Leah Gerber
This is not a test and there is no score at the end. You are collecting notes on what was around you on the days that went well and the days that did not. After a month there is enough to see something. Before that there is not.
Three people have run versions of this so far, and every rule below exists because building theirs taught it. None of their sheets matched, and that is the method working, not a flaw in it.
The questions have to fit your life or you will stop answering them by week two. Settle four things first.
Two parts, and they do different jobs.
First, the conditions. Circle or tick, do not write. Roughly how you slept and when you woke. Cycle day if you track it, day 1 being the first day of your period, and blank is a fine answer. Whether you went out, saw someone in person, moved, ate properly. What the day mostly was. Whether it felt like enough. Then whatever is specific to your life — which shift in the block, whether the nap was planned or just happened, whether you got to the thing you actually care about, even for zero minutes, because a zero is data.
Then one real question, in writing. Keep a short bank of five or six and answer whichever you have something to say about. Some days that is one, some days three, some days none. Which ones you keep choosing is itself worth noticing.
Why circles and not sentences for the conditions. After a long day nobody writes a reflective paragraph, and the month only becomes readable later if the same facts were captured the same way every day. The circles are for the record. The one written question is for you.
Read the whole thing in one sitting. Not weekly. Reading as you go is how people find patterns that are not there, because you start writing toward the story you have already begun telling.
Compare like with like. A first day off against a first day off. A working day against a working day. Then look only at what was around the days that stand out at both ends, and look for something that shows up repeatedly and that is on your list of things you can actually change.
Then change one thing. One. Watch for a few more weeks. Changing three things at once tells you nothing, which is the most common way this goes wrong.
Do not rate yourself out of ten. Where you sit on a scale limits how much you can appear to move on it, so numbers invent patterns out of the shape of the scale rather than out of your life. Circles for facts, sentences for everything else.
Answer what happened, not what you are like. When researchers compared what people believed about their own consistency against what their repeated reports actually showed, the two barely matched. Your memory of the pattern is not the pattern.
Do not read your own theory into the questions. If you build your sheet around what you already suspect, the month will return your suspicion to you. Build the custom questions from facts about your life — your schedule, your projects, your one free hour — not from your theory about yourself.
Writing it down changes it a little. Paying attention to something affects it. That is not a reason to stop. It is a reason not to treat one month of notes as proof of anything.
It can tell you which conditions are worth testing, and which of your days are actually working. That is genuinely useful and almost nobody has it about themselves.
It cannot tell you what causes what. A month of notes with everything moving at once produces good questions and no answers. The answers come later, from changing one thing deliberately, and even then they are about you and not about anyone else.
Want a set built for your life? The generic version above works. A version built around your actual week works better, and building them is part of this project. Email leahgerber@outlook.com with the shape of your weeks and what you can actually change, and I will draft your pages. Free, no diagnosis, no score, and your notes stay yours.