There's something fundamental which changes when a previously hard question becomes trivial to answer.
"What did I do today?" is surprisingly difficult for most people.
24 hours is a long time. Sometimes the act of recalling is used as a sleeping aid because it's so long.
Roll your brain all the way back to 24 hours ago.
Were you asleep then? Out and about?
What were the big events of the day?
Okay, suppose you went to work for 8 hours. That's easy.
Are you sure it was 8? Exactly?
When did you take a break, what specifically were you doing?
What did you do before and after?
Every single walk between rooms, every time you left a building, went to the bathroom, every time you stopped for just a moment which morphed into half an hour of scrolling.
How long were you there for?
Your calendar knows some of these things, your phone and computer know some others. But you don't, not till you think about it.
Is that a bad thing?
Not necessarily.
You shouldn't obsess over record keeping the past. It's tedious and has rapidly diminishing returns. Most people only remember the broad strokes, because they only need the broad strokes.
But it's useful to answer these basic questions.
"How much sleep did I get?" is a common one both because it's easy to answer and the results are so obvious. If you didn't get enough, maybe you need a nap later. If you feel tired but did get enough sleep, maybe it's time to check if you're sick.
Having consistently tracked what I've done every day for the last few years, and made basically any variant of "what did I do today" trivial, I can also say this with confidence.
It is a bit useless
Being non-trivial by default doesn't mean useful.
Your intuition still works well for one day, even if you forget the details. Because of that, you gain little by asking these questions outside the small measurable questions like "how long does folding laundry take?" Useful to know, but trivial in the grand scheme of things.
A day isn't actually the period life runs on.
Almost anyone can scrape by doing anything or nothing for a day. It might exhaust you, it might ruin your schedule later, it might make people angry. But if you truly needed to, if you are the demographic likely to be reading this post, you could do anything today.
Once the day becomes trivial, it becomes obvious that it wasn't what you should be looking at.
Finding a better question
The cynical take is that the more measurable something is, the less useful it becomes as incentive develops to rig it even just from observation. This is a principle so well known we named it not once, but twice.
But you'll notice those are about metrics, not questions. Questions have answers, but questions also spark questions.
Once a question becomes trivial to answer, using the information it provides becomes trivial. Any actionable information is used up until the question is no longer useful.
You learn all you need to learn and outgrow the question, you don't circumvent it.
An example.
I've mentioned before that I've noticed I feel the worst after three days of inconsistent sleep. I know this because I kept asking "how much did I sleep today?" compared to "how awful do I feel?", and kept getting unhelpful answers. Being able to see the trivial answer fail gave me a reason to look farther back.
It's like a child in the car asking "are we there yet?" A question so trivial it answers itself.
Of course we aren't.
But if you've been asked a hundred times and gotten the same answer, maybe you need to pull up the GPS for them.
- Rew
Nightly Notes
I open by doubting the reader's basic ability in many of these.
I hope it's clear I don't mean any offense.
I phrase it this way because this is how I know my past self was. I wasn't asking good questions, or I was accepting default answers for them. I wasn't thinking enough.
If you aren't like this, or you don't want to change in this way, that's fine.
I'm talking to a version of myself I never expect to meet again.
- Rew