What are you working on? April 2012

David_Gerard

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

A couple of months ago I started keeping a journal. I posted about it here, asking for recommendations, and vaguely outlining my plan. (TLDR for that post: I'm writing a traditional journal when I have the time and keeping track of activities and emotional levels in a spreadsheet everyday, since that only takes like a minute.) It's gone very well. Originally I envisioned the journal as being a far more important part, but I'm enjoying the data collection much more. (Though both are valuable and I encourage both) I've recently made the tools for actually analyzing the data I've collected, and I thought I'd make the template publicly available for anyone who wanted to try a similar project. If you are, please send me a message or comment, and I'd be happy to explain the spreadsheet in more detail, since I know it can be hard to follow. But I don't want to take the time to write this if no one is going to use it.

Surprisingly, I have found very few statistically significant correlations. For example, there is not yet any statistically significant correlation (p<0.05) between how much sleep I've gotten and how energetic I feel the next day. R-squared values for linear regressions of variables tend to be around 2%-7%, even for variables that I thought would correlate very highly. Surprisingly, what is most strongly predictive (of the things I've looked at) of my happiness is how much exercise I have gotten that day (even more so than how much I have eaten).

I feel like this is mostly because I need a lot more data. There are trends that are evident in most of my things, but they're just not statistically significant yet. I really want to have about 4-5 more months of data, and then I feel like I can make some strong conclusions. I hope I'm not coming back in another 4-5 months wanting another 4-5 months though...

Edit: Apparently I am more energetic (Significant at alpha = 0.05) when I eat more than average than less than average. I must not have looked at food eaten vs energy before. I thought I had. There's an R-squared of 21%, which is astonishingly high comparatively.

Surprisingly, what is most strongly predictive (of the things I've looked at) of my happiness is how much exercise I have gotten that day (even more so than how much I have eaten).

I don't think that'd be much of a surprise if you read much literature on exercise - exercise improving mood & cognition is a pretty common result.

Apparently I am more energetic (Significant at alpha = 0.05) when I eat more than average than less than average.

Or vice versa? (I feel very hungry on modafinil - does hunger cause me to use modafinil?)