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SCAFFOLDING. Drafted from website_dump.md to establish the pattern — the
frameworks are yours, the prose is not yet. Rewrite in your voice before
publishing, and set date: to when you actually had the thought.
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Most self-improvement advice fails in the same way: it optimises one dimension
and quietly borrows from the others to do it. The promotion comes out of sleep.
The training block comes out of the people around you. The savings rate comes
out of everything at once. Each of those looks like progress right up until you
add the columns.
So I stopped tracking things one at a time. Five dimensions, rated weekly, on a
scale coarse enough that I don’t argue with myself about it:
- Physical — energy, not weight
- Mental — stress, and whether I can actually think
- Financial — runway, not income
- Social — the relationships I’d notice losing
- Professional — whether the work is compounding or just accumulating
The part that matters is the interaction
The dimensions are not independent and pretending they are is the whole mistake.
A bad month financially shows up as a mental score first. A collapsed social
score is usually a professional score that has been “good” for too long.
Which means the useful question is never how do I improve this one. It is
which one is currently paying for the others. That is a different question and
it has a different answer almost every time you ask it.
Weekly, not daily
Daily tracking measures noise. You are measuring yesterday’s sleep and this
morning’s inbox, and you will react to both. Weekly is slow enough that a bad
Tuesday doesn’t register and a genuine slide does.
Five numbers, once a week. The scoring takes two minutes. The looking takes
longer, and that is the actual exercise.