Transcription
Behind me is my Google calendar from July 15, 2015. And as you can see, it doesn't look that interesting, but this is truly one of the most significant days of my life because this is the very first time that I use qualitative data to assess my overall quality of sleep, life, work, and health.
And when you look at this, you know, it it's also the very first time that I began to see a calendar as this potential place to store data about myself. But on this particular day, I rated my sleep a 10, you know, which is kind of crazy considering I only slept for 6 and 1/2 hours. uh life a seven, work a seven, and health a six, you know, which I can only imagine is because I was eating goldfish, pasta, and ice cream. Ice cream. Okay.
Uh but to me why this is so significant and so life-changing to me is the very first time you assess yourself through a 0 to 10 scoring system, it's this deeper awareness of how you feel about everything, you know. And what this happened to do for me over time was as you're asking yourself, how do I feel about my life, work, health, and sleep? You then have to give it a number. But then you have to understand why you feel the way that you feel. And so what happens over time is the more you're using qualitative data of asking yourself how you feel because ultimately that's the most important all of these things begin to reveal themselves that are more quantifiable.
And how I view qualitative data is is very simple. You know, I I view it as five is neutral, six and above is positive, four and below is negative. You know, it's almost like six and higher is you see the world half full. Uh neutral, you are you're a five and like you take it or leave it. And then anything in four below is you see the world half empty. And and that's where the richest information is. You know, the quality of your life is the higher those scores are, the the richer the quality of life. But the information of change is in that four and below. But above all, when you begin to look at these numbers in aggregate or by average, they end up showing you the quality of your life.
So when I build existence, I decided, hey, I'm I don't want to do it for just uh the whole day. I don't want to just ask myself how I felt about work, life, health, and sleep. And what I love about this, I now can see the quality of every block of time. And that value is so much more interesting because when you look at a whole week of your whole life, you know, you kind of see these really low moments that happened that may have brought down an entire day, but it was really, you know, a 15minute, 30 minute moment that brought you down, but it would feel like your entire day.
In this particular case, I had a sick cat that that would have made me give a lower score for my overall life score. But the beauty of it is is then now you can take this data and get these more focused aggregate numbers. So when I look at this 7.8, this is just like me collecting all that qualitative data between the four core pillars. But now this essentially becomes the quality of my actual day. And then when you look at that over a long period of time, now you have this incredible sort of heat map of the overall quality of your life. And so you're just continuously getting insights through qualitative data about the quality of your life to continuously optimize and make change and see the change inside the system.