I’ve been working on this the last couple of months, but it’s a free app to help track supplement usage (nootropics) and habits (ie. meditation) that’s synced. The data is completely yours (you can delete your information at anytime), but the abiilty to export it all is completely available! All the code is open sourced, so you can see exactly how correlations are done. I wanted something mobile friendly where I could enter things from my phone.
Automatic API Integrations are done with RescueTime and Fitbit.
But it works to answer the questions
How much does supplement X impact my correlation?
How much does Habit Y impact my sleep?
Given a week, if i took Supplement Y two times, how did that impact my overall productivity.
What did I do on Jan 23rd that made me so productive?
I’m specifically proud of the overview page, which will you show you for any given day what supplements and habits you might have done.
Very nice! Looks similar to Exist, conceptually? Have you found any correlations (or non-correlations) that surprised you? Any plans to support explicit A/B tests?
But that being said, it’s free versus Exist. Other notable ones are really an emphasis on supplements and diet driving a lot of difference in correlations (a lot of my breakthroughs in productivity were when I found how meditation and certain supplements really helped me drive the day) KSM-66 (nootropic) personally has been a god-send to me. Being anonymous was a big deal to me.
More surprising thing that I found was the lagging after effects, so the impact of alcohol and how you can still see it in days after. Other lagging effects - As much as workaholics love to work/work, I found that the activity “Hanging out with Friends” had an immediate drop in productivity for that day, but the after effects of boosted productivity outweighed it.
I think Exist’s UI is much better though. It has more integrations and a WAY cleaner landing page.
Even worse, changes are often only visible after adopting a new habit for a while–or an initially impressive change can disappear after a few weeks!
Another thing that confounds simple correlations is that getting up early every day for two weeks and then getting up late every day for two weeks, for example, isn’t the same at all as alternating getting up early and then late over four weeks…
Yeah, haha. I have tried so many supplements and continued testing for extended periods of time just to see if it was a placebo. Gwern takes it really next level with blind-testing a lot of supplements, but I found that a bit too difficult.
One of the features that I did to help reduce that is rolling aggregate correlations, so for instance, compare a full week’s worth of productivity, sleep and supplements to a week without that supplement. That helps average out a LOT of daily variance.
At the 21 days aggregation - the data starts getting noisy again. Human habits don’t want to be a linear regression, ie. baselines of productivity and sleep drift over time, regardless of supplements and habits.
PS - See that you own https://zenobase.com/, really dig how many integrations you’ve done with it! It’s a great site.
