Hey mieubrisse! 

Paleo/SC refers to the paleo diet and slow carb diet, respectively. As someone who is intolerant of both gluten and dairy, I feel and look my best when I stick to either of those two eating plans.

Essentials refer to the activities that I’ve already built habits for that are foundational to the life I want to live: exercising, blogging, career investment, and so on. Whereas Experiments are activities I can adopt as I feel the inspiration to do so, Essentials must be done much more regularly. Hope that clarifies!

S M P Es Ex I understand. Your heat map is the last four values weighted with a favor towards that which is most recent. Right? You color code based on thresholds. Super cool!

Hey Mike, I usually just look back on the work I accomplished that day.

As a side note, things like networking and blogging don’t necessarily need daily action, so if I worked on any of those categories for a substantial amount of time, I mark it as complete for a day. Over time, if I feel I haven’t worked on a particular essential, I take action separately from this system, as I felt it would get bogged down to track each essential area separately. 

Hey Jon, I discovered your blog around 2 months ago, during the lowest point of my semester as a CS undergrad. My homework wasn’t getting done, I was skipping class, I had no plans of getting a job, my health was suffering. After reading through your blog, I decided to implement the system you’ve developed here as an attempt to improve my life. As a student, I picked the following categories:

Homework, Attendance, Exercise, Diet, Diabetes Management (I’m diabetic), Networking, and Sleep. Every night before going to bed, I would log into my google docs spreadsheet and rate myself from 1 to 5 in each category, and used the function:
=MIN(POW((0.0138*S5^3-0.181*S5^2+1.071*S5)/4.05,1.4),1)*4+1

to evaluate sleep. (8 hours would give you a ’5′)

I also used the following color coding pattern:
>4.25 is green, >2.5 is yellow, <=2.5 is red.
I also added a delta % change for each day, which would automatically calculate the average for that day minus the average for all previous days, and would thus show you how much better or worse your performance was for today compared to your average day. Because I color coded any positive increase in green, a daily positive increase over time would eventually lead to a higher average and thus a higher standard of living.

Finally, I also added a column for comments about the day.

Long story short, this system really worked. For a long time, my networking column was filled with just red as I continued to neglect to network. Every time I added another red square, I was forced to really evaluate my progress, and, over time, I ended up doing better in every category. Just seeing the long term progress really helped, and for anyone out there who's reading this, I would strongly recommend to implement this system.