I am almost ready to prepare the book for printing. (UN — your copy will be sent to you immediately when the prototype is done, thanks for your willingness to participate!) I’m still finalizing the metrics I want to track for this project.
As I mentioned in part 1, the challenge has been in developing a simple way of objectively recording a rather subjective topic: our level of motivation for various things.
After some ruminating and many pensive bike rides, I’ve come up with what I believe will be effective at broad-stroking the level of motivation over time. The daily metrics should actually track the *RATE* of motivation, rather than the absolute motivation.The idea is that if you take a large enough sample size, patterns should emerge where periods of “doing” it is measured by spikes in motivation, and “thinking about it” is represented by a very slight increase. Not thinking or doing it will be represented (upon final analysis) by a slight decrease in motivation, until it decays entirely.
This metric would be based on two factors that will be very easy to track:
- “Did I think about doing ____ today?”
- “Did I do ___ today?”
Thinking about doing something is worth “0.25″ point, and actually doing it is worth “1″ point. This isn’t to say that “doing” takes 4x as much motivation as “thinking”, but I expect that the resulting graphs will reasonably reflect a pattern of fluctuation in motivation if the activity itself is periodic. Any items not mentioned, in final analysis, will lose 0.5 points until they decay back to zero. These values may all need to be tweaked in the end, but it really won’t matter for the purposes of tracking, since the test subjects will only be checking “Thought it” or “Did it”.
I’ve also considered that recording other incidental details — phase of the moon, number of hours slept, calories / meals consumed, and a quick assessment of mood “good, meh, or bad” for the day — may prove to be useful.
My goal is to have the journal take only 1 to 2 minutes per day TOTAL to ensure maximum “sticking-to-itness”. Indeed, the motivation to track your motivations may become a factor. 
I’m still mulling over some of the fine details, but I expect to have a prototype up here in the very near future (this month). It will be available for free download, and printed copies will be available via Lulu.
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