Find out what WORKS BEST for you by yourself

If you do anything that necessitates taking similar actions periodically, then it means you partake in a routine. This sets you in a very good position to be a test subject of yourself. You are the specimen, the analyst, and you can regulate most aspects of this study of yourself. In science, they would say you possess valuable data – based on your daily actions; that if analyzed would be beneficial to other individuals and most importantly to yourself. Unfortunately, all this information is uncollected, and that which is known is a small percentage of data that appears in the form of outliers. But how exactly can you gather
a lot of data about yourself? It is simple and I shall tell you how. As a general rule, you can collect data for whichever scenario. Let’s for example say you wake up every day at 6am, having slept at 10pm. The trick is to first of all have a tentative schedule for the day. With that, you must keep tabs of all your activities. Things like how you feel (health wise), whether the time allocated for any of the scheduled activities is adequate or not; how easily you start the activities, how much time you spend on any one of them, and any outstanding aspects of each schedule. There are surely plenty of variables and they change from one individual to another, but most likely not to a greater degree. If you do this every day, soon enough you shall have gathered a lot of information about your daily activities and yourself in general. 

Once you have all this information at your disposal, what you do with it is the most interesting part of your self-study. You can start experimenting with your life; you can reshuffle the deck of your activities. In the process of doing so, you will be able to realize more efficient ways to specifically deal with your life. In this way, you shall be able to escape the general bracket characterization of all individuals – one works for all scenarios! Soon enough you learn the most efficient ways to get your daily tasks done easily, and you are in position to probably advise someone else. And if you apply this approach to most of the things you do in your routines, you soon discover what aspects slow you down and how fast to get out of them easily. Remember that first time you were in a new place, and how for the first couple of days you didn't know the shortcuts, and how soon enough you were able to find the quickest route to your nearest destination (this is just an example, now days there are maps almost everywhere). But well, the same technique of finding your quickest route comes handy when we set out to identify ways to get around our tasks easily. And likewise, the same way you can’t know the shortest route without knowing the distance of the other routes; you can’t know how to change what, without the related information. Those who have allergies soon find out after their first experience. To some, it is difficult to identify the cause and may have to check the series of possible causes based on yesterday’s data. Once they know the cause, they may altogether avoid what caused it. 

Some people use journals to make a follow up of their daily activities or to store their ‘data’; and at the end of the day, a careful look back can help to make conscious decisions to better ourselves and others. And all results are good, whether positive or negative, they teach us something at least. Situations that require us to act swiftly, like emergencies, will rely so much on how fast we can react to situations. Knowing possible outcomes of various options will help in the making of smart decisions that could be lifesaving.

... and now that you know, what are you going to do about it?