# My Personal Form

In my early twenties for a period of approximately 4 years, I kept a sheet of paper in my pocket that I used to track my goals and progress in a few key areas in my life.

After a period of high success in college, for about two years, I began to slip into unmotivation and disillusionment with the college experience. In some classes my performance began to slip, and I was having to drop some due to health related issues (I was experiencing angioedema and welts all over my body, and on my face it was quite disfiguring.) Since I was having troubles, I decided to visit my school counselor, and she asked me if, as a psychology student, I have ever considered visiting a psychologist. I had not, so she suggested that I go ahead and do that, and perhaps then I would be able to work through my issues with motivation.

I did see a psychologist and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I'm not sure it is because I was seeing a psychologist in particular, but because it was one of the few occasions where I had an older male role model in my life, who was very definitely focused on helping me in any way he could. 

There is much that I can say about this experiend, but what is more important most likely is a ritual I began to engage in to increasse my discipline and to ensure that I reached my goals.

This all stemmed from the realization, that any mentor, who is older who is giving advice to a person having difficulties as an adult, is high quality if, they are paying attention to the person holistically, to see if there are any special areas of concern in any of hte categories that relate to a person's well being. And my finding, was that there were key obvious areas where I was lacking, and that these areas were I was lacking combined to create issues that would be very difficult to resolve in the short term. 
Although I was very successful due to this effort, I made some disturbing findings.

The most disturbing is that even spending a lot of time doing it, it was really difficult to actually complete the form on any day. Even on days when I put an hour of effort into it or longer, meaning I wasn't actually doing the things that I needed to do but instead I was focused on just organizing and entering data into the document-- the result was still mostly empty forms and the feeling that because of that it was impossible to gather all the data that one might want to have to make changes in life, but also since only so much can be entered and tracked, it is clear that there is only so much attention and thinking that can be applied for the changes in habit. The more changes that need to be made, the more that would be taken away from all those things that need to get done... the point of the task to begin with. 

Like the issue with idea tracking and hoarding, this leads to an issue that can be resolved to some extent by technology but not really. At the time, my portable computing devices was a Sony Clie mini PDA that was basically like a mini laptop. It had a ton of limitations. But it did allow me to enter data into spreadsheets wherever I was, and I hoped at some point to createa  database to enter the infromation that way.

10 years later, today, I returned to the same using Google Docs on a large iPhone with plenty of memory and still the same limitations exist.

Fundamentally there are issues with self knowledge and the recording of information to make use of. These limitations exist in every dimension that we can think of regarding the activity. 

So I began to think through the key areas of interest for each domain in question and to focus on those areas alone, and I do think some of those areas can be automated with technology, although integrations between the products to get the data in useful document or format is still not reasonable. Can you combine the fitbit tracking with the spreadsheet tracking, with whatever other trakcing tools being used. Probably not.

Below is a list of some of the factors that should be kept in mind when trying to think through this.

Factors here.

So what does this lead us to conclude.

Firstly, that it seems to be true that holistic life balance and maintaining overall health is primary and that if you can make that successful for yourself then you would be able to reach goals. These changes that you make to yourself ,and the trakcing process is slow going and you can expect to only change one or two habits in yourself at a time, before you lose energy.

Secondly, it shoudl be known what the limitations of the process means for ours lives. We cannot expect quick changes to be made by other people. And as we work through this process, and understand all tha twe need to do to make simple changes, and the informatin and education and data that leads us there, we can see that non eo fthe results that we gain would be possible if not for all the effort and maybe some luck of experience leading to that point. Therefore we should feel to a degree that without the process there woudl be no result, and therefore we are path dependent on the education and the discipline. This shoudl make us realize that determinism appears to be true to a degree, and all thsoe who do not undergo a similar process, may not have success, insofar as their process differs from the process that you employ (not that there wouldn't be alternative processes that could be used as well that one might not suspect owuld. work). This should lead us to be less judgmental of others, and more respectful to ourselves, and to see ourselves realistically in time, and to not have any short term goals that we should know in advance are unreasonable.

Thirdly, that as we get better with this, we build power, because fewer and fewer areas of our lives need attention, and that we cna shift to other intersts and focul points that are higher value and bring more to our life. This is the fascinating part! With maturity in each of the domains of interest it then becomes possible to do things you never thought were possible. If your weight and diet are correct, and your fitness just happens, and you don't think of any of that, suddenly you can think about your career, your family, your writing (like myself now), or any other goals that you might have that are important of your life.


There are
* Quantity of lifestyle changes.
* Ability to track.
