Success

Success 

MATTHEW RAYNOR

NOV 14, 2024

Since my spinal cord injury, I've had these debilitating chronic episodes that I initially thought were nerve pain—something I assumed was just part of the injury. The episodes would start with some sweating and a feeling of sickness, then my body would begin to shiver uncontrollably. It would get so intense that I'd be left exhausted, freezing cold, and drenched in sweat. The discomfort would continue into the night, preventing me from sleeping. I spent three out of four weeks in December stuck in bed, shivering in a cold sweat. This august was similar but I figured out why. I started a project a while ago to try and track patterns in my daily life. I wanted to identify the circumstances that promote learning, productivity, and overall mental well-being, then maximize those. My daily life is very predictable, so implementing a system like this wouldn’t be that difficult. I ended up creating a really cool system for managing my life that allows me to reference and draw conclusions, all with the goal of improving the overall system—but with science. So, if I’m going to spend the majority of my time trying to achieve a goal, how can I create the most efficient system to do it? Where am I losing productivity? Why? How can I make the system enjoyable and easy to use? And most importantly, how do I accurately quantify my productivity during the day? To start, I decided to count the number of lines of code I write, notes I take, and words I read per day. I set up a CSV file to record my daily productivity and then realized I needed a more accurate picture. So, I started recording my sleep time, whether I made a gratitude list, if I meditated, and even if I had a good dump (ever wonder how paralyzed people poop? It’s a whole ordeal, can’t go about your day filled with shit suffering with the attrition of constipation, lol). I expected to see a pattern: days when I took some time for mental health (gratitude list, meditation, etc.), combined with nights of sound sleep, would result in higher productivity. It also became clear that there were 24 to 48-hour periods where nothing would get done, usually preceded by one or more sleepless nights. I began to wonder why I was having these sleepless nights. If I could sort that out, I’d be able to recover a significant amount of time usually lost to misery. So, I started recording my physical and mental well-being, creating a food diary and an activity diary. At this point, I was recording pretty much everything I did during the day—what I ate, how I felt, how many lines of code I wrote, what ecosystem I was using—everything that went into my body was recorded, and even how much of it came out. Originally, I wanted to set up a web application to record the data and use some Django modules to produce graphs to visualize the data. But all of this can be a lot of work, especially for something you're not sure how to create or if it is going to work. To make things easier, I started visualizing the data with ChatGPT. There’s even a custom GPT for data visualization. As I analyzed the data, it became clear that something I was eating was making me feel sick. Eventually, I figured out it was probably gluten. I had the nurse order a series of allergy tests, which initially came back negative. I started doubting myself, thinking maybe I was just imagining things, but then the blood test results confirmed that I have celiac disease. In addition to this, I’ve automated my Trello Boards so that every day on my calendar, I have tasks set up. These include making a gratitude list, working on thought replacement, meditating, and filling out a diary for the food I’ve eaten and the things I’ve done that day. I use Trello for pretty much everything—it tells me exactly what I need to do, when I need to do it, and how I’m going to get it done. I do a lot of planning, but I automate much of it because, honestly, I can’t remember plans. Through this process, not only did I figure out I have celiac disease, but I also created a system that facilitates productivity and mental well-being.