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Labs

Twelve weeks, twelve methods, one day taken apart and rebuilt

You arrive with a record of your own day and leave with a result about it, or, more often, with a reason the result cannot be trusted.

These are twelve methods, not twelve topics, each introduced once and each depending on the ones before it. They run in three moves:realisation in weeks 1 to 4, where you learn to see your own day accurately; change in 5 to 7, where you alter one thing and test it properly; and rethinking in 8 to 12, where you work out how much of the result was the change and how much was everything else.

The Day You Didn't Design

We record one ordinary day and change nothing about it, which is harder than it sounds

Week 1 · 22 February 2027 · naturalistic baseline

What Is "Tired"?

Before you can measure how tired you are, you have to decide what you mean, and that decision quietly settles what you are able to find

Week 2 · 1 March 2027 · operationalisation

Two Instruments, One Night

Your phone, a paper diary and your own memory will disagree about last night, and none of them is the referee

Week 3 · 8 March 2027 · measurement error

The Observer in the Room

You cannot watch your own day without changing it, so this week we measure the size of the change instead of pretending it away

Week 4 · 15 March 2027 · reactivity

Take It Away, Put It Back

The simplest honest experiment one person can run alone, demonstrated on breakfast

Week 5 · 22 March 2027 · ABA withdrawal design

Twenty-Five Minutes

The most repeated productivity instruction in the world was one student's answer to one question, so this week we test it properly

Week 6 · 29 March 2027 · counterbalancing

You Are the Placebo

Every experiment in this course has the same unfixable flaw, and this week we look straight at it

Week 7 · 19 April 2027 · blinding

Everything Else That Happened

You cannot randomise your own life, so this week we go looking for what else moved while we were not watching

Week 8 · 26 April 2027 · confounding

Why You Felt Better Anyway

Almost everything appears to work, because almost everybody starts on their worst day

Week 9 · 3 May 2027 · regression to the mean

The Subject Has Changed

We run week 5's experiment again, on the same person, and get a different answer

Week 10 · 10 May 2027 · non-stationarity

Forty Things at Once

Track enough about yourself and something will always correlate with something, which is how a dashboard lies to you with true numbers

Week 11 · 17 May 2027 · multiple comparisons

The Day You Don't Measure

When to stop experimenting, why every answer you found has an expiry date, and what you are left holding

Week 12 · 24 May 2027 · stopping rules and exit