Long Term Productivity and the Reflect app

TLDR: I made an app that helps you understand yourself, and I leverage it to be productive

Over the past few years I’ve wrestled a lot with motivation, discipline, and other factors that feed into how productive I am and feel. But for a long time I was basing what tools and routines I used to be productive on how these things felt. Whether it was testing a new app, trying a new supplement, starting a new routine, meditating more, what have you. And, often, I would try multiple things at once. What I was missing was a systematic way of backing up my decisions to choose my tool and behaviors with data. Now, with Reflect, I know to what extent these changes I’m making in the name of productivity are actually having an effect.

The idea is simple. With every thing I’m looking to change, I run an experiment with Reflect. I record how productive I felt and the intervention I’m making (e.g. meditating more) every day. At the end of the experiment, I can see with data and statistical significance the difference the change has made. AND it will alert me to any confounding factors, like if lack of sleep messed with the results.

Now I’m much more parsimonious with what I try to use to increase my productivity, because I have raised the bar for trying just anything and have determined a set of things that work well enough, thanks to running experiments.