sensible for the first couple of reviews, but was far too common after that. I now review each review process in the review that is one step up.
Decision-irrelevant data - When I start gathering data, the thrill of building a data set can become a bit too much2. I have often kept gathering data on a part of my life, long after I stopped thinking the data was very useful. Sometimes I just really wanted that consistent time series. Having an efficient review process that I can clearly see the value in is more important than a cool dataset.
Excessive attempts at automation - The above reviews are all almost completely manual. At various points I have tried to automated it (e.g. by writing code to extract data from exercise apps). These attempts have almost always proved to be not worth it - building and maintaining these automated systems takes a lot of time. I also change the precise data I am gathering often which means I then have to change these automations.
Setting very long term goals - When I first made goal-setting a significant part of this process, they were annual goals. I think I set about 10. This was too long-term and too many. It was hard to know what to focus on and I kept deciding to add and remove goals throughout the year anyway. I now set quarterly goals which feel right. If I have longer term projects - setting intermediate goals that can be completed sooner is still better.
My advice on creating reviews
I think having a series of embedded review processes is very very valuable. Here are by broad suggestions:
Definitely do create a review process - I have found this incredibly valuable for maintaining habits, achieving goals, and increasing self-awareness. It doesn't take that much time and it’s often fun.
Start small and book out time - a weekly review is a great starting point, and it might only be a few questions. The important thing is to build the review habit. I prioritise these reviews and set aside time on a weekend morning to get them done
Create meta-review processes - As you can see from my list above, a part of each review is to review the process for the next more common review (e.g. review the weekly review as part of the monthly review). Ask yourself in these meta-reviews whether the data you are gathering is informative or action-relevant. Cut out questions that aren’t improving your life - make the review process as easy and quick as possible so that you don’t find it tedious.
Do it with a friend - I have often done some of these reviews with a friend. This has been great for accountability and has helped me clarify my thoughts by saying them out loud.
Gather data on your mood - even if it’s a little suspect - “General mood” is a data point I have gathered every week for four years. See results summarised below. I’ve added the most likely explanation for the dips (mostly based on the “what has happened this week” field).
I have some doubts about this data. Summarising an entire week's emotional landscape into a single number between 1 and 5 is a bit fraught. I feel a desire, every time I fill in an entry, to inflate this number. I want to believe that I am happy. I try to resist this temptation, but it still makes the data a little suspect. Despite these issues I’m pretty sure it’s capturing something useful. This might be the clearest and most holistic indicator about whether my life is going well.
Tell everyone that you are doing it - Having a regular review process makes you sound like a really cool and effective person. You should tell as many people as possible. This will help keep you accountable and motivated to keep it up. Maybe publish a blog about it to impress your friends!
And finally: Don't be this chicken - (I am sometimes this chicken):
I trained myself to get out of bed straight away by spending just 15 minutes practicing getting out of bed when my alarm went off. One evening I:
Set my alarm for 1 minute in the future, and got into bed.
When it went off, I immediately got out of bed and walked to the bathroom.
I then repeated this whole process 10 times.
This really worked! The next morning and subsequent mornings I just immediately got up at my alarm, it barely felt like a choice...
I don’t know why I am like this….