Week 1 Lab: The Day You Didn't Design

22 February 20271 min readlow risk

This week

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

What you bring to the lab

The lesson below is how you get there. The lab is where you show it.

you arrive with twenty-four continuous hours recorded
the day you recorded is one you did not try to improve
you can say what you decided not to write down, and why

What we do in the lab

A baseline is your day as it already is, before anyone interferes with it. Every later week in this course compares something against this one, so if you spend week 1 tidying, you spend the remaining eleven weeks measuring against a day that never happened. There is no hypothesis this week, nothing to prove and nothing to beat, and the only way to build it badly is to make it interesting.

So we record twenty-four hours at whatever resolution you can actually sustain: fifteen minutes is plenty, and an hour is not useless. Paper is fine. Your phone is fine. What matters is that the record is continuous and that you wrote it during the day rather than reconstructing it that night.

Then we do the part that feels like nothing: we read our own days back to each other and notice what we left out. Everybody leaves something out. The interesting question is not what you did with your Tuesday, it is which parts of Tuesday you did not think were worth recording.

There is a sheet for all of it below, if a screen suits you better than paper, and it explains itself when you get there. What it does not do is ask you what you left out: that part is the hour in the lab, not a box on a screen. It keeps nothing. It saves no copy, sends nothing anywhere, and loses the lot when the tab closes, so print the sheet or save it as a PDF before you leave the page.

The day sheet

Twenty-four hours, drawn, and what you might change. Fill it in as the day goes. It saves nothing.

How to fill it in

Say when you woke up, then pull the line down to open a block: where you let go is when it ended, and the space between the lines is where you write what you were doing. A pixel is a minute. Keep going until you went to bed, then press the sleep button, which records the rest as sleep and closes the twenty-four hours. Nothing has to be dragged: every time here is a field you can type into, and the button under the line opens a half hour block, which you then correct by typing its end time on the line below it.

Keyboard

Enter walks the start time, then what you were doing, then opens the next block.
Shift with Enter starts a new line inside one.
The arrows on a time move it a minute, or an hour on the hours.

Every block starts at Keep. Set one to Change if you would be willing to run it differently and could actually reach it. That is narrower than a block you dislike: the hour you resent is often the one somebody else's timetable fixed, and the one you could actually move is duller. Setting it changes nothing about today. Week 1 is a baseline, and a baseline you have begun improving is not one, so the block goes down as it happened. Weeks 5 to 7 are the course's Change move, where you choose one thing and alter it. The mark is a note to yourself then, not a plan now.

The sheet

Date

Woke at

The same sheet, to fill in by hand

If the line above will not pull and the buttons do nothing, scripts are not running here. Print the page and write the day in with a pen: the lab counts that identically, and the ruled sheet below is what prints.