artnc

OP (and Duolingo employee #34) here.

I can definitely relate to the frustration! It's been years since I've worked on the product side myself, but for what it's worth we do allow equipping up to 2 streak freezes now. I believe you can also restore a lost streak as an in-app purchase; I've never done so myself.

You could say that. More concretely, it was a stressful first semester of college and I felt like adding more structure to my life would help.

Interesting approach! It'd be great to hear how it ends up working out for you.

That's also a great point about NLP etc. I was kinda hoping that my "Average daily log entries" would show some kind of trend like that, but I guess it was too simplistic. It really might be worth recording journal data and just assuming that the tools for analysis will catch up later.

Thanks for sharing - your story reads like a movie script! I'm lucky enough to not be worried about my health (yet) but maybe I should start tracking variables other than bodyweight. I'll definitely be coming back to your post for more inspiration.

Hmm I've always been hesitant to self-diagnose stuff like that, partly because it feels like potentially trivializing others' experiences.

I basically see myself as a garden variety introvert. I suppose that in an informal sense, I might be further along the spectrum than the median person off the street, but then again I suspect the same is true of many other software engineers - especially HN readers.

So generally no, but technically maybe? IANAD

OP here. Great question! I've never journaled or recorded emotional variables partly because that takes much more time and partly because they're harder to analyze.

For example, I could record stress on a 1-10 scale. Do I just put 11 for a day of unprecedented stress? Or should 10 always represent the global maximum thus far? More generally, how do I ensure consistency with myself?

I do vividly remember the stressful times in my life and can see their effects in the blog post's charts. I figured it's probably best to preserve at least some of my own privacy, although I did touch on this a bit when discussing music.

All that said, I have friends who journal and I might end up trying it too out of fear of losing data (even if it's squishy). Maybe once a week would be a sustainable cadence?

Author here! I do track my gym workouts and finances using other apps - I just figured that that's pretty common and less worth mentioning. Those are both very quantifiable, so it's relatively easy to measure progress.

I'd probably improve faster by taking music lessons, but improvement is really a secondary goal after having fun. For what it's worth, I do still get some feedback from bandmates and my own ear - recording your own playing and trying to mix it into something presentable makes it painfully clear what needs work!

Author here. I certainly don't not track it!

If you're wondering where it could appear in the charts, any one of the Sleep/People/Exercise/Other categories would seem a possible candidate...

1. For tracking purposes, I assume that I fall asleep immediately after putting my phone down. That's generally true enough, although sometimes I do find myself still lying awake and having to add a "Not sleeping" entry before putting my phone down again (for hopefully the last time of the night)! After my alarm goes off or as soon as I'm otherwise conscious enough to do anything, I mark "Sleep" as over.

2. It's not surprising that lack of sleep can get you feeling down. But since starting to track myself, I've been more conscious of the fact that whenever I'm feeling down, it's almost always after a night or two of bad sleep! I now take sleep a lot more seriously and ask myself first whether I've been sleeping well whenever I'm feeling down (as opposed to blaming other people, etc). This is especially important since I tend to ignore what my body tries to tell me.

3. The 7.5 hour average has remained roughly constant month over month for the entire decade. It's hard to say how much of an effect that other variables like exercise have since I always aim for 7-8 hours regardless. I do notice that if I get like 4 hours one night, I'll end up sleeping more than usual for the next night or two.

Right, you certainly don't need to track yourself for 10 years to figure out how long a shower takes!

A rough analogy: you can figure out from your HP bar how much damage you take from each hit, and it's probably worth doing so if you're going to be fighting these same baddies forever and have no other way of knowing, but the HP bar also serves other important purposes related to resource management: it gives you a sense of how you're doing overall, and it constantly reminds you that HP management is even worth caring about.