This is post 3 of 4 in the series “My life as a research project”
Last time I got a whole bunch of ideas down and separated those into different key areas that I found important in life that I wanted to focus on. But there were a lot of items that fell into multiple different areas, so how did I deal with this?
First off, I accepted that life is complicated and sometimes things aren’t neatly categorized. That’s just something that happens with life. But it also means that I get to possibly improve two things at once sometimes, which is always good!
So with this in mind, I started brainstorming.
The hypothesis
Given that I had an idea of what would make my life amazing, I took these general ideas and started coming up with some Hypothesis. Ideas of what I thought would make my life better if I did them, and made note of which areas these might fall into. They took the format of “I will be happier if” or “This will happen if” and I just wrote a bunch of them down.
Some examples are:
| Hypothesis | Areas |
|---|---|
| I get a restful night of sleep every night. | Mental health, Physical health |
| I have a plan for the day. | Day to day life, Mental health |
| My chores are done regularly and not forgotten about. | Environment, Day to day life |
| My mortgage is paid off. | Money |
I’ve also made some notes about why these would improve my life, but I’m going to move on to the next key thing.
How could I measure these?
The metrics
Something important about me is that I am not good at just sensing when something is improving. I am someone highly motivated by seeing numbers change and watching progress, so I knew I needed to have something to look at to determine if things were getting better.
Some of these were pretty easy to find Metrics for. How much is left on my mortgage? Did I create a plan for the day, yes or no? Pretty easy things, and there were pretty easy ways to track and measure these.
Other things are not as clear. What counts as a restful night of sleep? Is that measured in hours? In how I feel in the morning? How easy it was to fall asleep? There’s a lot of factors, so I needed to brainstorm to come up with a bunch of them.
And, because I know these numbers might change as I figure out if I’m even tracking the right things, I didn’t stress out too much about anything. I just tried to gather as many metrics as I could to track and then started to think of what should come next: Figuring out my baseline and coming up with my first project.
