Mark Koester

The Ostrich Problem: Why do we avoid checking our goal progress?

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What metric are you currently hiding from?

I knew going into my marathon race that I wasn’t really ready. A knee injury had disrupted my training for weeks. The course for the Xichang Marathon in southern Sichuan, China, was at 5000 feet / 1500 meters of altitude, and the terrain turned out to be much hillier than I’d assumed too. Despite that data screaming at me to adjust my expectations, I just didn’t. I was so attached to this idea of myself as a sub-fourhour marathon runner, I ignored every single warning sign, and the results were an absolute disaster.

The first half went fine. I hit 21 kilometers in about two hours, right on pace. Then the cramps came. Severe calf cramps made the second half nearly un-runnable. Those last 21 kilometers took me three hours. And I finished in 5:09, over an hour off my goal, humbled and hobbling.

Why do we avoid the information that could help us succeed?

In my post-race notes I wrote: “the training and conditions of my body matter more than any false sense of my deserved expectations.” In my training logs and pre-race journaling, the information had been there all along. All those warning signs, the hilly course, the injury, the missed training runs, they were all there before the race even started. I just had chosen not to look or ignore what the information should have been telling me. Why did I bury my head in the sand? Why didn’t I want to check in-on or own up to my lack of preparedness and progress? Why didn’t I want to adjust my race day goal?

Tracking your progress towards your goals is essential for achieving them. In fact, psychologists believe that monitoring goal progress is one of the most effective behavior change techniques we have. In fact, tracking goal progress is believed to have just as much impact on goal achievement as setting goals themselves. Unfortunately, many people — including myself, as that marathon made painfully clear — both avoid checking how we are doing in pursuit of our goals and adjusting based on that data.

There are a lot of ways to get information about the status of a goal or project, like checking your phone’s screentime or looking at your wearable’s step count. Unfortunately, we often ignore and steer clear of these check-ins that might accurately tell us how close or far away we are from our intended goal or outcome. Behavioral researchers and psychologists have labeled this as the “ostrich problem.” Named after the myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger, this phenomenon describes the tendency to avoid monitoring one’s goal progress.

But not all avoidance is the same. Sometimes you’re hiding from data that scares you — your ego protecting itself from uncomfortable truths. Other times, the avoidance is a signal that the goal itself has gone stale. Understanding which kind of avoidance you’re dealing with is the key to knowing whether to fix your monitoring or fix your goals.

In this post, I’ll examine the research and psychology behind the “ostrich problem” — why our self-motives conspire against progress monitoring and what the consequences are when we look away. Drawing on my own confessional examples from marathon running, music production, and a book project that became its own ostrich problem, I’ll explore how avoidance can sometimes be a useful signal rather than just a failure of discipline. Finally, I’ll share strategies to overcome the ostrich problem and get better at goal monitoring through self-tracking, structured reflections, and regular check-ins.

What is the Ostrich Problem?

Examples of Self-Tracking Avoidance. Image: NotebookLM.

Ostrich Problem (definition): The tendency to avoid monitoring one’s goal progress.

There are two critical challenges we all typically face when it comes to pursuing our goals:

How to translate goals into actions?
How to close the gap between where we are and where we are hoping to get to in our goal pursuits?

Beyond just setting a goal, many factors go into the pursuit of one’s goals. According to the Self-Regulatory View of Goals, goals are better explained and framed as multi-stage goal pursuits. From goal setting comes goal striving and goal pursuit. It’s easy to have a dream or set a goal, but often our planning and actions are lacking.

Fundamentally, our goal behaviors end up displaying a number of cognitive, behavioral and emotional processes that can prevent us from goal-aligned behavior, often termed the intention-behavior gap. These cognitive processes can vary over time and differ according to the situation and our larger life and goal context. They can result in missing our targets and failing at our goals in large and small ways. And they can make us feel lousy too.

Difficulties with progress monitoring are an important explanation for the issues many people experience when translating goals into action. Related to the larger issues in the science of goals connected to self-regulation, understanding why we often stop seeking information on our goal progress and figuring out strategies to maintain goal tracking can provide a helpful approach to improve our goal pursuits, including how we feel about our goals.

Monitoring goal progress describes the periodically noting and checking-in on our goal-related behavior or its outcomes, including comparing these perceptions with where we want to be (Carver & Scheier, 1990). Checking goal progress is one of the more effective behavior change techniques available. As one group of researchers put it, “the real ‘work’ of goal striving involves monitoring goal progress and acting on discrepancies” (Harkin et al., 2016). Put simply, you reach goals through daily check-ins and following through on where we see gaps and opportunities to act to close those gaps.

The evidence for the power of tracking your progress is strong. In the largest meta-analysis on the topic, Harkin et al. (2016) found that progress monitoring had a small-to-medium effect on goal attainment (d+ = 0.40), which is comparable to the effect of setting goal intentions themselves (d+ = 0.36, per Webb & Sheeran, 2006). This suggests that effective goal striving requires not only deciding on an appropriate goal (“What do I want to achieve?”) but also regularly comparing ongoing behavior to that goal (“Where do I currently stand?”). When self-monitoring is combined with other techniques like intention formation, specific goal setting, feedback on performance, and review of behavioral goals, the effects are even stronger (Michie et al., 2009).

In practical terms, a person who monitors their progress has about a 61% chance of outperforming someone who doesn’t — versus the 50/50 you’d expect by chance. The simple act of tracking is nearly as powerful as the act of deciding what you want to achieve.

Figure: A framework showing how monitoring may lead to changes in behavior. Source: Webb & De Bruin (2020).

And yet, despite knowing this, many of us simply don’t do it. We don’t want to check in or monitor our goal progress — and we often reject the information even when we do encounter it. Webb, Chang, and Benn (2013) coined the term “ostrich problem” to describe this tendency: in many instances, people “bury their head in the sand” and intentionally avoid or reject information that would help them monitor their goal progress.

The evidence is striking:

Linde et al. (2005) found that 20% of people enrolled in a weight loss program reported having never self-weighed prior to the program. You enroll in a program dedicated to changing a specific metric, but you refuse to step on the scale to establish the baseline for that exact metric.
Regular self-monitoring among people with diabetes is uncommon despite its medical importance (Evans et al., 1999; Harris et al., 1993). People with diabetes know that blood glucose monitoring is medically necessary but they still avoid it because checking the numbers forces them to repeatedly confront the painful reality of their condition.
A National Savings and Investment Survey (2012) revealed that of Britons who worry about their finances daily, only 10% monitor their finances at least once a month. You worry about money every day but can’t bring yourself to look at the numbers once a month.
Similarly, despite rating relevant goals as important, few people keep track of how much they have eaten (Polivy, 1976), how many alcoholic drinks they have consumed (Hull, 1981), or the environmental impact of their behaviors (Shepherd & Kay, 2012).

This avoidance on checking our progress feels universal. Whether it’s social media or money matters, how many of us avoid checking our screen time or repeatedly ignore warnings that we are over our screen time limits? How many folks don’t want to check their credit card balances after Christmas or following a trip?

So, even though we have ways to check and likely know it would be good to check, why do we not check our progress? Why does this happen? Why do we avoid the very information that could help us succeed?

Why Do We Avoid Checking Progress? The Four Self-Motives

We choose to feel good now over actually being good later.

We don’t avoid tracking because we don’t care. We avoid it because we care too much.

According to Webb et al.’s (2013) framework, the ostrich problem stems from a conflict between four different self-motives that influence whether and how we monitor our goal progress:

Self-Assessment: The desire to obtain accurate knowledge about our current goal progress. This is the most obvious motive — the urge to ask “How am I doing?” to inform both our self-understanding and our goal pursuit.
Self-Improvement: The motivation to grow and better ourselves, which can trigger the desire to seek out information that reveals where we need to develop.
Self-Enhancement: The drive to maintain a favorable view of ourselves. This is where the conflict begins — we want to see ourselves positively and avoid information that might reflect poorly on us.
Self-Verification: The need to confirm and validate our existing beliefs and self-concept. We may avoid progress information when we believe it will be inconsistent with our view of ourselves (Swann, 1983).

The first two motives — the inner auditor and the inner coach — both want us to look at the data. They’re the voices in our heads saying “Check the spreadsheet”, “Step on the scale” or “Review your latest draft.” But then the conflict arises. Self-verification is our deep need to confirm our existing beliefs about ourselves. If I think of myself as a great runner — a sub-four-hour marathoner — I really don’t want to look at data that contradicts that identity. Anything against it feels like a threat to my ego. And self-enhancement takes this even further: it doesn’t just avoid the bad news, it actively protects a favorable self-image. Even an idealized version of myself feels authentic and true, which makes it harder to see the cracks and contradictions. My ego shields me from emotional discomfort — and from reality.

Figure 1. The ostrich problem within a model of self-regulation. Source: Webb, Chang, & Benn (2013).

As one researcher put it regarding diabetes self-monitoring: “self-monitoring of blood glucose throws it in your face … you must admit again and again that you have diabetes” (Candib, 2008, p. 1263). When we expect that we’ve performed poorly, we simply don’t want that information confirmed.

The ostrich problem isn’t about apathy. It’s an active, defensive move executed by our own ego. Our self-enhancement motive swoops in to protect our self-esteem from the reality of our poor progress. I wanted to see myself as a sub-four-hour marathoner. Looking honestly at those training logs would have destroyed that self-image before the race even began.

I see the same pattern in myself as a music producer. Even though I have already written, produced and released 6 albums and nearly 4 hours of music, I struggle to finish, and I’ve been stuck for months on my seventh album project. Jamming and making new demos is the fun part. Making new songs feels easy, creative and collaborative. It’s tempting to look at my accumulation of 48 demo candidates and partially completed tracks as a sign of success and progress. I’m a do-er and the raw material is there. But tackling my next album is hard and requires a different level of engagement and cognitive effort which I avoid.

Here’s what makes this avoidance so telling: I know the monitoring system works. On my previous album, Forwards & Towards, I used a tracking spreadsheet, logged my time, and tracked revisions through 158 hours and 8-9 revision phases to completion. The spreadsheet was central to finishing. But for Album 7 I wasn’t updating it or even looking at it. We will look at this pattern in more detail in the next section, but the short answer was that Album 7 wasn’t a goal I was committed to yet and I was in a period of goal dissolution.

When I finally forced myself to do a creative audit in February 2026, the numbers were humbling. I’d logged 81 hours across 31 weeks. This was a solid amount of time but I was only at the halfway mark compared to the ~145 hours my finished albums typically take. My activity breakdown told an even more revealing story: 65% of my time was still in jamming and songwriting and only 18% of my time was on reworking and finishing. On my completed albums, the reworking phase accounts for 30-45%. The median song had just 4 Ableton project saves, compared to 11-19 on my finished albums. I hadn’t really entered the finishing phase. In fact, the big push hadn’t started yet. Knowing that, I realized that I wasn’t as close to the finish line as I thought. I was actually at the mid-point — stuck in the middle, a goal phenomenon I’ll explore later in this post.

But here’s the thing about my music audit: even though the data was humbling, it was also clarifying. Once I finally looked, I could see exactly where I stood and what the path forward required. The avoidance hadn’t protected me from anything — it had just delayed the reckoning and kept me stuck. I suspect we avoid monitoring precisely because we know, on some level, what the comparison will reveal. Psychologists call this self-deception: being motivated to consciously disavow something that we know unconsciously (Greenwald, 1997).

This gets even harder when your self-identity is tied to the goal. You see yourself as an athlete, a writer, a musician — and the data threatens that identity. But not all avoidance comes from the same place. Sometimes you’re hiding from data that scares you. And sometimes, as I discovered with my own music, you’ve stopped looking because the goal itself has quietly changed. For example, after finishing a complete album, I wasn’t feeling called to tackle another finishing phase; I wanted to play and explore. I wasn’t avoiding it; I was disengaging in a creatively healthy and necessary way.

Not all goal tracking avoidance is a problem. Sometimes it’s a signal to reflect and change your goal’s parameters and update your goal pursuit journey. Knowing the type of avoidance matters, and that’s what I want to explore next.

Is the Ostrich Problem Always a Problem?: When Avoidance is a Signal

Ego protection vs. stale goal: two different kinds of avoidance. Image: NotebookLM.

Are you really afraid of what the numbers will say, or have you, on some subconscious level, maybe stopped caring about the finish line altogether?

The four self-motives framework explains why we avoid monitoring — but I’d argue it doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes a total avoidance of checking on our goal progress stems not primarily from self-deception or ego protection, but from a goal target that is no longer meaningful, timely, or situationally coherent.

According to Control Theory (Carver & Scheier, 1982), the self-regulation feedback loop depends on a comparator that measures the gap between your current state and a reference value (your goal). But this only works when the reference value itself is appropriate and you actually care about it. Information is only meaningful and useful to check-on when compared to a relevant standard. When the goal has gone stale, the act of monitoring feels pointless or even painful.

A goal could be stale because your life circumstances have changed, your priorities have shifted, or you’ve simply outgrown it. This isn’t goal failure but a call for goal disengagement and reprioritizing your goals. You stop monitoring your goals, not because you are afraid of the bad news, but because deep down you probably already know the goal isn’t achievable or meaningful to you. When your reference target or goal goes stale or no longer relates, the measuring stick is quite literally broken.

Thinking back on my Xichang Marathon, this was a classic ostrich problem. I still desperately wanted to run under four hours. The goal was alive. I just didn’t want to see what my training logs and injury history were telling me about my readiness. As I wrote in my post-race notes: “I probably aimed for an incorrect time and pace target” and “I didn’t plan well for the altitude or set a realistic goal.” The data was there. I avoided it because I was afraid of what it would say about me and my fitness. That was ego protection — the self-enhancement motive at work.

But my music tells a different and more nuanced story — one where avoidance wasn’t a single moment but an arc. Goals aren’t static. They ebb and flow. Interest surges, recedes, and sometimes comes back transformed. And the type of avoidance changes with each phase.

The ebb. After spending months finishing my sixth album “Forwards & Towards” — writing most of the songs, doing all the production, navigating tedious mastering and last-minute modifications — I was more relieved to be done than excited about what came next. As I wrote in my journal that July: “I’m definitely feeling the need to take a few steps away from album or finishing phase.” And that’s exactly what I did. There was no Album 7 goal. I didn’t set one up, didn’t create a tracking spreadsheet for it, didn’t even think about it. My summer was spent on a road trip from LA to Washington — hiking, camping, exploring — and my music time dropped to two and a half hours for the entire month. I wasn’t avoiding that number. I wasn’t hiding from it. I just didn’t care. I wanted to jam, explore new tools, and think about live performance. I’d naturally shifted from “finish albums” mode to “make music for fun” mode, and my time logs reflected this shift.

This ebb felt natural and appropriate — not like failure but like creative rest after a big push. By September I was writing in my journal: “Music is less important to me at the moment.” By October, my music time had settled into what one monthly review called a “restorative hobby-level rhythm.” Imagining a finished Album 7 felt flat. Not scary. Not impossible. Just irrelevant. The absence of tracking wasn’t avoidance. It was the absence of a goal worth tracking.

The flow back. But the interest didn’t stay gone. Once I was back in my home studio in Venice Beach and no longer living out of a suitcase, the creative energy gradually returned too. Jam sessions with my collaborator Jacob picked up. By December I was thinking about curation — “I should focus on picking 5-10 top projects, take some review notes, and rework them.” By January the momentum was building. Album 7 was reforming as a real goal, not because I forced it, but because the pull came back on its own. Even if I wasn’t sure I had the time to fully commit, it felt good to care about finishing again and working to release more music.

The end of November also ironically coincided with an app idea I started building called Playback Pilot, designed to help music producers organize their projects and track their progress toward finishing albums. It was a problem I was facing myself. So what better way to procrastinate productively — instead of finishing my own album, I built a tool to solve the ostrich problem for myself and other producers struggling to finish.

The avoidance returns. But unfortunately once Album 7 became a real goal again, so did the avoidance. I had 48 track candidates and a spreadsheet I wasn’t opening. That’s the classic ostrich problem from the previous section: goal alive, data avoided, ego protected. The same goal had moved through an entire arc — from active pursuit to honest dissolution to creative rest to gradual re-engagement — and the type of avoidance shifted with each phase. During the ebb, there was nothing to avoid. During the flow back, there was plenty to avoid — and I did. I wasn’t putting in the hours. I wasn’t finishing.

Not every lull in monitoring is the ostrich problem. Sometimes the interest genuinely recedes, and that’s not failure — it’s honest self-awareness. In the multi-stage model of goal pursuits, this is the evaluation phase — and one valid outcome of evaluation is letting a goal go. But our dreams and goals have a way of coming back, and when they do, we are often excited and energized by possibilities, but we can end up back in the same pattern and temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The question is whether you can recognize which phase you’re in or what type of avoidance you are manifesting.

So how does one tell the difference?

If imagining yourself achieving the goal still excites you but checking your progress fills you with dread — that’s the ostrich problem. You care about the goal but you likely aren’t actually making progress. This is a call to arms to fix how you monitor your goals and likely adjust ways to use your self-tracking as a tool to set shorter-term targets and monitor those.
But if even imagining a certain achievement feels flat or irrelevant — the goal may need updating. If you are setting a goal but don’t really care about it, and it’s just getting kicked forward week to week, month to month with nothing really to show for it, it’s time to fix your goals.

There’s another useful distinction from the research worth noting. Webb distinguishes between two forms of the ostrich problem: (1) avoiding monitoring entirely and (2) seeing the data but rejecting or dismissing it. These are not the same thing, and I think they map to different underlying issues. When you avoid checking in altogether — when you don’t open the spreadsheet, don’t step on the scale, don’t look at your training log — that might be a signal that the goal has gone stale. You’re not afraid of the data; you’ve just stopped caring enough to look. But when you do check in and then dismiss what you see — “that was a bad week,” “those numbers don’t count,” “I’ll make it up next month” — that’s more likely ego protection. You still want the goal. You just can’t face where you actually stand.

Before jumping to the strategies ahead, it’s worth pausing to ask which kind of avoidance you’re dealing with. The strategies that follow are designed for the classic ostrich problem — when the goal is still alive but you’re hiding from the data. If your avoidance is telling you the goal itself needs updating, the first step isn’t better monitoring. It’s an honest conversation with yourself about what you actually want.

I recommend you try a couple weeks of data-driven weekly review where you explicitly set aside time to track some metrics, review the data, and reflect on the past week and week ahead. This is one of my most empowering practices, and it has helped me consider my goals, purpose, and evolving priorities. Additionally, even a single reflection or journaling session might help you navigate and figure out which situation you’re in. For example, check out the guided reflection journey “Manifesting My Future Self” from the Stay Reflective app.

Cases and Consequences of the Ostrich Problem

The chocolate wrapper effect: visibility changes behavior. Image: NotebookLM.

The consequences of avoiding progress monitoring are significant. At its core, monitoring goal progress helps people identify discrepancies between their current and desired states that warrant action (Carver & Scheier, 1982; Fishbach et al., 2012). When we avoid monitoring, we lose the ability to identify both the need to act and the most appropriate way to do so.

Research provides some vivid illustrations of how monitoring (or its absence) shapes behavior:

The chocolate wrapper study. Polivy et al. (1986) found that female dieters ate fewer chocolates during a taste test when they were asked to leave their wrappers on the table (making it easy to see how many they’d eaten) compared to those asked to put wrappers in a wastebasket. Simply making progress visible changed behavior.

The progress bias. Huang et al. (2012) found that people who are far from achieving a goal tend to exaggerate their progress, while people close to achieving a goal downplay it. Interestingly, these biased views of progress actually serve to maintain motivation, but they also illustrate how our minds actively distort the feedback we do receive. You could argue that this kind of self-deception is actually adaptive and helpful. Is the ostrich problem sometimes a feature, not just a bug?

The monitoring tax. Self-tracking takes effort and attention. Active forms of progress monitoring, like keeping a food diary, consume regulatory resources that may be needed for other tasks (Muraven et al., 1999). While passive tracking tools might be easier, for it to be beneficial you need to be reviewing and looking at the data and progress. The monitoring part itself can feel effortful and draining, giving us yet another reason to avoid it or lose the habit.

Getting stuck in the middle. Bonezzi, Brendl, and De Angelis (2011) found that motivation doesn’t simply increase as we approach our goal. Instead, people tend to be most motivated when they are either far from or close to their goal — and least motivated in the middle. This “stuck in the middle” effect occurs because we shift how we frame progress: early on we look at how far we’ve come (“to-date”), but later we switch to how far we have left (“to-go”). At the midpoint, neither frame provides much motivational fuel. This is likely exactly when the ostrich problem hits hardest — when progress feels ambiguous and checking in feels least rewarding. I plan to explore the ‘stuck in the middle’ phenomenon in more depth in a future post.

Figure: How frame of reference influences perceived value of progress and motivation. Note the combined U-shaped curve when you switch frames. Source: Bonezzi, Brendl, & De Angelis (2011).

Beyond avoiding monitoring altogether, people also tend to reject progress information even when they do encounter it (Sweeny et al., 2010):

We dismiss data that contradicts how we see ourselves. For example, I saw myself as a sub-four-hour marathoner, so I ignored every training log that said otherwise.
We look away from information that would demand unwanted action. Specifically, checking my Album 7 spreadsheet meant confronting over 60 hours of finishing work that I wasn’t ready to commit to.
We downplay data that suggests poor progress. In my own case, it’s easier to count demos than to count revisions.
We avoid information we expect will make us feel bad — which is why 20% of people in a weight loss program never stepped on a scale.

In other words, we have no shortage of psychological reasons to look away, even when the data is right in front of us.

This is why Harkin et al. (2016) found that recorded monitoring — actually writing down or logging your progress — had larger effects on goal attainment than unrecorded monitoring. It is not enough merely to glance at the data; you have to face up to what it shows. The act of recording forces a confrontation that passive awareness doesn’t. A number in your head is easy to dismiss. A number in a spreadsheet stares back at you.

So how can we get better at navigating and dealing with the ostrich problem?

Strategies to Overcome the Ostrich Problem

The good news is that understanding why we avoid monitoring makes it possible to design strategies that work with our psychology rather than against it. As a self-tracker and data-driven goal pursuer, I’ve tried many experiments to better know myself and use that data to overcome where I get stuck. Here’s what has actually worked for me — and why the research supports it.

1. Lower the bar to look. The monitoring tax is real — checking in takes effort, and effort is a reason to avoid. The antidote is to make monitoring as frictionless as possible. Break larger goals into smaller, measurable milestones so that each check-in is more likely to show progress than failure. And wherever you can, let technology do the tracking for you. Passive tracking — step counters, wearables, time trackers, automated word counts — collects data without draining your willpower. A meta-analysis of pedometer studies found that pedometer users increased their physical activity by 26.9% over baseline, and having a specific step goal was a key predictor of success (Bravata et al., 2007). The less effort it takes to see where you stand, the harder it is to justify not looking.

For several years, I’ve kept a “goal scoring” tracker where each week I set 2-3 priority objectives and a host of smaller ones. Limiting myself to a few must-win’s is a forcing function. At the end of each week I score them and calculate a weekly goals score, giving me a simple way to measure progress and overall goal vitality. The act of scoring can be quick — maybe just five minutes — but it leads me to confront what I actually did versus what I said I’d do. It also means each week I’m holding myself accountable primarily to these “big win” targets, the weeks where I see lack of progress and failures on my big targets are often where my deepest reflections come from, since it’s either my approach, my caring or some combination that are falling apart.

2. Make checking in a habit, not a decision. The biggest enemy of monitoring is making it optional. If progress checks require a conscious decision each time — “Should I look at my spreadsheet today?” — the answer will often be no, especially when you suspect the news is bad. The solution is to build monitoring into your routine so it happens automatically.

A data-driven weekly review is the single most effective practice I’ve found for this. Every week, I set aside 20-40 minutes to review my time tracking data, check my goal scores, and reflect on what happened and what’s ahead. There’s no perfect way to do this — my process has evolved over years. But the core questions stay the same: Did I follow through on my intentions? If not, what got in the way? What do I want to focus on next week? When checking in is just “what I do” on Sunday evening, the psychological barrier drops considerably. Weekly Reviews are often where I explicitly notice the ebb and flow patterns. If I notice that a blog post or album project hasn’t been touched in several weeks or pushed forward as a goal without progress, it is a good time to diagnose and ask whether that’s avoidance or honest deprioritization?

3. Make progress visible and recorded. Visibility changes our behavior. In the chocolate wrapper study, participants who saw the wrappers changed their behavior. I strongly believe that the same principle applies to goals and tracking progress. Create progress charts, dashboards, or trackers that make your trajectory concrete and tangible. Like the wrappers on the table, visible evidence of progress (or its absence) can shape our behavior.

This is why I do year-in-data reviews — annual posts where I visualize my reading, time usage, running, and other tracked data. It’s also why my music producer spreadsheet uses color coding and revision counts: a row of red cells is harder to ignore than a vague sense that “I should probably work on that track.” And it’s why journaling and structured reflection prompts matter, because they force me to process progress information in writing rather than letting the self-enhancement motive filter it out. As the research showed, recorded monitoring outperforms unrecorded monitoring. A number in your head is easy to dismiss. A number on a page stares back at you.

4. Make it social. Pursuing goals alone makes avoidance easy, because there’s no one to notice when you stop checking in. Harkin et al. (2016) found that progress monitoring had larger effects on goal attainment when information was reported or made public than when kept private. When someone else is expecting an update, avoidance becomes harder. The social support can buffer the emotional sting of disappointing results too. This can be a formal accountability partner, a friend, a collaborator, or even a public commitment like a blog post. Regardless of how you do it, you are trying to link a goal pursuit with a social relationship and even a regular interaction with that person.

As I struggled to push forward with finishing my seventh album, I came to realize that I could and should use collaborators as an engine to help me make more progress and to act as an accountability mechanism too. Each week as I push to make my own progress, I also try to schedule at least one session with a collaborator to make it social, fun and a shared venture. This very blog post is also a form of public accountability, since it represents me facing up to the ostrich problem in the many ways it manifests in my own goal pursuits and life.

5. Reframe your relationship with the data and progress. This might be the hardest strategy to admit, but it’s the most important one. The ostrich problem is ultimately driven by our ego’s need to protect a favorable self-image. The antidote is learning to see feedback not as a verdict on your worth or value, but as simply useful information.

When I finally did my Album 7 creative audit, the numbers were humbling. I had a lot of demos but fewer tracks were close to done than I had thought. It was also clarifying. I could see what was needed more concretely for where I was stuck: an end-to-end review and note-taking session on all of my tracks, and several focused sessions with collaborators to record their parts. The data and my reflections on the state of the album showed me exactly where I stood and what the path forward required. I could move out from being stuck in the middle and start moving towards a series of finish lines. The data wasn’t a judgment. It was a map.

Conclusion

I need to make a little confession: this blog post started as a chapter in a book I was writing about goal tracking and the science of goals. I haven’t finished the book. That book has become its own ostrich problem.

Here’s the arc: In the spring of 2021, I took my brother’s book writing class. I researched hard — interviews, academic papers and personal stories — and I managed to submit a ~24k word manuscript in June. It was a very rough draft but it had the bones and many key ideas. Then I got a concussion, struggled with motivation and mood swings, and lost my self-esteem. A new job enveloped the bulk of my days, and music took over as my creative outlet. For years I avoided even opening the manuscript. The meta-irony writes itself: I wrote a book about tracking goal progress that I stopped tracking progress on. Was it ego protection, goal misalignment, or both at different times?

Book avoidance has taught me that rarely is a hard project or goal pursued or achieved in a straight, linear path. I thought I’d write the book in one push, but five years later I’m still circling back to it. How you feel about your goal pursuits will evolve, forcing you to rethink your approach, your strategies and even your self-identity. Once I pulled my head out of the sand, I still had to decide if that goal still mattered to me. The fact that I keep coming back (“I shouldn’t avoid my old manuscript” — Nov 2024, “I should simply try again” — Aug 2024) tells me the goal isn’t dead. It’s alive but scary. That’s a classic ostrich problem, not goal dissolution or abandonment. I still care. I still want to move forward with writing about goals, tracking progress and the nuanced reality of the pursuit. I’ve named it, and it’s now time to start writing again.

The ostrich problem is universal. Even someone who studies goal tracking, builds self-tracking tools, and writes about the science of goals isn’t immune. I’ve struggled with my goals for years. It’s precisely why we need systems, habits, and more clear-eyed self-reflection. The self-regulation feedback loop only works if you feed it data — and our egos will find every reason not to. The underlying principle across all of the strategies above is the same: don’t rely on willpower to overcome the ostrich problem. Design systems and habits that make monitoring so easy and automatic that when your ego tries to look away, the data is already in front of you.

Following my disastrous Xichang marathon, I wrote: “I have weaknesses that I need to work on the process of learning and improving BEFORE I should start thinking about certain performance and outcome goals.” That failure sent me into the academic literature on goal psychology — which is partly how this post and others on goals exist. While I’m no longer training for marathons, I’ve continued to run and completed several more races, mostly for fun and just to stay healthy, active and alive. But my approach to monitoring has fundamentally changed. Before each race, I review my training logs, level of fitness, and race conditions to set a realistic pace and plan an adaptive race strategy. During the race, I listen to my body, check my heart rate, and adjust accordingly. This two-level approach to progress check-ins — honest preparation before, responsive monitoring during — is what right-sized monitoring actually looks like. The goal isn’t perfect data. It’s enough data to keep the feedback loop running, and enough self-compassion to act on what it tells you.

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: the next time you notice yourself avoiding a check-in — not opening the spreadsheet, not stepping on the scale, not looking at your training log — pause and ask yourself why. Are you afraid of what the data will say? Or have you stopped caring about the goal altogether? The answer to that question can determine your next move.

If the goal is alive, fix your monitoring — set up the systems, build the habit, make it routine.
If the goal has gone stale, give yourself permission to let it go and redirect your energy toward what actually matters to you now.

Either way, the first step is the same: pull your head out of the sand and check your progress.

References

Candib, L. M. (2008). Obesity and diabetes in vulnerable populations: reflection on proximal and distal causes. Annals of Family Medicine, 5(6), 547-556.
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1982). Control theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality-social, clinical, and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 92(1), 111-135.
Conn, V. S., Hafdahl, A. R., Brown, S. A., & Brown, L. M. (2008). Meta-analysis of patient education interventions for adults with chronic illnesses. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 40(1), 52-58.
Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I. et al. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198.
Huang, S. C., Zhang, Y., & Broniarczyk, S. M. (2012). So near and yet so far: The mental representation of goal progress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(2), 225-241.
Michie, S., Abraham, C., Whittington, C., McAteer, J., & Gupta, S. (2009). Effective techniques in healthy eating and physical activity interventions: A meta-regression. Health Psychology, 28(6), 690-701.
Muraven, M., Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1999). Self-control as a limited resource: Regulatory depletion patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 774-789.
Polivy, J., Herman, C. P., Hackett, R., & Kuleshnyk, I. (1986). The effects of self-attention and public attention on eating in restrained and unrestrained subjects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(6), 1253-1260.
Sweeny, K., Melnyk, D., Miller, W., & Shepperd, J. A. (2010). Information avoidance: Who, what, when, and why. Review of General Psychology, 14(4), 340-353.
Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., & Benn, Y. (2013). ‘The ostrich problem’: Motivated avoidance or rejection of information about goal progress. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(11), 794-807.
Webb, T. L., & De Bruin, M. (2020). Monitoring interventions. In M. S. Hagger, L. D. Cameron, K. Hamilton, N. Hankonen, & T. Lintunen (Eds.), The handbook of behavior change. Cambridge University Press.
Bonezzi, A., Brendl, C. M., & De Angelis, M. (2011). Stuck in the middle: The psychophysics of goal pursuit. Psychological Science, 22(5), 607-612.
Bravata, D. M., Smith-Spangler, C., Sundaram, V., Gienger, A. L., Lin, N., Lewis, R. et al. (2007). Using pedometers to increase physical activity and improve health: A systematic review. JAMA, 298(19), 2296-2304.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude) were used to assist with editing and structural organization of the draft. Inline illustrations were generated using Google NotebookLM and Gemini, with minor editing by the author. Cover image was generated with Gemini and edited by the author.

Forwards & Towards by Stellar Mammals & Jacob Burgdorf: My Sixth Music Album Release

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Whether it’s learning a new skill, building something meaningful, or making music – the path to reaching your goals and dreams is forwards and towards.

Discover some fresh flow music and focus-inspiring beats in my sixth album as Stellar Mammals and my second co-written and co-composed album with the amazing Jacob Burgdorf on trumpet and more. “Forwards & Towards” is my latest collection of instrumental tracks for your flow, reflection or relaxation.

📻🎶 Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and all major music streaming services.

Check out our liner notes, reflections and more about the project below.⤵

Release Notes

Released on July 31, 2025. Performed, written, composed and produced by Stellar Mammals, aka Mark Koester Featuring, co-written and performed by Jacob Burgdorf Electric Guitar by John Stevenson Photo & Original Cover Design by Mark Koester Stellar Mammals Production 2025.

Track List

Grow Your Garden
Ill-fated Devil
I’m No Fortune Teller
Track Your Progress
Forward & Towards
Fury of the Kingfisher
Galaxy Extra
Homecoming Jay
Silly Goldfish
Starlight Passage
Awake Planet
Starry Eyed

Collaborators / Attribution

Collaboration is a gift. Thanks to:

Jacob Burgdorf — trumpet, horn, guitar and keys. Midwest-born, Los Angeles-based. Find on Instagram
John Stevenson — electric guitar
Kris Cruz — music production assistance. Los Angeles-based Music Producer and Audio Engineer. Find him on Spotify and Soundcloud

Artist and Producer Notes from Stellar Mammals / Mark Koester

About the Album

Celebrate each day’s potential with an open mind. Embrace our chance to start our moment anew. Create something beautiful, awesome and unique. Carpe diem. Seize the day.

These were some of the intentions that I carried with me as I created and manifested my sixth Stellar Mammals album “Forwards & Towards.”

These 12 songs extend my philosophical and creative spirit of being a continual beginner. We each possess the unique daily gift of pursuing our potential, making progress and, of course, exploring. The album’s spirit also imbues a long-standing belief and mantra I hold that the only way to get what we want and where we want to go is, as the title puts it, forwards and towards. A phrase worth repeating and living.

It’s challenging to reach goals, learn new skills and make art. As I’ve written about in my creative principles for music makers, there is no wrong way to make music and probably an infinite number of right ways. Whether I’m hiking a mountain, working on my professional endeavors or pursuing my various and wide-ranging creative projects, I often ponder: What can I do this year, this week, today, or even this moment to move myself closer to my goals and dreams?

Obviously the specific answer can take many forms but more often than not I have to remind myself of one simple truth, namely that regardless of the challenge, you get there by staying positive, moving your feet forwards and going towards what you care about.

Flow is one of the key themes in the album. The direction that we start each day with should be driven by a belief in our internal GPS, and the activities we take on should ideally induce a state of flow. Flow is a profound subjective experience of being-fully-present in the moment during an activity, whether it’s making music, writing code or some other creative outlet. Any thing can get us into flow. Just follow your passion.

Growth is another powerful component of the human experience and a theme in this album. We can always grow and change. Each day is a new year and even a potential new life. We are continuously changing biologically, so why do we struggle to greet each day with vigor of creation and growth? Each day is a gift and a unique opportunity to do something incredible. Embrace and find music that inspires you to live in the spirit of imagining what might be possible by our acts and thoughts.

Sonic Character and Track Highlights

With that focus on forward movement, sonically this album contains many energetic tracks including the opening track, Grow Your Garden, which I worked on for over a year and marked the introduction of a new collaborator – electric guitar by John Stevenson. His original guitar licks ended up on several tracks and complemented well with my more subdued guitar chords and piano parts.

How it started? I would say nearly all of my tracks start with and originate from a fun or interesting sound. Weird and complex sounds and sound design are a good GPS direction for making a track. Nearly every track of mine starts out untitled, and I initially title the tracks using Adjective-Animal format with placeholder names, like Eminent Okapi, Knowledgable Moose, and Obsequious Dotterel. “Puzzled Amaradillo” kept its generated name longest before becoming the title track “Forward & Towards,” and “Starlight Passage” was named “Night Theme” until v9 and finally got a name just before release.

How it evolved? The album’s core material spans nearly 3 years. Fury of the Kingfisher (Jan 2023) and Starry Eyed (Mar 2023) predate the album concept by over a year. Several songs were born in an explosive creation week in May 2024. It’s fascinating how older, sometimes forgotten, songs can seemingly wait patiently and unnoticed in the vault until they found their home on this album.

On the music production side, the guitar parts attempted to reference and sound in the space of John Mayer, Snowy White (“How Was It You”), etc. While the album still sits in the lofi beat space, it continues to probe aspects of psychedelic rock and has a tad more heavy hitting drums.

Here are my top tracks:

Grow Your Garden - A song to greet the day. Energizing mix of a guitar lick complemented by the trumpet/horns. Classic rock groove in a bed of supportive pad/strings. 20 total revisions (8 named versions + 12 backups) and was one of 4 songs born in the May 11-16, 2024 creation burst. This track went on a year-long journey from first idea to a finished opener.
Track Your Progress - Originally named “Puzzled Amaradillo” and spanning 17 total revisions, this track starts with an uncanny, somewhat organic synth ringing sound played on the MicroFreak and carries a slow buildup of the various elements including a core guitar line I wrote. The trumpets come in late but hit hard and add to the crescendo and core spirit of the track.
Forward & Towards - Title track with straight chords and lead line back by a rumbling bass layer and defined by a strong trumpet melody that weaves in and out of the different sections and parts.
Fury of the Kingfisher - Simple idea of a guitar melody weaved with a strong/heavy synth bass and woven to completion with trumpet melody.
Galaxy Extra - Imagine traversing galaxies and you come out hyperdrive and see the beauty before you… Centered on a repeating string section and some looser drum groove, trumpet aids to the opus of discovery and wonder.
Starlight Passage - For its simple, almost cinematic, sound, this track went through a lot of minor and major revisions (24 total). We did trumpet overdubs on the Nov 10 and in April 2025 before it was declared release ready.

Fun, weird ones:

Ill-fated Devil - Organ-led in the spirit of Ray Manzarek / The Doors. Ill-fated Devil had 24 total revisions (6 named + 18 backups). It originated from a live jam session with Jacob + Jasper on Aug 24, 2024, and it took a massive reworking and editing session on Oct 24, 2024 for it to find its final version.
I’m No Fortune Teller - Old Time Radio clip was added immediately after a simple jam idea and it largely just stuck. The song found its final footing after I let go of some “Demoitus” (unreasonable attachment to a particular version)

Blues Guitar Inspired Lofi Jammers

Homecoming Jay - Named after my high school mascot. This song is centered on dueling guitar passages on electric guitar by John Stevenson. This was one of the longer tracks on the album (at nearly 5 minutes). Heavy guitar-led song with the other parts like horn and live drums positioned to patiently complement its overall laid-back vibe.
Silly Goldfish - The longest and most revised song on the album. This track started as a raw guitar session with John Stevenson on Aug 2, 2024 (originally named “Silly Goldfinch”). The big creative question was the trumpet — Jacob laid down three separate variations (Best Brass mute, Harmon mute, Unmuted) before settling on using both mutes: Best Brass on the first half, Harmon on the second. The only song to reach v10.

Ambient outros:

Awake Planet - A song for staring at the stars, reflecting at dusk. Bongos, a string-inspired synth pad and a simple guitar line were used to create the backdrop for the lead trumpet line that were processed with various effects to create more atmospheric qualities at certain points.
Starry Eyed - A pure ambient closer for dreamland. This track had the fewest revisions (just 12). Originally called “Mayan Ancestors in Pentatonic All Blacks” and first composed in Antigua, Guatemala in the inner courtyard of the National Museum Of Guatemalan Art, this track used an echoing vocal synth preset from Arturia and Supermassive Reverb to cover a bunch of the space. Eventually trimmed back and complimented with a lush guitar sound.

Collaboration and Creative Process

This is my second album with co-artist and jazz trumpeter Jacob Burgdorf as my primary collaborator. Unlike Chop Wood, Carry Water which we started together in my home studio, the songs on this album were largely my original creations. I often had an early demo or core idea I’d created and did several iterations until it was relatively polished on the music production side and arrangement. This resulted in collaborating with Jacob when the track was more fully defined and possessed a more finished compositional state. Jacob did an amazing job of embracing the musical and stylistic character of the songs as-is and added incredible complementary melodic lines on trumpet.

The clearest artifact and checkpoint in this compose-first-then-add-Jacob process was on March 8, 2025 when every track was bounced to WAV + MP3 without brass. This gave Jacob space for his overdub sessions.

Another pivotal moment was November 10, 2024 — a mega recording day when we laid down trumpet overdubs on 5 songs simultaneously (Fury, Track Your Progress, Starlight Passage, Galaxy Extra, and Forward & Towards).

Like all of my previous albums, this album came out of a bigger vault of demos and potential tracks. From about ~17+ candidates, it was curated and reworked to its final 12 chosen tracks. Several tracks I was excited about didn’t make the cut this round, but I am excited to see if they fit a future project.

Liner Notes from Jacob Burgdorf

First Thoughts: This was my second album co-released with Stellar Mammals. In contrast to the first, Chop Wood, Carry Water, many of the compositional elements were developed before the addition of trumpet. It was a great opportunity to add to these concepts and help develop the music. In addition to the contribution of the trumpet there were many hours refining the tracks and adding input on instrumentation, use of space, balance, and overall vibe.

It was created mostly in Venice California with some of my first remote collaborations. The title means a few different things. First, it means moving forward on an objective regardless of obstacles. To make progress and move toward a goal. Second, it is also the act of becoming through the doing of a process. To go from little knowledge of something and growing into someone who obtains that mastery and title.

Here are a few thoughts on specific tracks:

Grow Your Garden - Muted trumpet, was improvised upon first listening. A fantastic job done in post, cleaning up intonation issues with the muted trumpet.
Ill Fated Devil - With help from a local musician, the organ and keyboard parts were laid down in an afternoon jam session. Most of the trumpet work was improvised in that same session. With a cool desert flair that gives the song a hypnotic feel. The music brings to mind images of a desert caravan or an exotic bazaar. The bass line near the finish (written on keyboard), brings some new interest on the low end.
I’m No Fortune Teller - The most lofi inspired track on the album. Using samples from a radio program. The trumpet parts were crafted over several sessions. Playing over a hip-hop style beat, I focused on having a smooth flowing sound. The intervallic leaps in the trumpet were intended to give a sense of uncertainty, complimenting the dialogue.
Forwards and Towards - Happy with the first take and the overall feel we finished with minimal editing on the track. The distorted guitar and the natural distortion of the mute complimenting each other lay the ambiguous feeling to the title track of the album.
Track Your Progress - Adding the delay on the trumpet to the intro and the ending of this song felt natural. Thinking it filled the space nicely without crowding the other textures. The main trumpet part in the middle adds to the feel of the music without taking too much of the attention. On some of the other tracks as well the desired effect was for the trumpet to add to the music on an equal level as other instruments like the guitar or keys without becoming the main thing happening sonically. During the mixing and mastering process we went through several versions with the trumpet at different levels. It sounded best when the trumpet was more in the mix instead of a little outside. This song has also been an inspiration to track my progress on my endeavors. Gaining information that can refine the process.
Fury of the Kingfisher - Using repetition the intended feeling was for a meditative introspective kind of sound. Eschwing from higher notes or accented passages to give a feeling of calm. The melody is simple, along with the accompanying part which are both atavistic in nature.
Galaxy Extra - The foundation laid by Cello and a shuffle tumble drum beat. A short atmospheric piece that is wrapped up with the muted trumpet.
Homecoming Jay - Another example of filling the space without dominating it. Leaving plenty of room for the guitar, to take the lead melody lines to come through. Going for a conversation like interaction.
Silly Goldfish - Mostly a free improvisation over the existing track. Always listening to what is given and playing something that compliments. Trumpet mute is used extensively on this track and others. The mute is close to imitating the sound of a voice and has characteristics and idiosyncrasies not achieved with open trumpet. On this particular recording session I was trying a new mute out and doing several takes over the material. Ending up being happy with both and liked elements of both. We decided upon using the typical ‘Best Brass’ mute on the first half and the more traditional ‘Harmon’ on the second. The slight contrast adds some textural differences while giving testament to the process in the final work.
Starlight Passage - This was the first remote collaboration with Stellar Mammals. Knowing where the peaks and valleys of a song informed my entrances, motif development, dynamic range, etc.
Awake Planet - The second remote collaboration. A simple intro that matched the spirit of the piece. After a short break a free improvisation covers the remainder of the piece.

Final Thoughts - Creating this music has been as much of a joy as a learning experience. Getting more familiar with the process of listening through several versions of a mix and noting the desired changes. More insight into capturing the sound from the bell, gain staging, rendering files with correct bit rate, and transfer of stems. Grateful for the amicable collaborations that continue to create innovative soundscapes.

Jacob Burgdorf

Creativity, Production and Time Tracking

Roughly 158 hours went into Album 6 with about 50% on song writing and 30% on reworking.

I take a data-driven, time tracking approach to a lot of my life. Tracking my time and setting weekly targets helps me see where my time goes and holds me accountable to time input as part of tangible creative outputs. It also helps me reflect on the journey and lean in or disengage when I’m working on multiple pursuits. As noted in my 2025 year in time blog post, I spent 155h on music in 2025, which was about half as much time on my music compared with 2024 when I produced and released two albums.

Between the release of Chop Wood, Carry Water and the final review session for Forwards & Towards, I tracked 158 hours of album-specific music production time across 297 days (September 25, 2024 to July 18, 2025), averaging 3.7 hours per week (~32 minutes per day) over 195 sessions.

Activity Breakdown:

Jamming & Song Writing: 82h 17m (52%)
Reworking & Finishing: 50h 30m (32%)
Review & Planning: 15h 31m (10%)
Practice & Learning: 5h 31m (3%)
Other: 4h 02m (3%)

The 52/32 split between creation and finishing reflects the different process on this album. With most songs starting as my own compositions before Jacob joined, the jamming and song writing phase was front-loaded and expansive, while the reworking phase was more targeted. Instead of building from scratch together, we were essentially reviewing and refining arrangements and integrating Jacob’s trumpet and input.

The weekly timeline shows the rhythm of production: strong bursts in October-November 2024 and January 2025, a quieter stretch in February, then renewed energy in April-May as the album moved into its finishing phase. This kind of data is a good reminder of the marathon effort it takes to finish a multi-track album project.

Collaborator Breakdown:

Of the 158 hours, 49 hours (31%) was collaborative work:

With Jacob: 45h 20m (29% of total)
With Kris: 4h 03m (3%)

Jacob’s 45 hours on this album is up from ~36 hours on Chop Wood, Carry Water – a deeper collaboration even though the compositional starting point was more solo this time around.

Spreadsheet Organization and Iterative Reviews and Revisions:

Since my second album, Symbolic Wonderlands, I’ve used a spreadsheet to organize and help me finish my tracks and complete and release albums. This album benefited from having a spreadsheet to rank favorite tracks, track progress and revisions and collect notes and feedback from improvements. It was useful to determine which tracks were in and out. Color coding reviewed or reworked tracks made the process more obvious visually as well. It also gave me format to share and collect feedback with collaborators.

Example of my Album Tracking Spreadsheet (V5) with revision count and song ratings using hotdogs and other visual indicators of progress.

Initially, according to my spreadsheet, I had about 75+ tracks to choose from. All told, I went through about 8-9 formal revision phases.

Files & Song Revisions:

Beyond my toggl time and spreadsheet tracking, my album files directory tells its own version of a similar story: 1,111 files, 14.6 GB, 9 mix versions, 4 mastering passes, and 317 WAV renders across nearly 3 years of material. It was an iterative process from 2-track demo (v1, Sep 2024) to full assembly (v3, Dec 2024) to final LANDR master (v9, Jun 2025).

The revision chart tells another side of the story. Each bar represents the number of Ableton project saves – every arrangement change, mix tweak, or new idea getting its own version. Silly Goldfish led the way with 32 revisions, while Starry Eyed (the oldest track, and the only one without trumpet) needed the fewest at 12.

Activity peaks by file count: Jun 2024 (159 files — creation burst), Apr 2025 (153 files — album assembly), Jul 2025 (220 files — licensing/distribution prep).

Album Comparison:

Album	Total Hours	Period	Pace
#3 Cosmic Coastlines	125h	19 weeks	6.5h/week
#4 Stardust and Dreams	123h	28 weeks	4.4h/week
#5 Chop Wood, Carry Water	155h	23 weeks	6.7h/week
#6 Forwards & Towards	158h	42 weeks	3.7h/week

Interestingly, Album 6 had the most total hours from my recent album projects, though only by a small margin compared to Album 5. It also had the longest maturation cycle at 42 weeks from start to completion and slowest pace or weekly input. Unlike 2024, when music was one of my main things, music was not my main venture in 2025. I’m glad I managed to complete this album by July nonetheless, since there were a lot of things competing for my attention and time, including client work, startup projects and a lot of travel too.

One of the other gaps leading to less output and less time on my music was a decreasing number of collaborators. An especially acute need was not having an assistant music producer. Personally I love the early creative side and the final finishing phase, but I struggle getting strategic help maturing key aspects of certain songs, like drum grooves, arrangement and jams cleanup and adding counter melodies. As I lean into my next album project and more music making in general, I am more intentionally seeking out and bringing in new collaborators and music makers. I’m also trying to ensure I put in a more sustainable baseline of music making time each and every week too, ideally 3-5 hours per week.

About Stellar Mammals

Stellar Mammals is a creative project centered on creating lofi, instrumental positivity music for any number of situations, moods and selves. It tends to lean into the hip-hop lofi while also offering up ambient and cinematic moments too.

Checkout our recent work:

Along with creating the music and art, I am pretty open about my journey and process. You can read an assortment of notes, blog posts and reflections on music production and creativity on my blog. Start with From Zero to Album: My Personal Music Production Learning Journey.

About the Artists

Stellar Mammals is a Venice Beach-based producer and technologist. His full catalog of music, projects and videos is online at StellarMammals.com. He is available for contact, performance, licensing, collaboration, music production and projects at StellarMammals@gmail.com.

Jacob Burgdorf is an LA-based trumpeter, musician and music teacher, originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Check him out at BurgdorfMusic.com and on Instagram. He is available for contact, performance, teaching, collaboration, and more at jacob.burgdorf@gmail.com.

Got a comment or question? Send me an email or reach out on social media.

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AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): All music was written, composed, performed and produced by the credited artists. Liner notes were written by the credited artists. Album art was from a hiking trip on Catalina Island with a small assist from Midjourney (Generative AI Art Tool) to add more dramatic clouds. AI tools were used to assist with some data analysis and blog post editing.

A Year in Time: 2025 - A Builder's Year

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Time management is a zero-sum game. Every hour invested in one area is an hour divested from something else.

In 2025, I tracked 2,166 hours of my work and personal projects. This is 311 more hours than last year, which was a dramatic increase compared to previous years. I had to make trade-offs, sometimes intentionally though often as a byproduct of time pulled into one area over another.

My 2025 time tracking data tells a story of those tradeoffs, shifts, trends and patterns. My last year saw a surge in building software products and scaling technical development. But even with my overall project and computer time increases, this shift into a “builder mode” resulted in time subtracted from exploration, marketing, creative experimentation and some personal hobbies. You can’t do it all. There are only 24 hours in a day.

Here is a visualization that best summarizes my year in time:

Between 2024 and 2025, ventures surged +60% (1,115h → 1,779h) while Creative & Learning contracted -43% (504h → 285h). The ratio flipped from roughly 70/30 to 82/18. The result: a surge in building, a retreat from creating.

For example, I wrote and published few articles. My music time was cut nearly in half, I worked with fewer music collaborators, and I completed just one album last year, compared to two the previous year. I traveled 50% of the year, which was a significant increase and, even when working remotely, still came at certain costs. For example, my running distance dropped over 50%, though it was replaced by more time outdoors camping and hiking. I maintained my pickleball routine. So overall my exercise was largely stable year-on-year. My sleep varied dramatically throughout the year.

I’ve been more or less continuously tracking my time since 2013. My time logs, along with data I collect on my health, exercise, sleep, screentime and a few other areas, give me an incredible dataset to explore and examine patterns and trends in my focus and attention over the years. While my yearly data reviews are the public manifestation of this reflective practice, the main act comes in the form of my data-driven weekly reviews whose chief benefit is clarity, clarity about what I care about, where my time has gone and where I hope to put my efforts in the days and weeks ahead.

In this post, I want to dive into my year in data from a few different angles. First, I’ll look at the 2025’s biggest pattern and shift, namely towards more hands-on technical software development. Next, I’ll go through my key time indicators from computer usage and screentime as well as a breakdown of key areas, projects and creativity.

The Great Shift: My Builder’s Year

What happens when client work and your own startup are both demanding more? You work more—but something eventually has to give.

Software Development Work: ~1000 hours

Venture Building: Increased by 60% in 2025

I have worked as a technical product manager and data-driven growth marketer at early-stage healthtech and biotech for the last several years, and I continue to lead, design, code, launch and scale product-led organizations. I continue to build and launch my own products too, and I often share open source code. In recent years and on projects, my time tended to get spread across a range of responsibilities spanning strategy, tech, and growth/marketing. This changed in 2025, aka The Builder’s Year.

In 2025, development effort and intensity surged across all ventures, totaling nearly 1,000 hours of coding and software development. Intriguingly, while we often think about AI coding agents as replacing software developers, in my case the rise of these tools and technologies fueled more hands-on development and product building. In fact, in 2025, over half the time in three of my four active ventures was dedicated exclusively to development, signaling a portfolio-wide shift from planning and cross-functional needs to execution.

Here are the numbers:

Area / Category	2024	2025	Change
Ventures (Clock Foundation, AudioCardio, Stay Reflective, Data-Driven You)	1,115 hrs	1,779 hrs	+60%
Creative & Learning (Music, Writing, Studies)	504 hrs	285 hrs	-43%

This software and product development-first shift shows up in every venture:

Data-Driven You: 66% Flutter Dev
AudioCardio: 59% SDK Work
Clock Foundation: 55% Dev Work
Stay Reflective: 46% Flutter Dev

In summary, creative projects (Music, Writing) and formal learning (Studies) declined while technical ventures scaled dramatically. The composition changed: more dev work, less marketing; more finishing, less experimentation.

Resurgence of Personal App Building

Stay Reflective shifted from exploration to execution (+48%), with Flutter dev doubling. Data-Driven You went from dormant (4h) to active development (282h), spawning Goals Vitality and Playback Pilot.

I’ve long been fascinated by the intersection and melding of personal data and self-awareness/self-improvement through technology and apps.

In 2025, I leaned more and more into Flutter development through my client and personal app development work. With the help of Claude Code, in particular, I’ve made a lot of progress on my own apps.

Stay Reflective: From Exploration to Building

About two years ago I launched my first pilot helping people reflect using AI follow-up questions, and since then, this idea has emerged as StayReflective.com, a mobile app and website that has helped thousands of people reflect and navigate life and decisions using a Socratic form of AI.

For Stay Reflective, I’ve integrated and added reflection facilitator tools allowing teachers, coaches and thought leaders to create and scale interactive reflection journeys themselves. I’ve added new and improved design, reduced technical debt and continue to explore how we can use AI to augment our humanness through self-awareness and thoughtful reframing and check-ins.

“Data-Driven You”: The Resurgence of Data-Driven Productivity Apps

“Data-Driven You” is a term I came up with many years ago which I define as leveraging data and AI to empower human growth, change and awareness. I’ve written, blogged and built several experimental projects in this space, including Quantified Self (QS) Ledger, my top open source project—a free tool for data collection and personal data analysis. It’s easier than ever to track aspects of our lives and use that tracking data and our usage of certain tools to create transformative product experiences.

While we often frame AI and technology in general as a form of automation in which human work gets replaced by machines, I believe there is still a lot we can do and create by using technology to empower humans.

How might AI tools enable us to be better and different humans (including such higher cognitive functions like decision-making, self-reflection and even creativity)?

I’m currently building a couple of data-driven “productivity” and reflection-centered apps and products, geared towards working professionals and creatives. Creative work and goals are really hard to start, continue and finish. By nudging and inviting humans to check-in, monitor progress and identify meaningful next actions, I hope to make the pursuit of goals easier, better and more fulfilling.

One example is PlaybackPilot.com, an app I’m building to help music makers finish more music, faster.

Key Time Indicators (KTIs)

Where did my days and time go in 2025?

The short answer: building. I spent 2,013 hours on my computer and logged 2,166 project hours (+17% from 2024 and my highest tracked year ever!).

📊 Total Screen Time: 2517 hrs

Metric	2025	2024	Change
Project Hours (Toggl)	2,166 hrs	1,855 hrs	+17%
Computer Hours (RescueTime)	2,013 hrs	1,756 hrs	+15%
Productivity Ratio	86%	87%	-1%
Phone Time (iPhone)	451 hrs	518 hrs	-13%
Tablet Time (iPad)	53 hrs	271.5 hrs	-80%
Total Screen Time	2,517 hrs	2,546 hrs	-1%
📺 YouTube	136 hrs	242 hrs	-44%

Along with 2000+ hours on my computer, I also spent about 451h on my phone and 53 hours on my iPad (broken part of the year). This translates to 2,517 hours of device screentime or 6 hours and 53 minutes per day.
Despite a +15% increase in computer time, total screen time stayed essentially the same because phone (-13%) and iPad (-80%) dropped significantly.
YouTube dropped 44%—an intentional goal from 2024, finally delivered. That’s 106 fewer hours of passive consumption.

💻 Computer Time: 2,013 hours

RescueTime tracked 2,013 hours across 325 days. Software Development dominated at 30%, with 86% of time rated productive. Note the Q4 surge: Oct-Dec averaged 223h/month vs 138h/month earlier in the year.

325 days tracked (-10 days)
40 computer free days
6.2 hrs/day average (+15% from 5.4 hrs)

Top Computer Usage Categories:

Category	2025	2024	Change
Software Development	604 hrs	244 hrs	+148%
Writing Tools	296 hrs	371 hrs	-20%
Reference & Learning	155 hrs	82 hrs	+89%
Audio Editing	107 hrs	221 hrs	-52%

Key shift: Software Development became #1 category (30% of total), displacing Writing.

🏃 Health & Lifestyle

Metric	2025	2024	Change
🛌 Sleep	7.2 hrs/night	7.4 hrs	-3%
🚶‍♂️Movement and Exercise (Apple Health)	1h 6m / day	1h 5m / day	~
🏸 Workouts (Strava)	104 hrs	93 hrs	+12%
🏃 Weekly Running (Strava)	4.1 km/week	9.3 km/week	-55%
🚲 Cycling (Strava)	405 km	592 km	-32%
🌍 Weeks Traveling	26 (50%)	16 (31%)	+62%

Running and cycling collapsed (-55% and -32%), likely a casualty of traveling half the year.
But total workout time increased (+12%), meaning pickleball and hiking filled the gap.
Sleep held steady at 7.2 hrs/night despite the chaos of 50% travel.

Cognitively-Engaged Project Time: Where 2,166 Hours Went

There are great tools that can passively collect where your device time goes on your computer, phone or tablet, but I personally get a lot of my clarity and focus by manually tracking my project time. I’ve used Toggl to manually log my project time for 8+ years. I account for all of my work hours, creative time and various admin tasks. Each time logged task includes the project I’m working on and a brief note or gist of the activity. This is arguably the goldmine for me in understanding my year or even years now and how and where I’m mostly cognitively engaged.

📁 My Project Time: 2,166 total hours

By Workspace Category:

Workspace	Hours	% of Total
Startup Clients	1,089	50%
My Startup Projects	690	32%
Personal	380	18%

The “Big Picture” of My Project Time

This visual tells the story: ventures dominate while creative work has shrunk to a sliver. Startup Clients alone account for half my tracked time.

Broken down by project categories:

Project Category	Hours (2025)	% (of Total)	Change (YoY)
🚀 Clients	1,089	50%	+30%
🛠️ Stay Reflective	408	19%	+48%
📱 Data-Driven You	282	13%	(new)
🎶 Music	155	7%	-51%
✍️ Writing	80	4%	-43%
📚 Studies	50	2%	flat
📁 Total Project Time	2,166	100%	+17%

How did the big picture of my 2025 look? 82% of tracked time went to ventures. Music and writing hit their lowest levels since I started tracking.

The Quarterly Story: Q4’s Surge

Out of 32 quarters tracked since 2018, Q4 2025 was my highest output quarter ever: 701 project hours. 🥵

The margin is significant. 2018 was a strong year for me; in fact, 3 of the top 5 quarters by Toggl hours are from 2018. But compared to the previous record (Q2 2018 at 562h), Q4 2025 is 139 hours more—a 25% increase. Interestingly, my computer time only increased by 28 hours (651h vs 623h), meaning I got dramatically more project work done per hour of screen time.

My Startup Projects includes Stay Reflective, Data-Driven You and Playback Pilot >

I spent 50% of my weeks in 2025 traveling. At the start of the year, I was forced to travel due to the Los Angeles fires and terrible air quality—a reminder of winters spent living in China. I took several trips to visit family too. In late June, we left Los Angeles and drove north for what became a 3-month Pacific Northwest road trip and experiment in working from nearly anywhere. The trip was wonderful—filled with adventures, new places, nature, and hiking.

Looking at last year’s data and previous years, I now clearly see my own “travel tax”: travel impacts how much time I spend at my computer, if and how I work out, and even my device and YouTube time.

As we wrapped up our last stay in San Luis Obispo in late September, I found myself pulled back into building. This resulted in a dramatic shift—more time on my computer, more project hours, and changes to my sleep patterns.

Here is a snapshot of my year segmented by quarters:

Quarter Summary

Quarter	Hours	Productivity	Travel %	Notable
Q1	552	86%	46%	Costa Rica, LA fires
Q2	466	87%	38%	Lowest output
Q3	446	85%	85%	PNW road trip, lowest running
Q4	701	87%	31%	Record quarter, Stay Reflective surge

Projects by Quarter

Project	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Clients	349h	263h	304h	174h
Stay Reflective	54h	102h	11h	240h
Data-Driven You	11h	—	62h	209h
Music	46h	53h	19h	36h
Writing	46h	11h	17h	5h

So, what changed? How did this Q4 surge happen?

A few factors converged:

The Flutter Convergence. While I’ve spent most of my career using PHP, JavaScript, and Python, I started playing with Flutter in late 2023 and eventually launched Stay Reflective. Over the past two years, I’ve leaned heavily into Flutter development. Now, 3 of my 4 core tech ventures are built (or being built) with Flutter. This created a wonderful convergence where thinking and building one app helps me think and build others. My skilled practice in AI coding and Flutter made for a harmonious, focus and flow loop.
Data-Driven You resurfaces. As we prepared to leave San Luis Obispo, I was pondering how I might turn my weekly review practice into a product. I’ve had this thought many times over the year. This thought had led me to revisit my QS Ledger project earlier in the year and transform it into a Flutter app leveraging self-tracking data I used during my time blog, i.e. Toggl and RescueTime. I called the initial app “Data-Driven You” and was exploring integrations and data visualization. As I was packing up, I had a couple hours to kill and little interest in client work. So, instead I asked myself, what if I mapped my weekly goals to tracked data? What if my goals management came with automatic data checks to see if I was hitting my time input intentions? Sparks flew and a new fire was lit. When we returned to LA in late September, I continued hacking on what became “Goals Vitality”.
Client work naturally slowed. Q4 can go in a few directions for me. Both of my core client projects were closing out the year and were in largely maintenance mode with major initiatives paused until 2026. Client hours dropped from 304h (Q3) to 174h (Q4), as personal projects and startup building adventures ramped up. I didn’t consciously plan this. It just happened as I got pulled deeper into building.
Stay Reflective tech debt sprint. After exploring and pushing on Goals Vitality, I found myself excited to work on Stay Reflective more. Stay Reflective’s development and progress has ebbed and flowed for me, but the spark of Goals Vitality led me to redirect energy back to Stay Reflective. I sorted out massive technical debt and developed the reflection facilitator dashboard and new share features. This alone accounted for 240 hours in Q4. A happy accident of being pulled into a personal interest enabled me to find renewed interest in a partially stalled project.
Playback Pilot emerges. Even though I got obsessed with building it, early product feedback on Goals Vitality revealed several challenges and limitations. Goals span so many domains and can be pursued in many different forms and formats, making it hard to generalize into a singular user experience or product journey. Through testing, interviews and introspection, I determined that in its current form, GV was too ambitious and untethered to a specific use case. If the challenges of goal pursuit are ubiquitous and universal, what was a more specific area of my life I’d want to apply it too? Music! As a music maker, I’ve blogged and developed a host of techniques for improving my music producer skills, and I have released 6 albums to date. This eventually led me to consider combining aspects of Goals Vitality and Data-Driven You to create a progress-making focused, files and project manager app for finishing music that I called Playback Pilot. After 2-3 weeks of flutter dev, I shifted into early marketing efforts and created a landing page and waitlist. It’s been about a month and early interest and signups are looking good at nearly 400 beta interested signups. More updates coming soon!

Q4 2025 lit a spark in me and, upon analysis, a clear pattern emerges: returning home after extensive travel + a convergent tech stack + reduced client load + passionate projects = a perfect storm for personal project building.

So what was the cost of this Q4 product builder focus? Writing collapsed to just 5 hours in Q4 and was largely journaling and some goal planning. Being home led me to tap more into my music collaborators network and music held at 36 hours but still couldn’t compete with the pull of building. I wasn’t consciously sacrificing music, writing or other things. It’s just what happened when I got absorbed in product work.

The Zero-Sum Reckoning

A zero-sum game is a situation where only one player can win and the other player or players must lose. In the purest sense, time management is largely a zero-sum game where one hour spent or invested in one area is an hour not spent elsewhere.

While each week, month or even year I try to think in terms of intentional choices and attempt to balance an equation where I allot enough time to reach certain goals and objectives, it’s often an impossible equation to get right. There is never enough time to do it all, even when I’m not traveling, skipping sleep and glued to my computer. Trade-offs are inevitable and choices are often intuitive and just seem to happen. My 2025 data reveals a story of undeniable tradeoffs:

What Grew	What Contracted
Flutter Dev (Data-Driven You): +185h	Album Work (Music): -75h (-54%)
Dev Work (Client): +179h (+92%)	Jamming (Music): -53h (-40%)
SDK Work (Client): +174h (+269%)	Marketing (Client): -33h (-52%)
Flutter Dev (Stay Reflective): +161h (+571%)	Writing: -60h (-43%)

My weekly patterns paint a pretty obvious picture of the linked patterns:

Key observations:

Computer hours grew in two stages: A gradual rise through summer (30→45 hrs/week), then a steep Q4 surge (45→65+ hrs/week) as I returned home and dove into building.
Sleep retreated dramatically: Started the year at 7.2 hrs, peaked around 7.5 hrs in Q2, then collapsed to under 7 hrs as computer time surged in Q4. The inverse correlation is unmistakable: more building, less sleeping.
Running collapsed mid-year: Peaked at ~15 km/week in March-April, then cratered to near-zero during the Q3 road trip. The slight Q4 recovery never got back above 3 km/week. Travel killed the running habit.
Tasks stayed surprisingly stable: Despite all the volatility in other metrics, weekly tasks completed held steady at 40-50 throughout the year. The what I worked on changed dramatically; the throughput didn’t.

The Creative Pivot: From Writing & Learning to Albums to Apps

I feel priveledged to have spent so much of my life over the last severals year learning and creating. Looking at the trends from 2018 reveals an evolution and several creative shifts.

Studies peaked in 2018-2019 (415h, 443h). This was my “learning to build” phase as well as a deep engagement with quantified self, psychology and goals. That intensive skill acquisition gave way to applied practice. I’m no longer studying technologies; I’m building with them.
I started making Music in 2020 and my engagement peaked at 314h in 2024. My music time dropped to 155h in 2025. Collaboration narrowed from 8+ collaborators in previous year to one (Jacob). The details of my time logs reveal that I spend much less time learning and practices and what remained was the core: jamming and album work.
I love to write but my writing habit has always been volatile. 370h in 2018, 36h in 2022, 208h in 2023, now 80h in 2025. Book projects and technical writing hit zero. What remained was journaling and annual reviews. I barely managed to publish anything in 2025 besides my yearly data reviews and a few book reviews.

Taken at face value, “traditional” creative work, like music and writing, hit historic lows in 2025. I definitely wasn’t as activated in these creative activities. But is building an app less creative than writing a blog post? Is designing a product experience less artistic than mixing an album?

I would argue that the ~1,000 hours I poured into development, product design, and shipping Stay Reflective and Playback Pilot tells a different story. Creativity didn’t retreat in 2025. It changed form.

Creative Form	2024	2025	Change
Traditional (Music, Writing, Studies)	504h	285h	-43%
Technical (App/Product Building)	~400h	~1,000h	+150%
Total Creative Output	~900h	~1,285h	+43%

Put metaphorically, my canvas or medium changed, but my creative impulse and interest didn’t. Building Stay Reflective or Playback Pilot doesn’t require the same problem-solving, aesthetic judgment, and iterative refinement as producing an album. Music is shipped as an .mp3 or .wav and blogs as .md, .doc or .html while apps emerge as .ipa. But in all cases I’m manifesting a tangible artistic creation which I deem essential to a lived human experience.

App-building counts as creative. That said, I do miss the balance and mix of a more complete artistic life. App creation isn’t the same. Music and writing engage different parts of my brain than coding. They are immersive creative experiences that coding or seeing a created app isn’t. The challenge, of course, is the zero-sum equations we must answer day-in, day-out and whether I want to also make space for my writing and music making and how much?

Conclusion: Insights from 2025 & Looking Ahead in 2026

What trajectory have I been on? Does it still align? Do I want to continue, shift, or dramatically change it?

My 2025 data tells a story of peak cognitive engagement: 2,166 project hours, a record Q4, and clear trade-offs. I built more than ever (1,000+ hours of development) but created less in traditional forms (music and writing at historic lows). Traveling 50% of the year brought adventures but came with a measurable “travel tax” on deep work.

Here are six insights from 2025:

Cognitive Time has a speed limit. ~2,200-2,400 hours of focused work per year is my estimated ceiling or speed limit to how much effective time I can deliver in a year, based on eight years of data. In 2025, I put 2,166 hours into projects, which was a peak year for me to date, and Q4 2025 was a peak quarter. The constraint isn’t motivation or discipline; it’s time physics and our brain’s limits.
The Travel Tax is real. 50% of my weeks in 2025 were spent traveling and brought incredible experiences but came with measurable costs: running collapsed (-55%), deep work diminished, and creative projects got squeezed. Travel weeks averaged 5.5 hrs/day on computer vs 7.2 hrs during home weeks. Leaving aside whether a travel week is of vacation, work or hybrid, each travel week costs ~19 hours of cognitive capacity on average. I can’t necessarily work harder or longer, but I can prioritize and design for more time at home.
Convergence creates flow. Q4’s record-breaking output (701h) wasn’t random; it emerged from a specific formula: returning home after travel + a unified tech stack (Flutter) + reduced client obligations + passionate personal projects. When thinking about one app helps you build another, you enter a compounding productivity loop. As someone who tries to accomplish a lot, this idea of convergence and simplification to a unifed goal is a life principle to remember.
AI tools enabled more building, not less. Counter to the “AI replaces developers” narrative (which is also happening), Claude Code and similar tools fueled more hands-on development. My coding hours nearly tripled year-over-year. AI didn’t automate me; it amplified me. This abilility to create more is key but should align with human intentions and human-led creativity.
Creativity pivoted, not retreated. Traditional creative hours (music, writing) hit historic lows. But ~1,000 hours of product building tells a different story. When you count apps as art, my creative output actually increased 43% last year. The canvas changed; the impulse to create didn’t.
Passion pulls harder than discipline pushes. My peak productivity wasn’t driven by forcing myself to work harder. It came from being pulled into projects I cared about (Stay Reflective, Playback Pilot, Goals Vitality). This included deep project engagement on my clients’ healthtech and biotech needs too. Flow states emerge when interest and challenge align with capability.

As I look at 2025 and beyond into the year ahead in 2026, the question for me isn’t really about whether I spent my time right or wrong, well or poorly; but instead reflecting on whether the trajectory of my time is something I align with, still accept or want to change and redirect?

I strongly believe that time management is deeply existential, and that in not choosing, you are still make a choice. All in all, I’m content with the trajectory I’m on. I want to continue to lean into building and software development. I want to stay active, exercise and prioritize sleep and health. I do feel like I neglected or sacrificed some aspects of my creative self in 2025, like music and writing, and I intend to allot more time to those in the year ahead. My creative shift or retreat in 2025 shouldn’t be permanent.

My Intentions for 2026

Shift More into Marketing and Growth Mode: After a year of nearly exclusive focus on product development, I was determined to end 2025 and start 2026 with my attention put into marketing and growth. You can’t just build it; you need to grow through customer-centricity and iteration.
Ship Playback Pilot. My momentum from Q4 continues and I aim to finish and launch a beta soon. I’ll then iterate based on early user engagement and feedback. Let’s see if this product has legs.
Grow Stay Reflective. My pilots over the last two years have been incredible. The “reflection tools for coaches” and dashboard are nearly built and I have several parties interested. Now it’s about finding and getting them into the hands of coaches, teachers, and thought leaders.
Protect creative time. Stay all-in on building, but carve out space for music and writing. Finish Album 7 in Q1—it’s 50-60% done and needs only 60-80 more hours at 5-10h/week. Seek collaborators to stay engaged. The formula is simple: consistent small inputs compound into finished work.
Maintain the travel balance. Even though much of it was forced, 50% of 2025’s travel weeks was likely too much and unsustainable. Instead, let’s aim to travel less at the start of Q1 until I ship certain outcomes. Overall, maybe aim for 30-35% of year spent travel, preserving that spirit of adventure, hiking and new places without the tax on deep work.
Keep Tracking Time & continue the weekly review practice. After 8+ years, the combination of time tracking and weekly reviews lies at the foundation of my productivity and goal pursuit methodology. Tracking brings data and makes all this reflection possible.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to another year of tracking, building, and figuring it out as I go.

Appendix

Creative Deep Dive: Music & Writing

Music (155 hrs, -51% from 2024)

2025 Breakdown:

Music Production Jamming: 26 hrs
Album Reworking: 17 hrs
Jamming with Jacob: 14 hrs
Album Reworking with Jacob: 14 hrs
Jamming with Vocals: 10 hrs

Writing (80 hrs, -43% from 2024)

2025 Breakdown:

Journaling: 20.5 hrs
Year in Time: 10.5 hrs
Year in Creativity: 8 hrs
Travel Diary: 5 hrs
Book Review Blog Post: 3.5 hrs

2025 Published Posts:

Jan 4: Book Notes: The Mind Is Flat
Jan 13: A Year in Book Reading: 2024
Jan 15: A Year in Time: 2024
Jan 24: Book Notes: The Reflective Practitioner
Feb 28: A Year of Creativity: 2024
Sep 4: Book Notes: A Thousand Brains

Tools Used

Toggl - Project time tracking (8+ years)
RescueTime - Computer activity monitoring
Oura Ring - Sleep tracking
Strava - Exercise tracking
Apple Health - Movement and workout data
Weekly Review - Manual data aggregation

Previous Year in Time Posts

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This post was written by me with the aid of AI tools. I leveraged AI systems (Claude) for data processing, analysis, visualization, and initial outline generation. For ideation and big themes identification, I used Claude and Google’s NotebookLM.

A Year in Book Reading: 2025

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The books I read each year often unfold like maps and trails—shaped by the places I visit, the questions I’m wrestling with, and the stories that find me along the way.

2025 was a year of movement. The Los Angeles fires in early January were a massive disruption, and the subsequent air quality pushed me to spend a month in Costa Rica and several weeks in Kansas City. I eventually spent nearly half of 2025 away from home, including a 3+ month road trip through Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. Somewhere between building apps, hiking Pacific Northwest trails, and working from temporary homes, I read 48 books.

It wasn’t just where I read that changed but what I have been reading has changed too. My reading history logs date back over a decade. Looking back, I noticed several shifts. Most notable was a shift from self-optimization and personal development to exploration. For years, as I honed my skills and developed my craft as a product-thinking software engineer, my reading was heavily utilitarian: business books, productivity systems, psychology research, self-improvement.

This year, fiction reached near-parity with nonfiction for the first time. Science fiction became a primary lens for thinking about technology and the future. As my feet and eyes were exploring the outdoors, trail narratives started to dominate my book reading and passages I was highlighting.

Interestingly and somewhat surprising to me was that my average rating on Goodreads hit an all-time high. I may have become a softer critic, but I also think it was because I got better at abandoning books that I wasn’t enjoying. If you don’t like a book, don’t force it; just stop reading it and start reading something else.

The data tells part of the story: fewer books (48 vs. 69 in 2024), but higher satisfaction (4.73 average rating, with 79% receiving 5 stars). Fewer highlights (1,156 vs. 3,056), but a deeper engagement with narratives and plots rather than extractable facts and topics I should learn and master.

For the past five years or so, I’ve published an annual reading review as part of my “year in data” series. In this post, I’ll share my favorite books from 2025, explore the patterns in my reading data, and reflect on what these shifts in my reading history might mean. I’ll set a few intentions for the year ahead. Hopefully you’ll find a few books worth adding to your own list.

The Numbers: 48 Books and 15,232 Pages

In 2025, I read 48 books totaling 15,232 pages. I averaged about one book per week and roughly 317 pages per book.

Longest Book: The Dragon Republic (654 pages)
Average book length: 317 pages
Highest rated year ever: 4.73 average rating
79% of rated books received 5 stars

Year on Year Changes: 21 fewer books compared to 2024

For a host of reasons, 2023 and 2024 were huge years of reading for me, and I was unlikely to come anywhere close the previous year’s 70 books per year count. For 2025 I had set the reasonable goal of a book a week or 52 books per year, and, in spite of a slow start in January, for most of the year I was on pace to hit that target.

As my workload increased professionally and I went deep into software development and “vibe” coding, my late night book reading time got supplanted by app development. Being immersed in building was amazing, and I felt less and less of a pull towards new topics and explorations and more and more into building. Generally travel is a great time for me to read, but since a large part of this year’s travel involved driving, I overall spent less time on my kindle. When I did read, especially at the end of the year, it was mostly fiction aimed at relaxing and exploring immersive future, sci-fi worlds.

The Patterns:

Rise of Fiction Reading: Shift in Genre Preferences

One of the most striking patterns I noticed in my book reading this year and over the past couple years was the continued shift towards reading more and more fiction. In fact, in 2025, 46% of my books read were fiction which marks the highest percentage in my recent documented reading history dating back to 2013.

Here is the breakdown:

Year	Fiction %
2019	15%
2020	11%
2021	20%
2022	37%
2023	38%
2024	36%
2025	46%

There are a host of factors likely contributing to this change. Between 2015 and 2020, my reading and timelogs show a marked focus on learning and personal development. This coincided with a change in my non-computer screen time and YouTube usage too. Over time I have decreased my time spent on learning overall and less and less time reading nonfiction, which is likely a byproduct of increased daytime work and project commitments.

Here is the breakdown:

Period	Fiction %	Context
2019-2020	11-15%	Almost exclusively nonfiction
2021	20%	First signs of shift
2022-2024	36-38%	Steady increase
2025	46%	Near parity

2025 marks the first time where I’m reading nearly the same amount of fiction as nonfiction. I attribute some of this shift to maturity of work skills and personal life management skills. I’m less and less in need of these so-called “self-help” books to guide, orient and aid me figuring out my core purpose, habits and time management.

Though it’s a separate topic, I also think my learning has shifted into using and leveraging AI to explore new topics and accelerate how and what I learn, leading to less need for seeking out books for most of what I learn. Interestingly I’m also starting to use AI (in particularly Google Gemini’s Guide Learning Mode or NotebookLM) as a companion while I read certain history books, enabling me to contextualize and dive into parts of stories a book may not cover, are confusing or simply I wish to revisit and refresh my memory.

Book reading can be a portal to exploring self and society. Overall, with nearly 13 years of reading history, I am definitely due for a deep dive and some data analysis into the changes in my reading history and other data points, along with hopefully a public blog post.

Top Genres in 2025: Science Fiction, Science, History and Biography/Memoirs

I’m a strong believer in reading widely and across multiple genres. One my intentions each new year is to ensure I read a wide variety of genres. I also try to read female authors and international writers too. I try to read at least a few books on history, philosophy and science every year as well as a mix of books on productivity, habits or mental health.

Over the years, on the nonfiction side, I tend to read a mix of genres spanning philosophy, science, history and more. During previous years, I left like there were a ton of books on habits, goals, brain and psychology that I just had to read, but over last couple years I feel like I somewhat “graduated” from some of those books, since a lot of those books tend to use the same studies and core ideas but in slight different configurations. I wouldn’t exactly say I am burned out on “pop psychology” books per se, but I am definitely more selective.

Interestingly, this year saw marked increase in travel books, especially hiking related travel books. This isn’t surprising in view of how much travel, hiking and camping I did last year, including three months in the Pacific Northwest and long treks in and around the Pacific Crest Trail and Cascade Mountain Ranges.

I generally believe this shift in genre preferences wasn’t so much a conscious decision. It emerged organically as I found myself drawn more and more towards science fiction’s big questions and to novels that explore the human condition. This feels especially true and necessary in view of how rapidly certain areas of technology have been changing so quickly in past couple years due to the rise of Generative AI and Agentic tools.

Book Reading Highlights: 1,156 Total in 2025

Even though I finished 48 books, I actually “nibbled” on many other books and collected highlights in 57 total books. This higher count of books highlighted than books read is indicative of a willingness to try a bunch of books as well as being ok with not finishing too. As a primarily a Kindle ebook reader, I collected a total of 1,156 highlights in 2025, which was a significant decrease from 2024’s 3,056 highlights.

Interestingly I started the year in January with a lot of nonfiction books and lots of highlights, but overall the year saw a slow decrease. I had a two-month peak in August and September, which lined up with travels in the Pacific Northwest. October to December saw a dramatic drop that coincided with a big product development push and an increase in fiction reading. This was tied with an end of the year push to try and finish as many books as I could to hit my 52 books read yearly goal (which I missed by 2 books this year!).

Top Numbers:

20.3 average highlights per book
96.3 monthly average
219 most in a month
6 least in a month

Top Highlighted Books:

129 in Rethinking Consciousness
102 in A Thousand Brains
82 in The Origin of Buddhist Meditation
78 in A River Lost
67 in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned
58 in The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey

Such a dramatic decrease in highlights year-on-year begs the question of what changed? Was I less engaged with what I was reading? Highlights have historically been a strong proxy for me about my engagement on a topic and its importance for my personal development. In past years, I heavily highlighted books on running, training and sleep, which were indicators of topical importance to me on a health and training level. Like I hinted at early, I’d attribute this shift to a change in genre preferences and reading more for enjoyment as well as my increased utilization of AI for learning and discovery. As I’ve shifted more towards fiction, it makes sense to see less and less highlights.

All things considered, in view of how important learning and thinking is during this period of change, I likely want to integrate personal development and thinking books into my 2026 reading list. I view book reading and a few books in particular as highly formative and even transformative in my life.

Thematic Threads: Trails and Consciousness

Looking back at 2025’s reading, two themes kept emerging across multiple books:

Thematic Thread #1: Trails and Journeys

I definitely didn’t set out in late 2024 or early 2025 to read about trails, but this was clearly one of my top recurring themes in 2025: pioneer trails, hiking trails, the trails animals make, and even the neural pathways that form our thoughts. For example:

The Oregon Trail (Rinker Buck)
Wild (Cheryl Strayed)
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk (Ben Montgomery)
On Trails (Robert Moor)
Pacific Crest Trail guides

As I was exploring Oregan and experiencing transcendent moments hiking in Catalina Island, Northern California and especially in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, the idea and presence of trails were a big part of my world. Trails essentially connect two different places and, for both humans and animals, generally form for pragmatic needs, including connecting resources, communities and places. The Oregon Trail was the primary conduit in the migration to the Western edge of the United States. Technology amplifies the speed and practicality of these connected places through roads and even information superhighways.

Over time, the nature of trails has become less about practicalities and more about immersing us and connecting us with nature. As society got increasingly urbanized and less and less physically active and connected to nature, trails and trail building emerged as a counteracting force. It led to this return to nature, and hiking trail serve as a way to experience nature through movement. I feel incredibly grateful for the time I spent last year on a host of trails and for trail builders and maintainers that make it possible. I’m excited to hopefully hike and visit more trails around the world in the months and years ahead.

Thematic Thread #2: Consciousness and Mind

If you asked me to recommend one book or even a class of books that I think would be most transformative, I’d recommend you read books on neurology and brain sciences. As brain-bound humans, understanding how our brains work and function can have a profound impact on personal development and even our biologically bound lived experience.

While I read more books on the brain in 2024 than 2025. Several “consciousness” books, both nonfiction and fiction, all approached the same question from different angles: What is awareness, and why do we have it?

Several books tapped into this theme for me:

Blindsight and Echopraxia (Peter Watts)
Rethinking Consciousness (Michael Graziano)
A Thousand Brains (Jeff Hawkins)
Bewilderment (Richard Powers)

While science books on consciousness were the most grounded, science fiction books like Blindsight,Echopraxia, and Bewilderment pushed me the most to think and imagine the nature of our brains at the intersection of technology and even alien intelligence. For example, what if intelligence in the universe lacks consciousness or even language but can still achieve technological superiority? What if our human form of knowledge and consciousness doesn’t “win out”?

Books That Matter: My 2025 Book Recommendations

Top Writers of 2025:

Check out Goodreads for a list of all of the books I read in 2025. Below are a few recommendations on my favorite books with quotes and thoughts.

(If you are interested in more book recommendations, check out my Recommended Books page where I keep a running list of my all-time favorites.)

Favorite “Made Me Think” Nonfiction Book: A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins

“The cells in your head are reading these words.”

Why doesn’t your brain get overwhelmed when you’re at a noisy party? How is it that so many competing signals resolve into one coherent world rather than a cacophony of competing interactions and interpretations?

In A Thousand Brains, neuroscientist and former tech executive Jeff Hawkins makes a compelling case for a conception of the brain that includes thousands of “mini-brains.” At the center of this story is the the neocortex, which he describes as “the organ of intelligence” and possessing “[a]lmost all the capabilities we think of as intelligence—such as vision, language, music, math, science, and engineering.” Inside the neocortext, Hawkins present a compelling theory of the brain built from thousands of nearly identical “columns,” each containing a complete model of the world.

A sample of thought-provoking quotes:

“Only thing in the universe that knows the universe exists is the three-pound mass of cells floating in our heads.”
“The brain’s model of the world includes a model of our self. This leads to the strange truth that what you and I perceive, moment to moment, is a simulation of the world, not the real world.”
“If you connect a cortical region to eyes, you get vision; if you connect the same cortical region to ears, you get hearing; and if you connect regions to other regions, you get higher thought, such as language.”
“We realized that the brain’s model of the world is built using maplike reference frames. Not one reference frame, but hundreds of thousands of them.”

This book and theory behind is paradigm-shifting reading into how our intelligence works and likely how future intelligences including AI work too.

👀 Check out my personal review and summary in How Intelligence Emerges from a Thousand Brains: Jeff Hawkins’ Model of the Neocortex.

Favorite Sci-Fi Book: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

“It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.”

Can a piece of world-altering technology be used to change a political system? Or reinforce an existing world order?

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite fantasy and sci-fi writers. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, published in 1974, is a fascinating and immersive read that offers a modern and thought-provoking take on what it means to live together and how technology or a scientific breakthrough might alter a political order. The main protagonist Shevek is a physicist in an anarchist society attempting to develop a revolutionary and paradigm-shifting theory of temporality.

The story takes place on Anarres and Urras which are twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti and are markedly different political and societal structures. The moon, Anarres, is a harsh environment and operates a anarchist society with a deep collective, worker-centered community. By contrast, Urras is an capitalistic, technologically and materially advanced society but is also a largely patriarchal and even authoritarian system. As he develops his work, Shevek finds himself blocked by the sheer challenge and by rivals, and he must travel and bridge these two worlds as well as connect with the greater universe of space-faring societies beyond. The tension between Shevek’s ideologism and ego/drive towards achievement particularly resonated with me.

This book is political philosophy embedded in a page-turning wok of science fiction and is part of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, a loosely associated group of books based on the premise that humans didn’t evolve on Earth but from the peaceful and ancient planet Hain that now surveils and guides other civilizations. I’ve read nearly all of the books in Cycle and especially recommend this book along with Left Hand of Darkness.

Selected Quotes:

“To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.”
“If you can see a thing whole, it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…. But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
“We’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.”
“But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life.”
“Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”

2nd Favorite Sci-Fi Book: The Humans by Matt Haig

“To be a human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly, over and over, until the end of time.”

This is a strange, perspective-shifting novel about an alien who was transported into and takes over a human body. Tasked with an important objective, this alien-embedded-human slowly learns to appreciate and understand what makes humanity beautiful, interesting and unique, in spite of all its contraditions and limitations. This book is more fantasy than traditional space-faring sci-fi and takes a heart-felt exploration of what is means to find what is meaningful and true, even when it isn’t your “home”.

Selected Quotes:

“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for.” – David Foster Wallace
“Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite amount of solar systems.”
“The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfilment was a shortage not just of time but of imagination.”
“The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.”
“There is a sunset, stop and look at it. Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite.”

Honorable Mention Sci-Fi Favorites

“What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?” — Blindsight

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.” —Aldous Huxley

Blindsight by Peter Watts - Hard SF exploring consciousness and stretched my ability to follow some definition-breaking formations of what is life and what an alien life might look like, act, etc.
Scorpio by Marko Kloos (Book 1 in Frontlines: Evolution Series) - Super fun read involving a distant colony and their quest to survive underground as supersized aliens take over their planet.
The Toll by Neal Shusterman - Lovely third and final novel in Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe trilogy where humans have ended death and given most control and power to a benevolent AI.
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin - A bit dated at time, this book has quirky archeological, neocolonial edge.
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park - One of the more fantastical books I’ve read in years. This book spans multiple countries and time periods in this Korea-based genre bender.
August Kitko and the Mechas from Space by Alex White - Fun read about the near end of days and rise of a piano-playing human turned battle robot driver.

Favorite Novel/Fiction: The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

“In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone.”

This is another “instant classic” for me from Kristin Hannah with beautiful writing and imagery. The main female protagonist and her family move to Alaska to escape the husband’s past and mental health challenges. They must learn to adjust and survive in Alaska’s harsh climate and unique neighbors.

This book stands out through its vivid imagery of Alaska through the seasons, a core plot and the overall evolution of a sleepy town into a tourist hub.

Selected Quotes:

“Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.”
“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”
“She lifted her camera and minimized her view of the world. It was how she managed her memories, how she processed the world. In pictures. With a camera, she could crop and reframe her life.”
“Books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself.”

Honorable Mention: Magic Hour by Kristin Hannah - mute girl arrives myseriously at a remote town and two sisters (police chief and psychologist) must heal her and uncover what happened to her.

2nd Favorite “Made Me Think” Nonfiction Book: On Trails by Robert Moor

“To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of a path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line.”

In year spent immersed in nature and trails, Robert Moor’s philosophical exploration of trails was one of those books that made me think and see the world differently. I originally thought this book was centered on trail builders, but in fact this book takes a very expansive view looking at trails from Ediacaran traces dating back 500 million years ago to modern hiking paths. The book weaves in stories from his hikes along the Appalachian trail and shares an inspiring look at why animals and humans have used trails and where trails exist now.

Selected Quotes:

“On a trail, to walk is to follow.”
“The trail had taught me that good designs—like age-old tools and classic folktales—are trail-wise: They fulfill a common need by balancing efficiency, flexibility, and durability.”
“The reality of how most trails form—collectively, organically, without the need of a designer or a despot—has been increasingly apparent to scientists for centuries, but has remained invisible to most of us for far too long.”
“Why do we, as animals, uproot ourselves rather than maintaining the stately fixity of trees? Why do we venture into places where we were not born and do not belong? Why do we press forward into the unknown?”
“‘Truth has no path,’ [Krishnamurti] wrote. ‘All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing.’”

Favorite History Book: Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery

“The forest is a quiet place and nature is beautiful. I don’t want to sit and rock. I want to do something.”

In a year spent hiking and camping and reading several books and memoirs on the topic, this biography of Emma Gatewood, a 67-year-old grandmother who became the first woman to solo thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, was one of the most inspiring. Estranged from abusive husband, Grandma Gatewood spent her whole life working and caring for her family but was also seeking chances to go on long hikes and treks. After stumbling upon a National Geographic magazine on the newly “finished” Appalachian trail (AT), Gatewood decides to try and complete the entire 14-state, 2000-mile trail. Originally conceived as largely multi-day or day hikes, AT at the time proves less finished and more challenging than she expected. Equipped with a simple rucksack and basic tennis shoes, her tale is filled with courage and misadventures as she traverses from Georgia’s Springer Mountain to Maine’s Katahdin. Inspiring stuff.

Selected Quotes:

“Why? Because it was there, she’d say. Seemed like a good lark, she’d say.”
“Not lost, Emma said. Just misplaced.”
“Most people today are pantywaist.”
“Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche said, ‘Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.’”
“Anthropologists estimate that early man walked twenty miles a day.”
“She planted her seventh pair of tennis shoes on the rocky top of the precipice, alone. She had lost thirty pounds. Her glasses were broken; her knee was sore.”

Honorable Mention History Books

The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck - Another modern pioneer spirit, Rinker Buck and his brother retrace the Oregon Trail by mule.
- From The Oregon Trail: “The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history.”
- “Two great impulses of the American experience—moving from farm to farm along the frontier, and building canals—resulted in the mythic prairie wagon that opened the West.”
A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia by Blaine Harden - Traversing the border between Oregon and Washington and snaking north to Idaho, a history of the Columbia river’s transformation from wild to tamed powerhouse
Krakatoa by Simon Winchester - page-turning history about a volcanic eruption that changed history and theory

Fantasy/Literary Fiction Favorite: Bewilderment by Richard Powers

“The universe is a living thing, and my son wants to take me for a quick look around while there’s still time.”

Mixing astronomy, neuroscience, and the simple act of imagining other worlds together, Richard Powers writes pointedly about a father and son coping with grief and their changing world. Set to the backdrop of Earth falling apart due to ecological disasters and climate change, the pair navigate each other and these changes highlighted by camping trips. At its core his a boy struggling with himself and his mind, and a father desperate to help, even seeking the most cutting edge technologies and doctors. The story is both personal and planetary as we see tragedy unfold throughout. Wonderful, poetic read.

Selected Quotes:

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.” —Rachel Carson
“We live suspended between love and ego.”
“Earth had two kinds of people: those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.”
“Sagan: We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”
“Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war.”

Absent Categories: What Didn’t I Read? What should I read more of?

All-Time Top Genres:

Compared to my 2024 book review, I found it notable some favorite categories that were absent in 2025, including:

Creativity – No standout books on creative process or artistic practice
Philosophy – While I read four philosophy-adjacent books (including Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned), none captured my attention the way previous years’ philosophy reads did
Startup/Business/Economics – A category that dominated my reading from 2016-2019 was almost entirely absent, though you could argue the biography on Sam Altman would likely fit here.
Health Science – After years of deep dives into sleep, nutrition, and performance optimization, this category went quiet and likely a category of books I should increase soon.

These weren’t intentional gaps. Looking back, I think the “explorer” mode that defined 2025 naturally pulled me toward narrative—fiction, trail memoirs, regional history—and away from the instrumental reading that characterized earlier years. When you’re hiking through the Columbia River Gorge or reading about pioneer wagons on the Oregon Trail, productivity and organizational frameworks are not generally the topics you turn to.

But I’ll admit that gaps reveal something. The absence of creativity books during a year when I was actively building apps and making music suggests I was doing creative work rather than reading about creative work. The absence of health science during a physically active year of hiking and travel might reflect the same pattern. Academic and theoretical studies just can’t replace lived experience and embodied practices theoretical study.

Still, in view of wanting to consciously weave these topics back into my life and thinking, they are categories I wish to bring back in 2026. The goal isn’t to return to full-on optimization or life hacking but to invite curiosity and exploratory reading into core fields in my life, like health, creativity and venture-building.

Conclusion and Reflection

Along with empowering me to explore and immerse myself in a host of worlds and landscapes, my 2025 book reading exposed me to many new topics and ideas. Looking back at 2025’s reading, I see less “optimization” and more exploration. Fewer business books, more fiction. Fewer highlights, and, to some extent, more reading for pure enjoyment. The longer-term shift from 11% fiction (2019) to 46% fiction (2025) further reveals how my relationship with reading has evolved.

After 48 books, what stays with me isn’t necessarily the nonfiction takeaways I highlighted (though Hawkin’s Thousand Brains Theory comes close), but the fictional worlds I inhabited: Le Guin’s anarchist moon, R.F. Kuang’s shaman-powered medieval China, Watts’ nightmare spaceship, Hannah’s frozen Alaska, and Moor’s ancient trails.

Interested in reading more? The best reading advice I can give: read books about topics that interest you, abandon reading books you aren’t enjoying, carve out an end-of-day reading habit (to replace phone or screentime).

Best of luck and happy reading!

What was your favorite recent read? Or what’s another book I should read based on the ones here?

Got a comment? Send me an email.

FYI – If you are interested in more detailed data logging and tracking practices, I log my reading with Goodreads, Kindle and Instapaper. Core data collection and visualization powered by QS Ledger.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This post was written by me with the aid of AI tools. I leveraged an AI system (Claude) for help on data processing, analysis and visualization of Goodreads and Kindle clippings as well as an initial outline and top quotes. I used an AI system (Google’s NotebookLM & Gemini) to generate visual elements which I edited and refined.

How Intelligence Emerges from a Thousand Brains: Jeff Hawkins' Model of the Neocortex

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps it’s because your brain isn’t one singular processor at all, but thousands of tiny “mini-brains” working in parallel, weaving their independent models into the unified experience of perception.

A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins proposes a new theory of intelligence centered around the Thousand Brains Theory which posits that our neocortex contains thousands (approximately 150,000) cortical columns in humans. Each cortical column is independently building a complete model of the world using sensory-motor input and map-like reference frames. These columns then engage in a voting process that ultimately creates our unified perception of reality and sense of self.

I read the book A Thousand Brains several months ago, and it remains one of the most interesting and impactful books about the brain I’ve read in years.

In this book review, I want to focus on a short explanation of the book’s core thesis and explore two or three interconnected concepts:

Cortical Columns are the Fundamental “Microcircuit” of Higher Order Intelligence
Reference Frames as the Foundation of Knowledge (and mental movement as key to learning and understanding)

Below are my explorations of these key concepts, some of my takeaways as well as additional quotes and notes.

Thousand Brains Theory’s Central Thesis: Independent Mini-Brains Operating in Parallel

Our neocortex is the outermost layer of the brain, responsible for higher-level functions like sensory perception, cognition, learning and language.

The Thousand Brains Theory contrasts with the traditional hierarchical view of the neocortex and argues that intelligence isn’t a single entity but an emergent property of many parallel processes. Instead of one giant computer knowing and deciding, our brain’s intelligence depends on “mini computers” or “mini-brains” working together.

Knowledge is not stored in one specific location or part of the brain, but distributed across thousands of these cortical columns. Think of a cortical column like a tiny processor chip that runs its own version of reality. Each is capable of learning and simulating a predictive model through its inputs and within a specific reference frame.

Strikingly, even though we don’t perceive it, the knowledge of any particular item, event, or idea is therefore represented by multiple, complementary models at the same time and within a small fraction of the total number of columns.

Hawkins writes, “Cortical columns create reference frames for every object they know. Reference frames are then populated with links to other reference frames.” (p. 88). Put another way, each mini brain is perceiving, learning and deciding on its own while also within a grouping of other mini brains doing the same.

So, if we have so many mini-brains, why don’t we perceive multiple brains, sensors, etc? Why isn’t perception noisy and chaotic dissonance? Hawkins posits that these independent sensory-motor modeling systems work together through a voting mechanism to create our perception and understanding of the world. This suggests a more decentralized form of intelligence wherein truly intelligent machines must learn models of the world to adapt and solve problems.

My Quick Take Reviews

I rated this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? I would definitely recommend this book. In fact, I’d rank this one of the top books I’ve read about the brain and mind in several years.
Would I read it again? Potentially. There is too much to digest and understand in this book to fully digest in a single reading. I wouldn’t necessarily read it again anytime soon, but I will keep an eye on this researcher and writer and his research group for future work in academic papers and book format.

Cortical Columns: Fundamental “Microcircuit” of Higher Order Intelligence

First identified in 1957, Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle proposed that the fundamental unit of the neocortex is the cortical column, a roughly one square millimeter area that extends through the entire thickness of the neocortex. Structurally, a cortical column consists of a group of neurons shaped like a column and positioned perpendicular to the cortical surface.

SOURCE: p48 of Ebook: Insights from the brain, the road towards Machine Intelligence

Cortical columns are proposed to be the fundamental microcircuits for cognition in neocortex. The fundamental concept is that the neocortex is not a single, unified processor, but rather a collection of approximately 150,000 independent sensory-motor modeling systems, each located within a cortical column. Each operates in parallell and coordinate high-order intelligence including learning, prediction and decision-making.

These columns work semi-autonomously and their collective activity, potentially through a “democratic consensus” or voting mechanism, leads to our overall perception and understanding of the world.

Rather than evolving something new, the evolution of our human intelligence involved duplication and scaling up a network of mini-brains, which allowed human neocortex to “increase in size by almost 3-fold over just the last 3 million years.” As Hawkins puts it, “The neocortex got big by making many copies of the same thing: a basic circuit.” (p. 29).

Reference Frames as the Foundation of Knowledge

Beyond just positing the neurological mechanisms, Hawkins attempts to explain how cortical columns in our neocortex model perception, represent knowledge and think. He posits that all knowledge in the neocortex is stored within map-like structures called reference frames.

Reference frames are used by each cortical column to learn the structure of objects, represent locations, make predictions, plan actions, and even understand abstract concepts. Reference frames help the brain organize knowledge. and, according to the Thousand Brains Theory, are the universal organizing principle for all knowledge.

Based on the sources provided, here is an explanation of how reference frames help the brain organize knowledge, using the specific example of a coffee cup.

The brain organizes all knowledge using reference frames. A reference frame is like an invisible, three-dimensional grid that the brain attaches to objects and concepts. This grid provides structure, allowing the brain to learn the locations of features relative to each other, which is essential for understanding an object’s shape, planning movements, and making predictions. Thinking itself is described as a form of movement, where your brain activates successive locations within these reference frames.

To illustrate this concept, the book uses the example of a coffee cup. When you first encounter a coffee cup, your brain learns a model of it. This isn’t just a list of facts about the coffee cup (like color, funny quote on side, shape, etc.); it’s a structural representation built upon a reference frame that is attached to the cup itself.

Your neocortex through cortical columns processing sensory information establishes a reference frame that is fixed to the cup. You can think of this like an invisible 3D grid surrounding the cup that allows you to mentally rotate the cup. As you interact with the cup in the real world (or mentally through imagination), your brain learns what features exist at specific locations and the overall reference frame of that cup updates and changes. You often can already imagine the backside of that cup even before turning and seeing it. As you manipulate it, your brain creates a three-dimensional shape and structure.

Mental and physical movement might even be a core component of learning and thinking. According to the Thousand Brains Theory, learning and perception are active, sensory-motor processes. Cortical columns learn models of the world by observing how sensory inputs change as we move and interact with our environment. Predictive modeling depends on mental movement, and Hawkins argues that thinking itself is a form of moving through these reference frames.

Beyond physical, real world objects, reference frames can also apply to abstract concepts like government and democracy, because the brain arranges all knowledge using reference frames, not just knowledge about things we can directly touch and see. Obviously the reference frame for democracy cannot correspond to the same one as three-dimensional physical objects, like a coffee cup. You can’t make a simple image of democracy in the same way you can for a cup. That said, democracy and other abstract concepts are more than just a random collection of facts. They also entail relationships, organization, structures and modeling like all knowledge.

How you model, organize and represent concepts matters. Learning what is democracy, software engineering or geology of mountains is more than simply knowing certain facts; it requires the right framework or reference frame for organizing facts, ideas and concepts coherently together. Different people might organize and think about democracy in different ways. For example, one might think of it in terms of a historical timeline or another might interconnect with other concepts like fairness, rights or voting. Interestingly, becoming an expert in a field requires discovering a good framework to represent data and facts and to formulate actions, decisions and solutions.

Additional Book Notes & Quotes

Neocortex: The Engine of Intelligence: “The neocortex is the organ of intelligence. Almost all the capabilities we think of as intelligence—such as vision, language, music, math, science, and engineering—are created by the neocortex.” (p. 21)
“All mammals, and only mammals, have a neocortex. The human neocortex is particularly large, occupying about 70 percent of the volume of our brain.” (p. 20)
Prediction: The Core Function of Intelligence: Our brain constantly makes predictions based on past experience.
“My brain, specifically my neocortex, was making multiple simultaneous predictions of what it was about to see, hear, and feel.” (p. 36)
“Prediction was a ubiquitous function of the neocortex.” (p. 37)
“A dendrite spike occurs when a set of synapses close to each other on a distal dendrite get input at the same time, and it means that the neuron has recognized a pattern of activity in some other neurons.” (p. 51)
The Role of Movement in Learning: Intelligence and understanding arise through movement and interaction with the world.
“Thinking occurs when the neurons invoke location after location in a reference frame, bringing to mind what was stored in each location.” (p. 75)
“Vision is an interactive process, dependent on movement.” (p. 92)
Knowledge is Distributed Across the Brain: “Our knowledge of something is distributed among thousands of cortical columns.”* (p. 98)
“Complex systems work best when knowledge and actions are distributed among many, but not too many, elements.” (p. 97)
Collaborative Process of the Neocortex: Even though neocortex has thousands of models distributed across cortical columns, they constantly communicate and vote on perceptions, leading to stability, unity and consistency of our perceptual experience of the world (and of our self).
“The input to the neocortex is not like a photograph. It is a highly distorted and incomplete quilt of image patches. Yet we are unaware of the distortions and missing pieces; our perception of the world is uniform and complete.” (p. 94)
“The voting mechanism of the Thousand Brains Theory explains why we have a singular, non-distorted perception.” (p. 107)
Human Uniqueness in Language and Abstract Thought: “Our ability to see and hear is similar to a monkey’s, but only humans use complex language, make complex tools such as computers, and are able to reason about concepts such as evolution, genetics, and democracy.” (p. 71)
Learning and Remember a Model of the World = Conscious Systems “At some point in the future, we will accept that any system that learns a model of the world, continuously remembers the states of that model, and recalls the remembered states will be conscious.” (p. 138)
Brain Uploading: Brain uploading entails recording all the details of your brain and then using them to simulate your brain on a computer. “The fact is, if we want to upload you, and we want the uploaded brain to be normal, then we have to upload the entire brain, everything.” (p. 192) The process involves making a map of every neuron and every synapse and then recreating all of this structure in software.
Uploaded brain will be a separate person or self: “‘Uploading your brain’ is a misleading phrase. What you have really done is split yourself into two people.” (p. 194) A mental and intellectual “you” will become separate from your biological body such “you” could then live in the computer.
Genes vs Knowledge: Which is our future?
Superiority of knowledge over genes: Genes are simply molecules that replicate. There is no overarching goal beyond replication. By contrast, knowledge has both a direction and an end goal.
“We have the opportunity to choose between a future where the primary driver is the creation and dissemination of knowledge and a future where the primary driver is the copying and dissemination of genes.” (p. 219)
“Our superior intelligence is unique, and as far as we know, the human brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the broader universe exists.” (p 232)
Wiki Earth, an “estate plan for humanity” Goal is preserve human knowledge for potential future intelligent beings, because knowledge is rare and valuable. The aim would be to “preserve our knowledge in a more permanent form, one that could last tens of millions of years,” like Wikipedia floating in space.
“Reverse engineering the brain and understanding intelligence is, in my opinion, the most important scientific quest humans will ever undertake.” (p. 229)

What I got out of this book?

While the science of the human brain remains deeply mysterious, this book made me rethink many of my commonly held understandings about how our brains work and what intelligence entails. Specifically, it emphasized that the brain is not a single centralized processor but a network of thousands of models working together. If true (and admittedly it is a bit difficult to experientially validate), this is a pretty revolutionary model of intelligence.

I personally find the idea that we are a collection of mini-brains fascinating. It means that our perceptions of the world get sensed, experienced and processed via multiple cortical columns at once and our first-person subjective experiences are built up from multiple angles and sources and distributed across thousands of complementary models in different columns. Our singular, unified experience is actually a consensus reached by these thousands of columns “voting” on what they are sensing.

This decentralized approach corresponds with my long-held belief in multiple selves, our evolving core identity and personality, and possiblity of personal transformation and change too. Underlying our brain’s flexibility and robustness is ambiguity. Our inputs and experiences are ambiguous and sensed through several mini-brains. In turn our knowledge and understanding depends on learning, creating and manipulating reference changes.

Ultimately, this perspective reminds us that we never perceive or experience the real world directly but instead we experience a simulation of the world created by the predictive models in our head. A concept repeated in The Mind Is Flat by Nick Chater. Our brain is a simulation and prediction machine. It is constantly making thousands of predictions about what it will see, hear, and feel, and we only become consciously aware of this process when a prediction is wrong. This continuous, predictive modeling is what allows the brain to learn, adapt, and create the flexible intelligence and selves that makes us human.

A Concluding Thought: How do we as individuals and societies overcome our “old brain”?

Beyond the core ideas and fascinating science, Hawkins also explores several ethical, philosophical, and even futurist ideas. I was particularly struck by his framing of the conflict between our two brains, namely our older, so-called “reptilian” brain and our more recent neocortex.

As he puts it, “We human mammals are the victims of a recurrent dispute: a tussle between the old reptilian brain, which unconsciously runs the survival machine, and the mammalian neocortex sitting in a kind of driver’s seat atop it”. These two brains serve different purposes with the old brain serving reproduction and selfish genes and the new brain serving knowledge. He believes that the battle between genes and knowledge defines our era.

I’d argue this internal conflict is responsible for many of our personal and societal struggles. For example, our neocortex, informed by research, doctors and books, might understand that eating a sugary cake is unhealthy. But our old brain, which evolved over millions of years when sugar was scarce and valuable for survival, simply screams, “Cake. Want cake. Mmmm cake. Gimme”. In this battle, the old brain, which evolved to serve the primal drives, often wins.

Sadly, this same dynamic seems to be playing out on a global scale with issues like climate change, epidemics and even racism. Our neocortex can learn a model of the world and predict the long-term consequences of our actions, but it is often overpowered by the old brain’s fears, pleasure-seeking and drive to replicate. Hawkins also highlights our old brain’s susceptibility to false beliefs including racism and xenophobia.

So, how do we overcome this? Hawkins suggests that humanity faces a profound choice: do we want our future to be driven by the processes that got us here—natural selection and the drive of selfish genes—or by intelligence and its desire to understand the world?. He argues that our newly emerged intelligence, residing in the neocortex, gives us the unique ability to defy the dictates of our selfish genes and our old brain. The key seems to be for the “new brain” to find clever ways to outsmart the “old brain.” He cites examples like birth control and advocates for education, including learning about how our brains work.

While I’m a bit skeptical that we will ever fully overcome the limitations of our older brain without radical and profound transformation on societal and even neurological levels, it is a noble ideal. What if every human understood what was going on inside their own head, might we have fewer conflicts, more knowledge and a better chance at a sustainable future?

Got a comment? Send me an email.

References:

Hawkins, J. (2021). A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. United States: Basic Books.

A Year of Creativity: Tracking My Inputs, Outputs and Lessons from 2024

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Creativity is often seen as an unstructured, free-flowing process. But what if we could track it like a data scientist—measuring time, effort, and connections between ideas?

Time and effort form the foundation of a creative life. But what else drives progress and helps us complete meaningful work? How do our journal entries, readings, conversations, and even AI interactions shape our creative outputs?

I’ve been tracking my life in a wide-range of ways for multiple years. Time and task tracking are the core as well as weekly reviews. I also track my writing and have a detailed and extensive record my words and notes. I also have a record of my AI tool usage. Whether it’s a journal entry, personal project notes or reading highlights, I have a digital version and data trail of my written attention over time. While I don’t yet have a way to track the flow of ideas in my conscious mind, I suppose I have second best, a pretty complete record of my typed words.

On and off for the past couple years I’ve proposed an added tracking challenge, trying to quantify and track my creativity. In 2019, I explored the intersection of daily creative typed words, specific added words by domain and my creative writing output. For several of my music albums, including the last one, I have attempted to tease out how much time goes into song writing and reworking and results in songs finished and released. Last year in 2023 I tried to show that a huge component driving one’s success as a creative are our inputs, namely time and certain core creative tasks. There I was able to show how much time it took for released music vs. blog posts.

In this post, I take a deep dive into my year in creativity—what I worked on, what I learned and how my creative process unfolded. My focus spans three personal creative goals: writing, music and my startup app development for Stay Reflective. Each of them involved planning, check-ins, experimentation, reflection, and sustained effort to turn ideas into tangible creative creations.

But creativity isn’t just the finished projects. It’s also the inputs, like the time spent reading, journaling, researching and organizing ideas and next steps. All of these shape the final output, leaving a digital trail of the creative process.

Let’s explore!

My Creative Input - Time

Tracking time helps me understand how my creative energy is distributed. Compared to 2023, my priorities shifted, and here’s where most of my non-client creative time went in 2024.

✍️ Writing:

~139 hrs (down from 208 hrs in 2023). This was a significant drop—partly due to my increased focus on music and Stay Reflective, but also a shift in my creative energy. While I wrote less overall, I prioritized more refined pieces.

🎶 Music:

~314 hrs (up from 267 hrs in 2023). Music took center stage this year, reflecting a strong commitment to both production and finishing projects.

🚀 Stay Reflective:

~280 hrs, spread across design, development, marketing, and launch work. This time investment reflects the push to get the app fully released and into the hands of users.

In total, I dedicated 733 hours last year to my core creative goals and activities. This represents a deliberate investment of time into creative work, shaping what I was able to produce in 2024. While the mix of priorities shifted, I’m proud to say the total creative effort remained strong.

Creative Inputs - What Shaped My Thinking in 2024?

Last year I read 69 books and made 3,056 total book highlights. I also explored a wide range of technical and academic papers, diving into topics that shaped my creative projects and professional and personal thinking.

Here’s a month-by-month snapshot of the key themes I explored throughout the year. Some topics were deep dives, while others were passing fascinations that sparked creative inspiration.

January: Longevity (Outlive, True Age), Flutter & Firebase, Body Composition & DEXA Scan, Python Data Analysis, Future Self
February: Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Journaling & Reflection, Longevity, Music Production, Flutter & Firebase
March: Flutter & Firebase, Feel Good Productivity, Japan & Japanese Language
April: The Gift, Elon Musk Biography, Japanese Culture & History, Japanese Modern Novels, AI & Creativity, History of Music
May: AI & Creativity, History of Music, ML/Recommenders, Psychologist Alfred Adler, The Courage to Be Disliked, Both/And Thinking, Go-to-Market Strategy
June: Music Synthesis (Synthorial), Biology of Aging, The Comfort Crisis
July: Empire of the Summer Moon, Effective Altruism, GLP-1 / Ozempic, The Gift of Athena
August: Make Time, The Gift of Athena, Longevity & Biology of Aging, Handbook of Behavior Change, Google Apps Script
September: Longevity, Cancer Screening & Immunotherapy, Rust, Mac Miller Biography, Ukulele, Supercommunicators
October: UFOs & Aliens, Alien Phenomenology, A/B Controlled Experiments, Dao De Jing, The Ministry for the Future, Immune System, Startup Failure
November: Immune System, The Mind Is Flat, Why Startups Fail, iOS & Android Mobile Development (Flutter & Rust)
December: Central America, William Walker, Brain’s Spatial Navigation

Check out my 2024 book review post forrecommendations and thoughts on my favorite and most impactful books read.

My Creative Output

Blogs and Newsletters Published

Since starting this blog in 2007, I’ve published 336 articles—an average of 19 per year. In 2024, I published 15 blogs, articles, and speeches, which was 8 fewer than 2023’s total. Despite the decline in total output, my writing focused more deeply on AI, creativity, longevity, and personal reflection.

In 2024, my writing and speeches explored the evolving relationship between AI and human creativity. I focused on AI as a tool for empowerment and reflection, advocating for transparency, ethical considerations, and intentional AI usage. Here are some questions worth reflecting on:

What does AI tools mean for my learning and productive and creative work?
How can I use AI to augment my own creative process, rather than merely feeling replaced?
What does authenticity mean to me in the age of AI?

Below is a breakdown of my blog posts and speeches by topic:

Reflection / Stay Reflective

Empowering Music Technology Students through AI-Enhanced Reflection: Case Study – A case study on integrating AI-enhanced journaling into music technology education to improve engagement, self-awareness, and creative skills.

Speech: From Reflection to Composition and Beyond – Talk at Foothill College on “Creativity in the Age of AI,” discussing AI as a creative tool and the role of AI-enhanced self-awareness in creative work.

AI

Exploring the Boundaries: Three Hard Questions on AI and Creativity – Examining AI’s role in creative processes, transparency, collaboration, and authenticity.
How Are You Using ChatGPT?: Tracking & Reflecting on AI Usage with Quantified ChatGPT – Discussing an open-source project I built to analyze and visualize my AI interactions.
AI Included Disclosure Acknowledgment (AIDA): Why Artists Should Disclose AI Use in Their Creations – My biggest thought piece of the year, advocating for a social norm where artists disclose AI use in their creative process. My Position: “I believe we should start aknowledging the use of AI tool in our creative output and productive work as well as, to a limited extent, the role of AI and technology in our creative processes.” Do you agree?

Music

Creative Principles for Music Makers: A Music Producer’s Guide - “Do the thing, i.e. take action and start creating.” Some ideas meant to guide music makers, emphasizing action, inspiration, experimentation, and the development of creative habits for sustained momentum.

Biology and Longevity

In my work at the intersection of biotech, aging research, and medtech, I continually learn and share insights. Here are some of my key contributions in 2024:

[Webinar & Write-up] Decoding Aging with GrimAge and Systems Aging Risk Factors (Longevity Connect – May 2024)
[Newsletter] *The Birth of Epigenetic Clocks: Clock Foundation’s Origin Story**
[Newsletter] *Rewinding the Clock: Epigenetic Age Reversal and TRIIM-X**
[Newsletter] Biological Age 101: Best Practices for Monitoring Biological Age

Check out more on longevity interventions and biological age testing at MyAgingTests.com.

“Year in Data” Posts

Additionally I wrote two liner notes write-ups on my music album releases.

While my total published content was slightly lower than last year, 2024 was a year of deeper exploration—especially in AI, longevity, and creative self-tracking. Society and technology are rapidly changing and evolving. Hard questions are facing us as individuals and communities. Writing continues to be a foundational part of my creative process, shaping both my projects and my thinking.

Music Released

In 2024, I released two full-length albums under my stage name, Stellar Mammals, bringing my total discography to X albums. Each album was accompanied by detailed liner notes that document my creative process.

Stardust and Dreams – 15 tracks
Chop Wood, Carry Water – 11 tracks

In total, I released 26 tracks across two albums last year.

While I primarily create music for myself, it’s exciting to see my work resonate with listeners. In 2024, my music was streamed over 41,000 times in 158 countries.

My most-streamed track, Undercurrents, has reached nearly 25,000 streams to date!

Software Product(s) Released: Stay Reflective

Every year, I aim to release an open-source project on GitHub and build a new product of my own. In 2024, I took a major step forward with Stay Reflective—a journaling and reflection app that helps users track, structure, and deepen their self-reflection practices.

I started with an initial web version of Stay Reflective at the start of the year and eventually ended year with mobile app versions on iOS and Android.

I’m overdue for an announcement blog post, but in short: I believe reflection can be more impactful and accessible. That’s why I built Stay Reflective—an app designed to enhance journaling and self-reflection through thoughtful design and AI-assisted guidance.

I ran my first pilot study with music technology students at Foothill College (Read my case study). The goal was to see if we could make goal-setting and reflection moments more engaging and insightful. The pilot and subsequent experiments showed how powerful AI-enhanced reflection can be. Many users spend over 30 minutes on a single reflection journey.

Here is a month on month snapshot of my time put into Stay Reflective:

Since then, I’ve signficantly improved the backend, frontend, design and interaction experience. I’ve added many more reflection journeys and created various open-end reflection topics.

Though Stay Reflective started as a side project, it has grown into a platform with a steady user base. I’m excited to keep improving the design, expand our features, and grow our network of reflection facilitators.

If you are interested in an empowering and self-awareness centered form of reflection, give it try at StayReflective.com. One of the most engaging journeys is Manifesting My Future Self—I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!

My Creative Input - AI Chats and Conversations

A few years ago, I launched Quantified ChatGPT, an open-source project that tracks and visualizes AI interactions. The goal? To better understand how AI-assisted conversations shape my learning, research, and creative outputs. By analyzing my chat history, I hope to uncover patterns that connect my explorations with my writings, projects, and innovations.

2024 AI Usage Overview

Last year, I exchanged 5,269 messages with OpenAI’s ChatGPT—a 36.7% increase from 3,852 messages in 2022. On average, I had 18.6 messages per conversation, sending approximately 439 messages per month.

Here’s my yearly trend:

What Did I Use ChatGPT For?

Here’s an aggregated breakdown of my AI interactions by topic:

Rust Development (405)
Firebase & Data Analysis (512)
Citation & Research Organization (246)
Longevity & Aging Research (408)
Flutter & Mobile Development (304)
Music & Creative Projects (220)
Sound Therapy & Health Tech (225)
Business & Growth Strategy (186)
Software Development & Debugging (186)
Art & Design (244)
Miscellaneous (314)

Breakding this down a bit more, in summary, here are some noticeable insights:

Software Development (1,221 messages, ~48%)
- Focused on Rust SDKs, Firebase, Flutter, and debugging.
- Key projects: Rust SDK, Firebase data handling, mobile app development.
Research & Knowledge Management (654 messages, ~26%)
- Covered longevity, epigenetics, citation management, and structured research.
- Key focus: Biological aging, AI in research, and knowledge organization.
Business & Growth (304 messages, ~12%)
- Topics: Startup strategy, marketing, monetization.
- Key focus: Growth for Stay Reflective & refining business models.
Music & Creative Projects (338 messages, ~13%)
- Jekyll themes, music production, album ideation, and artistic design.
- A mix of technical work (web design, branding) and creative projects.
Health & Therapy Tech (225 messages, ~9%)
- Sound therapy, therapist app features, and health technology applications.
- Heavy focus on product development for AudioCardio and therapeutic applications.
Miscellaneous (125 messages, ~5%)
- Time tracking, personal productivity, and assorted topics.

Thoughts on My AI Interactions

Looking at the data, nearly half of my AI interactions were deeply technical—focusing on software development, SDKs, and app integrations. Beyond that, my engagement balanced research (26%), business growth (12%), and health tech (9%), reflecting my worka nd interest in longevity, hearing loss, and cognitive health. Meanwhile, music and creative projects accounted for 13%, reinforcing my continued investment in artistic expression alongside my tech work.

My Creative Inputs - Reflection, Journaling and Typed Words

I recently explored the idea that reflection is essential for navigating complex, nonlinear creative challenges in this piece. The ability to step back and assess our knowledge and actions in real time is a critical skill for creative practitioners.

It should come as no surprise that journaling and note-taking are central to my creative process. While effort and time drive progress, without reflection, we miss opportunities for learning, feedback, and innovation. AI is an important novel tool for learning and strategizing, but my most valuable creative habit remains journaling and reflection in my own voice. Whether I’m starting my day or wrapping up creative work, taking time to write and process ideas is a foundational practice.

Journaling: How many journal entries did I write?

I wrote a total of 170 digital journal entries in 2024 which was a slight increase from 2023’s 167. My most common form of journaling is morning pages where I jot a thought, what I’m feeling or what’s on my mind. I now often use Stay Reflective to generate follow-up questions to explore my intentions, challenge my assumptions and gain a fresh perspective.

“Creative” Words Typed: How many words did I type and using which programs?

On my Mac, I use program called WordCounter that that tracks how many typed words I type and in which programs. In 2024, I typed a total of 24.6k creative words, averaging 815 words per day

Here is a heatmap comparing 2024 vs 2023:

While the direct connection between general word typing and creative output isn’t revealed in this data, I am confident that my habit of regular typing, journaling, and reflection plays a critical role in my creative productivity.

Reflection Questions Answered (powered by Stay Reflective)

I firmly believe that the best way to start journaling is with your own thoughts and voice. However, I’m increasingly excited about how AI can help deepen self-reflection journeys by providing structured follow-up questions and prompts. AI fits best as a tool for augmenting the human element and challenging us.

Beyond the hundreds of new users who tried Stay Reflective, I was an active user myself. In 2024, I answered 556 reflection questions, using AI-generated prompts to deepen my self-exploration.

Notably, there was a marked increase in both questions answered and word count from August to October—a sign of deep engagement during that period.

Concluding Thoughts: Reflection—The Lynchpin Between the Creative Process and Tangible Outputs

What does it entail to pursue a creative life, one centered on sustainable progress and meaningful creative output while avoiding burnout?

The short answer? Creativity requires sustained effort, persistence and adaptability towards a certain meaningful outcome. Whether your goal is artist, entrepreneurial or technical, you have to put in the work and the time.

This simple answer hides the harder and more difficult reality that many of us as creatives and entrepreneurs struggle to decide, make progress and actually reach our goals. The path isn’t always clear, and success requires more than just doing the work—it requires critical reflection on the process itself.

In fact, most “successful” artists and creators enage in reflection-in-action. They are constantly questioning, refining and improve their mehtods as they navigate ambiguous and uncertain creative challenges.

For the past several years, I’ve tracked my time, book reading, journaling habits, creative writing output, and even AI interactions. These data points, woven together, form the foundation of my creative process—whether in writing, music production, or software development.

At its core, I believe learning should be a lifelong pursuit, and if you don’t make time for your own creative and intellectual growth, you’ll always be working on other people’s priorities. Journaling, note-taking, and structured reflection act as critical tools to sustain progress and navigate uncertainty.

As a believer in self-tracking and AI, I see data and AI-powered reflection as tools to enhance creative alignment, even though their role and state of authenticity are shifting. Tracking progress keeps you accountable, while AI has the potential to nudge curiosity, expand creative thinking, and refine personal insights.

What Should You Do When You Feel Stuck or Uncertain About a Creative Goal?

Many factors can derail our creative progress—situational challenges, cognitive blocks, emotional resistance, motivation dips, or gaps in skills. Obstacles are inevitable, but a robust reflective practice can enable you to be more aligned with your creative journey and make better decisions.

I recommend journaling and self-reflection as essential tools for cultivating self-awareness, gaining mental clarity and finding alignment.

Obviously if you don’t put in the work that directly contributes to your craft, you’ll never achieve your goals. But creativity isn’t just about doing; it’s also about thinking, evaluating and iterating. Creative “success” or “progress” rarely follow some rational or linear path. Most successful creators don’t just produce; they reflect, refine and experiment.

Check out other posts, data visualizations and infographics from my year in data!

Got a comment? Send me an email.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This post was written entirely by me. I leveraged an AI system (ChatGPT-4) for data analysis, spellcheck and minor revisions for clarity and structure. I used an AI system (Midjourney) for the cover art and conclusion images. All other data visualization images were rendered using QS Ledger.

Why Reflection Matters in Professional Work: Book Notes on The Reflective Practitioner by Donald A. Schön

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“A designer shapes the situation, the situation talks back, and the designer reflects on the back-talk.”

We often imagine experts, artists and high-performing professionals as totally confident and all-knowing. We believe in the expert as some visionary who seems steps aheads and who can arrive at a problem with formula or solution already at hand. At a glance, experts seemingly have found the “key” to any challenges, and it’s as if they have all the answers and just know what to do in any situation in their field.

But is this an accurate portrayal of expertise and modern working professions? Are professionals just know-it-all’s?

First published in 1983, The Reflective Practitioner by Donald A. Schön explores the nature of professional knowledge and how professionals approach problems, think in action, and ultimately reflect and stay curious on and in their creative processes and problem-solving.

Schön argues against what he terms “Technical Rationality,” this assumed all-knowing model of professional knowledge, which he characterizes as the application of theoretical principles and standardized techniques to well-defined problems. While so-called “textbook solutions” and rationalist expertise are effective in some situations, most profesional and artistic work is messy, ill-defined, unpredictable and ambiguous. You can’t simply apply ready-at-hand solutions to these kinds of unique challenges we each face. Schön argues instead for a new “epistemology of practice,” grounded in the book’s central concept of “reflection-in-action.”

Reflection-in-action describes a practitioner’s ability to reflect on their knowledge and actions while engaged in their work.

Rather than possessing enlightened encyclopedic abilities and answers to all problems, expert practitioners often operate based on tacit knowledge, honed through years of experience, which defies easy articulation; and in fact, actual professional practice is a dynamic, reflective, and context-dependent process. True experts don’t just reach into their bag of past challenges for set answer but lean into uncertainy, experiment with novel approachs and engage in a dynamic interplay of framing and reframing problems in light of the situation’s feedback. Put another way, professional work is art and craft.

For Schön, professionals do indeed leverage their repertoire of past exemplars but in a more open-minded and dialogical manners. Modern professionals face complex problems that call us to deploy a more adaptive, creative, and reflective approach. He refers to this as a “reflective conversation with the situation” which he describes beautifully as: “A designer shapes the situation, the situation talks back, and the designer reflects on the back-talk.”

Unfortunately we still live in a world where experts are assumed to act confidently and all-knowingly; and bosses and managers often expect us professionals to simply solve it intuitively and obviously as we are the so-called “expert.” Through a series of examples in multiple fields spanning architecture, psychotherapy, design and even engineering, Schön articulates a vision of the professional and expertise as not just what you know but as one encompassing many facets and demanding adaptability, questioning assumptions and considering approach, options and what best fits to “screwy” problems.

Originally written over 40 years, this book still retains a profoundly important critique for a techno-rationalist conception of expertise and professional work. It contains a wealth of still relevant and applicable mentals models for modern working professionals and artists. As a knowledge worker and professional technical artist, the book’s core message rang true and I think it contains a lot of useful thoughts for any so-called expert or professional in any field, e.g. explaining tacit knowledge, admitting we don’t know anything and encouraging curiosity and openness when facing challenges.

💡 If you’re ready to bring reflection to your creative or professional practices, Stay Reflective offers guided reflection journeys to help you get started. It’s got lots of reflection starters and each exercise comes with dynamic and personalized follow-up questions.

Here are my key takeaways and lessons as well as a selection of book notes.

My Quick Take Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a X out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? Even though I quite enjoyed this book and found several parts of it incredibly interesting, I’m not sure I’d highly recommend this book for the typical artist or working professional, because the writing style can be a bit cumbersome and the examples feel a bit dated. It leans more into academic questions, rather than key insights, practical guidance and techniques.
Would I read it again? I doubt I’d read this book again, per se. I would love to look at this book’s key ideas through follow-up studies and academic research, because I believe a reflective practice or collaborative modality are key parts of creative process.

What I got out of this book?

How do professionals adapt their knowledge and skills to unique problems?

Schön’s book reminded me that rarely is just having the skills or knowledge enough when it comes to one’s professional or creative practice. There are occassionally times when our expertise, experiences, or ready-at-hand answers are enough to solve a problem. But often times that’s the exception rather than the rule, because more often than not, professional work involves a combination of doing and thinking, seeing and re-seeing as you come up with what is a solution, simulate and evaluate its fit and finally enact it. In view of these “screwy” challenges, Schön argues that expert practice necessitates mental and reflective practices.

The Unexpected Gift of a “Screwy” Site

“You should begin with a discipline, even if it is arbitrary, because the site is so screwy—you can always break it open later,” advises Quist, the studio master in Don Schön refers to early in the book. This seemingly simple statement encapsulates a profound approach to professional practice—one that embraces uncertainty, experimentation, and a willingness to engage in a “reflective conversation with the situation.”

Schön argues that truly skilled practitioners, whether they are architects, psychotherapists, engineers, or managers, don’t simply apply pre-existing knowledge to familiar problems. Instead, they approach each situation as a unique entity, embracing surprise as an opportunity for learning and innovation.

In Quist’s design review with his student, Petra, Schön vividly illustrates the concept of “reflection-in-action.” This process is an ongoing, dynamic interplay between thinking and doing. It enables practitioners to navigate complexity, uncover latent possibilities, and create outcomes that transcend technical solutions. By remaining open to the unexpected and treating the “screwy site” as an opportunity rather than a limitation, practitioners can achieve both the necessary functional result and potentially innovative, transformative goal.

Reflection-in-Action

“Practitioners themselves often reveal a capacity for reflection on their intuitive knowing in the midst of action” (p. 8).

Reflection-in-action describes a practitioner’s ability to reflect on their knowledge and actions while engaged in their work. It involves questioning assumptions, framing and reframing problems, and experimenting with new approaches in response to unexpected situations.

Schön’s contrasts this with knowing-in-action which refers to the tacit, often unconscious knowledge that practitioners draw upon in their everyday practice. knowing-in-action encompasses the skills, routines, and intuitive judgments that allow them to perform competently.

Reflection-in-action, on the other hand, involves bringing this tacit knowledge to the surface, making it explicit, and critically examining its validity and relevance in specific situations:

“Usually reflection on knowing-in-action goes together with reflection on the stuff at hand. There is some puzzling, or troubling, or interesting phenomenon with which the individual is trying to deal. As he tries to make sense of it, he also reflects on the understandings which have been implicit in his action, understandings which he surfaces, criticizes, restructures, and embodies in further action.” (p. 63)

Reflective practices and creative process help us adapt to complex, uncertain, or unique situations.

Uncertainty and Framing

As nearly everyone learns shortly after college or a training course, situations of practice we actually face are often unstable, uncertain, and resistant to technical, “textbook” solutions. As Schön puts it:

“The situations of practice are not problems to be solved but problematic situations characterized by uncertainty, disorder, and indeterminacy” (p. 25).

In view of the uncertainty of work practices and lack of technical rationalist solutions, Schön advocates for a deeper, reflective engagement. Because how you see a problem largely determines your ability to solve it, it is important to consider how you name, label and frame the problem. Schön provides an early formulation of the framing problem, made famous in behaviorial economics.

Framing refers to the way practitioners define and interpret a situation, influencing their understanding of the problem, the relevant factors, and the potential solutions. Framing is not a static process but rather a dynamic one, involving continuous reframing as the situation unfolds and new information emerges. According to Schön, “it is the work of naming and framing that creates the conditions necessary to the exercise of technical expertise.” (p 54).

Adaptability, Exploration, and Testing in Professional Practice

Because modern professionals operate in a rapidly evolving landscape, Schön underscore that experts and aspirants should embrace adaptability, engage in exploratory experimentation, and apply testing frameworks such as move-testing and hypothesis-testing.

Adaptability: “Professions are now confronted with an unprecedented requirement for adaptability… The dilemma of the professional today lies in the fact that both ends of the gap he is expected to bridge with his profession are changing so rapidly: the body of knowledge that he must use and the expectations of the society that he must serve. Both these changes have their origin in the same common factor—technological change.” (p. 25) Put another way, professionals can’t merely adopt new tools or solutions but also imagine and navigate the application and implications of technology.
Exploration: “In the most generic sense, to experiment is to act in order to see what the action leads to. The most fundamental experimental question is, ‘What if?’” (p. 171) Exploratory experimentation allows professionals to interact with uncertain environments in a low-stakes, playful and imaginative manner. “Exploratory experiment is the probing, playful activity by which we get a feel for things.” (p. 171). They have the added benefit of challenging the framing problem and have the potential to uncover unexpected insights too.
Move-Testing: “Each move is a local experiment which contributes to the global experiment of reframing the problem.” (p. 112). Each action, or “move,” serves as a local experiment and simulated what if that contributes to a larger understanding of the situation. “Moves produce effects beyond those intended” (p. 172).

By embracing adaptability, exploration, and different testing methods, professionals can navigate the inherent uncertainty of practice.

Additional Book Notes & Quotes

The Role of Professionals in Society: “The professions have become essential to the functioning of our society.”
Technical Rationality and Its Limitations: “Professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique.” (Schön’s central critique)
“Practical knowledge exists, but it does not fit neatly into Positivist categories.”
The Knowledge-Practice Gap: “The widening rift between universities and the professions, research and practice, thought and action.” (p. 7). Despite this gap, professionals often reach innovative solutions through their tacit knowledge and reflective practices.
Tacit Knowledge: Professionals rely on tacit knowledge, which is often intuitive and difficult to articulate: “Competent practitioners usually know more than they can say; their knowing is tacit.” (p. 8)
Knowing-in-Action: “Knowing-in-action… a kind of knowing is inherent in intelligent action.”* (p. 64)
Reflection-in-Action: “A way of thinking about what you are doing while you are doing it, questioning assumptions, and reframing problems in light of unexpected situations.”
Problem Framing: “Problem setting is a process in which we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.” (p. 52)
“Exploratory experiment is the probing, playful activity by which we get a feel for things.” (p. 171)
Move-testing: “Each move is a local experiment which contributes to the global experiment of reframing the problem.” (p. 112) / “Moves produce effects beyond those intended.” (p. 172)
Improvisation: “Improvisation consists in varying, combining, and recombining a set of figures within the schema which bounds and gives coherence to the performance.” (p. 70)
Design Thinking: “A designer shapes the situation, the situation talks back, and the designer reflects on the back-talk.” Schön emphasizing the iterative and interactive nature of design.
Reflective Conversations: Professionals engage in “reflective conversations” not only with clients but also with materials, situations, and unexpected outcomes.
Virtual Worlds are “Symbolic representations used by professionals to simulate, test, and communicate complex ideas.” Schön believes drawings, and narratives help practitioners simulate, test, and communicate ideas.
“Virtual worlds are contexts for experiment within which practitioners can suspend or control some of the everyday impediments to rigorous reflection-in-action.” (p. 191) - These worlds create space for experimentation and rigorous reflection
Exemplars: “A practitioner’s repertoire includes the whole of his experience insofar as it is accessible to him for understanding and action.” (p. 163).
Exemplars (previous cases or solutions) guide action but can limit creativity if overly relied upon. Reflective practitioners use them as starting points while remaining open to reframing problems.
Surprise: “Surprise triggers reflection-in-action, challenging assumptions and prompting experimentation.”
Generative Metaphors unlock new ways of seeing and solving problems:
“Paintbrush as pump was a generative metaphor in the sense that it generated new perceptions, explanations, and inventions.” (p. 216)
Meta-Reflection: “When a practitioner does not reflect on his own inquiry, he keeps his intuitive understandings tacit.” By reflecting more formally on your practice and creative problem-solving, you make your professional action and decision-making explicit and can iterative and improve.
Reflective Practice as a Learning System: “The reflective practitioner tries to discover the limits of his expertise through reflective conversation with the client.” (p. 339)
“The idea of reflective practice leads to new conceptions of the professional-client contract, the partnership of research and practice, and the learning systems of professional institutions.” (p. 395)

Concluding Thoughts:

What distinguishes a skilled practitioner from someone who is merely proficient in their field?

In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön argues that the answer lies in the “artistry” of professional practice. He challenges the notion that expertise is solely the product of technical mastery. Instead, he advocates for the reflection, experimentation, and creative decision-making in navigating the complexities of real-world situations.

How do professionals adapt their knowledge and skills to unique problems?

Modern expert professionals are able to reflect and learn in the moment while you are doing the work. They look to past exemplars but not simply for an answer but in order to enact a deeper process of seeing patterns, drawing on past experiences and reframing. Instead of possessing all the answers, an expert knows different ways to see the situation, what questions to ask and how to approach the problem.

What are limits to Schön’s model reflection-on-action?

Modern professionals face significant barriers to reflection. They are often expected to project confidence and provide immediate answers, even when uncertainty is inevitable. Admitting doubt feels risky, especially in front of bosses, clients, or peers, where it may be mistaken for incompetence.

Time pressures also make reflection challenging. The fast pace of work often resembles a constant firefighting drill, leaving little room for curiosity or thoughtful problem-solving.

Organizations can further stifle reflection by prioritizing quick fixes or the so-called “right” solution over open exploration of uncertainties and simulating possible virtual worlds. In such environments, uncertainty may be perceived as a lack of expertise, potentially jeopardizing your career too.

Finally, the myth that professionals must have all the answers can isolate them from collaborative solution-finding. By excluding clients, teammates, and others, they miss opportunities for creative iteration, a process often critical to discovering the best and most holistic solutions.

What are key lessons modern professionals can take away from this book and apply in their work practices?

According to Schön, modern professionals should strive to:

Embrace Uncertainty: Our work and creative projects often involve involve messy, uncertain situations. Stay curious, open to reframing problems and asking questions, rather than seeking immediate, definitive solutions (from the internet or AI!).
Cultivate Reflection: Work and art isn’t just about what you do or how you solve problems but demands a reflective practice. Take time to reflect and build a habit of reflection-in-action in order to adapt and learn during your work and creative practice. Even when you are under time pressure or uncertainty, these reflective practice might offer alternative paths and novel solutions.
Leverage and Trust Tacit Knowledge: Even though it might not be from your training or found in a textbook, trust your intuitive and experiential knowledge. Not all solutions can be made explicit. Embrace your expert, creative instincts as a foundation for creative problem-solving.
Engage in Exploration: The playful “what if?” is incredibly powerful question to answer yourself and your projects regularly. Use experimentation and simulation asking to probe, test, and refine solutions iteratively, before and as you act.
Collaborate Creatively: Even if you are the so-called expert, welcome clients, peers, and others into your problem-solving process. New voices and perspective can help you generate better, more innovative outcomes, and it can also invite a strong collaborative creative community in your work or art.

Got a comment? Send me an email.

A Year in Time: 2024

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What do you make time for?

Last year, I made time for the things I care about most — creativity, writing, music, growth, and meaningful progress on a new app.

Here’s where my time went:

🎶 Music: ~314 hrs - This time shows consistent focus on my creative goals including releasing two new albums as well as expanding with collaboration and refining my production skills.
🚀 Stay Reflective: ~280 hrs - My startup app received a significant time investment, resulting in a few product milestones, a successful pilot, and growth experiments.
✍️ Writing: ~139 hrs - While this fell short of my ideal, the writing helped me find clarity and enabled me to share content on AI, creativity and data.

Was this enough time for my desired outcomes? Are adjustments in order for year ahead for making more time for what I care about? If so, how?

Where was most of my time spent?

When I look at where I actually spent my time, here’s what it looks like:

🛌 Sleep: 7.55 hrs per night
💻 Computer Time: 6.43 hrs per day
💼 Professional Work: 3.57 hrs per weekday
📱 Phone/Tablet Time: 2.16 hrs per day
🏃 Exercise: 1.08 hrs per day

I feel good about my consistent sleep and exercise routines, but my device time, particularly on my phone and tablet, feels higher than I’d like. While half of this time is positive (e.g., reading and educational videos), the other half often goes to distractions like Netflix and YouTube.

Road Ahead: Figure Out What You Want to Make Time For

Time management is a cornerstone of life, but it’s not just about how you spend your time. It’s about what you make time for.

In the past, I fell into the “efficiency trap,” chasing productivity hacks that saved minutes but consumed days of effort. I learned that productivity alone won’t bring fulfillment nor solve all of life’s changes. You eventually hit a wall, because the more productive you become the more demands are placed on you (either by yourself or by others).

You can’t out-hustle your limitations or mortality.

Instead, I believe in two key steps:

Figure Out What You Care About. Explore what truly matters — your passions, projects, and people. Journaling and reflection are invaluable here.
Align Intentions with Time-Bound Actions. Prioritize and commit to what matters most. Progress takes time, but the key is showing up consistently.

💡 If you’re ready to align your time with your values, Stay Reflective offers guided reflection journeys to help you get started. It’s got lots of reflection starters and each exercise comes with dynamic and personalized follow-up questions.

In this post, I want to share my latest year-in-time data visualizations, analysis and a public self-reflection. I have spent years developing habits and technical skills centered on time tracking various aspects of my life. While I wouldn’t recommend immediately tracking everything in your life, hopefully you can see how time tracking and data help me illuminate the broad lines of my days, weeks and months and enable me to find opportunities, overcome challenges and pursue actions towards the goals and activities I personally care most about.

Let’s jump into my time data.

A Year-in-Time: My Key Time Indicators (KTIs)

Where did my days and time go in 2024?

The short answer is a lot of my days was spent on my computer and/or on my projects. Nearly 92% of days in 2024 I used my computer (335 total computer days), and about 89% of days I manually logged “project” time.

I put in 1,854.2 total project hours, meaning I was active and cognitively engaged working on something. Often this was either professional work or creative projects (writing, music or my startup app). We will look at my project time in greater detail in a separate section below, but overall this alignment of computer time with project time is a good indicator of using my time meaningfully. The challenging and more difficult to answer question is whether or not I spent my time “right” or I made enough time for the outcomes and goals I had and have?

Let’s look at my time data more, before returning to these intentionality-behavior alignment questions.

Here are a few of my key time indictors (KTIs) from the last year:

My Total Screen Time: 2346 hours

What was my screentime last year?

TOTAL SCREENTIME: 2346 hours.
COMPUTER USAGE: 1892.4 hours.
PHONE TIME: 517.88 hours.
TABLET TIME: 271.48 hours.

That averages out to about 6 hours and 25 minutes of tracked screen time per day.

From a screentime tracking perspective, I have a nearly complete picture of my screentime, meaning how much time I spend on my core devices. I track my screentime using RescueTime (computer) and log my iPhone and Tablet time every week or two manually during my data-driven weekly review.

Let’s look at a few other slices of my time data, before comparing year-on-year and opportunities.

My Total Computer Time: 1892.4 hours

As a software developer and designer, I use my computer a lot. I track my computer time using Rescuetime, which gives me a lot of granularity of my time usage as well as some key yearly numbers. Here are some notable numbers:

335 total computer time days
30 computer free days
1,801.7 total computer hours
Daily Average (of tracked days): 5.4 hrs

What programs and activites did I use the most?

Here are my top tools used in 2024 with their yearly percentage change:

Note-Taking & Writing Tools: 381.5 hrs (-2.5%)
IDEs & Software Development: 249.7 hrs (-7.0%)
Music Proudction & Audio Editing Tools (Ableton): 224.8 hrs (+20.4%)
Email: 91.7 hrs (+1.0%)
Reference & Learning Sites: 82.7 hrs (+8.4%)
Utilities: 76.6 hrs (-4.3%)
Business Stuff: 66.1 hrs
Graphic Design: 49.4 hrs
Video Production & Editing: 34.5 hrs
General News & Opinion: 34.3 hrs

QUESTION: Does my time using these tool categories fit and align with my goals and creative and professional target outputs?

YouTube Time: 243h 28 minutes

Even though I do some learning and education on YouTube, I primarily use YouTube for entertainment. I watched about 4h and 40 minutes per week on YouTube. Unless there was some time tracking error, I spent a lot more time on YouTube in 2024 than 2023. In 2024, I spent 244.5 hours watching YouTube compared with 172.4 hours in 2023.

This continues a two-year trend increase compared to a low of just 143h in 2022. Admittedly, I did notice and note this spike in YouTube usage over the summer, and I have taken some action, like uninstalling YouTube from my phone.

QUESTION: What would it take to reduce my Youtube usage and/or become a bit more mindful and intentional about my usage?

Non-Device Time: Sleep, Exercise and Activity

As a healthtech software builder and head of product at a longevity research group, I am overdue for a data-driven review of my my efforts at de-aging and longevity tracking. My yearly Health and Fitness data merits a deeper dive and a separate blog post (coming soon).

For now, here are my top health time data points for 2024:

SLEEP: 7 hours, 33 minutes per night - I track my sleep with a Oura ring. I saw a negligible 1.2% increase in my sleep compared to 2023. This is close to the recommended 7–9 hours for adults. QUESTIONS: Is this enough sleep? How might I increase my sleep time and quality? And how does it impact my cognitive abilities and aging?
MOVEMENT & EXERCISE: 1 hour 5min daily - According to my apple watch, I got a decent hour of movement everyday. Over an hour a day is consistent with health recommendations and represents a a meaningful 27% improvement over 2023 (51 minutes daily).
WORKOUTS: 135 hours of logged workouts (~2.6 hours per week) - Using Strava, I logged workouts 172 days in 2024 (~47% of the year) shows that I have strong and consistent exercise habit. My workouts mostly included running, cycling, and pickleball. I did very little weight training (less than 5 hours for the year). QUESTIONS: Have my change in exercise routines translated to lower or similar fitness levels? How might increased or varied workouts impact key fitness and health metrics?

Trends Across Time: Weekly Changes in Time Usage

By combining all of my time related data I get to see a week-on-week chart, broken down into categories such as Health and Fitness, Tablet, Phone, Computer Usage, and Sleep like this:

Looking at the chart, here are some key insights:

🛌 Consistency in Sleep - My sleep patterns (blue bars) appear to be relatively consistent week-to-week, at least when seen in terms of weekly sleep averages. This suggests a stable sleep routine, though I should look at this with greater grandularity and potentially consider my readiness and activity level as well.
💻 Highly Variable Computer Usage: My computer usage (red bars) appears to be he largest and most variable category week-to-week. Are lower periods associated with time off, sickness or something else? Do weeks showing significant spikes correspond to periods of intense focus on work or creative projects?
📱 Relatively Small Yet Stable Tablet and Phone Screentime - I have aspired to limit my non-computer screentime for a number of years including a 30-day youtube detox a few years ago. It’s good to see that my phone usage (green bars) and tablet time (yellow) are relatively small and steady. I uninstall YouTube and don’t use social media apps on my phone. Generally my phone usage involves navigation, communication (email, messaging), music listening, and quick tasks.
🏋 Health and Fitness Patterns - A quick review of my health and fitness (orange bars) show noticible fluctations. Do these correspond to shifts in your workout routine or periods of lower activity (e.g., busy work weeks or travel)?
⚖️ Balanced Time Allocation: Viewed at a high level, I see a consistent, healthy and balanced time usage across different activities. Excluding computer usage, no single category dominated my weekly hours in 2024.

Comparing Years: 2023 vs. 2024

How does this year compare with past ones?

In total, I recorded about 2,346 hours of screentime in 2024, which is nearly identical to my 2023 numbers (2,355 hours). Interestingly, I increased my computer time from 1,711.2 hours in 2023 to 1,892.4 hours in 2024. This translates to less time on my phone and tablet, and it likely indicates an improvement in more focused, cognitively engaged time, rather than passive consumption and media habits.

Cognitively-Engaged Project Time

While I can passively track my computer time with RescueTime and get good screentime usage data on my phone and tablet, I get the most benefit and my most insightful time dataset by manually tracking my project time. Specifically, I use a manual time tracker tool called Toggl to log all of my work hours, creative time and various admin tasks. Each task includes the project I’m working on and a brief note or gist of the activity. Pulling this data together and doing some data visualization quickly reveals changes over time and trends on what I am spending my time on.

My Project Time: 1,854.2 total project hours

Excluding two weeks in late April (travels in Japan), two weeks in early December (travels in Belize and Honduras) and end of year, my project time was pretty consistent and evenly distributed across the year and day to day. We see a strong weekday time allotment too. I see a noticable dip in project time on Saturdays and Sundays.

The “Big Picture” of My Project Time

Here are the exact numbers:

Professional Work: 928.34 hrs (50.06%)
Personal Projects: 646.08 hrs (34.84%)
Startup Projects: 280.09 hrs (15.10%)

Professional Work: 928.34 hrs

Like most working professionals, the majority of my time goes to professional work and my clients. I dedicate roughly 19 full hours per week in my case. While I formally log my hours for my personal time analysis, the reality is that I also often spend an additional 20% or more of time thinking and talking about my professional as well as various unlogged calls, logistics, planning, note-taking, research, etc.

Personal Projects: 646.1 hrs

About 12.4 hours per week goes to my personal project time. This category covers several areas. Here is a breakdown of some of my key non-professional work:

Creative Projects: Music, Writing, App Development

🎶🖌🎨 Read my separate write-up and analysis: 2024: Year in Creativity [Coming Soon]👀

As I mentioned in the intro, my personal time and creative projects are fundamental to my life, and I make time for them. I hold a deep commitment to self-expression, personal growth, and creative output. I value reflection, journaling and note-taking. And I am a life-long learning, both in terms of yearly book reading and in terms of always-be-studying, skill-building and staying curious.

Let’s dig into how my time data reflects these goals and values:

🎶 Music Making & Music Production: 313.8 hrs

My main creative hobby currently is music making and music production. I currently release my music under the artist name of Stellar Mammals and primarily personally produce and release instrumental focus music.

Along with regular exercise, music helps me relax and ground me. It’s a constant source of joy, fun and inspiration. It’s something I really enjoy, though I wouldn’t necessarily define myself first and foremost as a musician. Music making puts me in a state of flow, and collaborating with others around music is my one of my main social activities too.

Overall, I spent ~314 hours in 2024 on my music, marking a significant focus and increase from 2023 (267 hours). It was really fun to jam, explore a bunch new musical directions, and create new demos and songs. According to RescueTime, this included ~225 hours total on audio editing tools like Ableton Live.

I averaged 26.15 hours per month on music. My lowest amount of music time was April, when I had a hard professional work push and personal travels in Japan. My two biggest months were May and August, which were most closely associated with original song writing and reworking for my fifth album.

The biggest shift in my music time was the dramatic increase in collaboration time. In 2024, over 100 hours was spent on music collaboration, compared with just 21 hours in 2023. For example, I worked with another producer reworking both albums and collaborated with a trumpeter, keyboardist and a few guitar players. Here is what that collaboration time allotment looked like:

In terms of my time input, here were my biggest music-related activites:

Individual Re-working / Finishing: 74.5 hrs (23.7%)
Collab Jamming & Song Writing: 63.6 hrs (20.2%)
Individual Jamming & Song Writing: 42 hrs (13.3%)
Collab Reworking, Re-recording and revisions: 31.5 hrs

I had an additional grab-bag of individual music related activites that totalled 95.6 hours, reflecting a mix of creative, reflective, and organizational efforts. For example, I spent 5h on album art and releasing and 2.6h on finishing and mastering. I also put in an additional 2.3h on music reflection (e.g. reviewing and reflecting on the album or music direction, evaluating progress or setting future goals).

In terms of tangible outputs, I produced and released 26 tracks and two new albums:

Stardust and Dreams - 15 tracks
Chop Wood, Carry Water - 11 tracks

I also made significant progress on my next album as well as a host of new tracks with vocals and in new experimental genres. Unfortunately, while I did grow my music listenership and following somewhat this year, especially on Spotify, I didn’t make as much progress on music production or music videos. Along with doubling down on collaboration and balancing new song writing with reworking and finishing, I’d love to expand my music videos work in the year ahead, ideally with more collaborators!

✍️ Creative Writing: 139.4 hrs

Writing allows me to explore intellectual interests, externalize my learnings, share my work projects and experiments, and engage in meaningful self-reflection. Historically writing has been number primary creative hobby and outlet. I’ve written hundreds of blog posts and delivered dozens of research-backed talks and papers.

For a range of reasons my writing time has steadily declined over the years. Unfortunately this trend continued. Last year in 2024, I spent 139.4 hrs writing, compared with 208.2 hours in 2023. This representes a roughly 33% decrease and was a significant reduction.

Interestingly I did manage to journal, reflect and review regularly. Specifically, I spent 59.6 hrs on journaling, reviewing and general reflection. One of the interesting benefits of building my reflection-empowering app, Stay Reflective, is the ability to help myself and others journal more regularly and get into deeper moments of introspection.

For example, whenever I’m struggling on my goals or next steps, I often start by jotting some initial thoughts and notes. By then using one of the reflection journey experience, I can get tailored follow-up questions that help me clarify my thinking and identify next actions. All in all, this has been a powerful method and tool towards greater mental clarity and intention-centered productivity practices.

In spite of my more modest time spent on writing, I still made progress and delivered several in-depth pieces. Here are my biggest writing projects last year:

Year In Writing, Learning, and Noting: 11.7 hrs
AI and Creativity Talk: 9.4 hrs
Case Study for Stay Reflective: 8.7 hrs
AI Disclosures: 5.4 hrs
Year in Books: 5.4 hrs
Year in Time: 4.3 hrs
Biohacking My Aging (incomplete, unpublished): 4 hrs

Based on a simple statistical analysis, here are some benchmarking writing time numbers:

⏰ Average Time Spent: 5.5 hours per writing project.
Longest Talk Project: AI and Creativity Talk with 12.9 hours.
“Year in Data” Projects took between 2.15 and 4.3 hours per project.
Shorter/Minimum Blog Posts took about 2.5 to 3 hours of writing time.
Shortest Project: Album Liner Notes with 1.5 hours each for two separate posts, largely built up first through journaling and reflection exercises.

Along with a full professional workload, two music albums and developing my app, I am still content with my written output, and I am excited about carving out more time for writing. I’ll likely start some new blogs eventually, thought for now I plan to focus on and finish several blog posts that I have started or thought about in recent years.

One of my biggest opportunities is to continue to write about topics that combine multiple hobbies and interests, like reflection for musical creatives, biohacking and the data-driven life. Also I want to seek and protect more time for my writing in general. For example, how might I ensure I write 2-3 times per week, rather than once and awhile every month or two?

Additionally, based on these estimated-to-time-write guidelines, perhaps I need to be a bit more clear-eyed on the actual time needed to write and complete research, drafting and publishing blog posts, articles and talks. For example if I do want to write more than 20 blog posts in the year ahead, then realistically I’m going to need to put in at least 110 hours and likely more. Put another way, you can’t get your output (blog posts) without sufficient input (writing time and word count).

My Startup / Stay Reflective Time: 280.09 hrs

Can I launch an new app and acquire users in a year as a side project?

Every year I set the following open-ended goal for myself, “Build Something. Keep Creating.” It’s a reminder that my mix of skills and interests enables me to give back through open source code and product development. I shouldn’t just build for my professional work; I should give back by designing, developing and lauching software products and new business ventures. Even though it’s hard and often one of the most challenging areas to “succeed” at, it’s part of who I am: I am a product creator.

This year I launched app called Stay Reflective that aims empower reflection journeys, augment how you take notes and journal, and ultimately enhance creative and life decision-making.

This year I put 280.09 hrs in my startup and my product development and marketing efforts. In fact, 15% of all of my project time last year went to my own startup work. While this was less than the 296 hours I put in 2023, it was markedly more than last year’s 132.5 hours, and I have a lot to show for it and build on.

I am a long-time journaler, and I believe reflection can be made better. I have written about journaling from the self-tracking, quantified perspective. With the rise of AI tools, I have been fascinated by and experimenting with AI as a Journaling Companion and leveraging AI to augment self-reflection.

Initially I built a simple web version on Flutter in early 2024 and launched a pilot for music technology students at Foothill College, which you can read more about in my case study. A lot of work went into the rough MVP and improved public web launch. We saw great engagement during the first experiment, and I subsequently launched a couple other pilots for students and creative professionals. Additionally I improved the design, created more reflection starters, and ameliorated how reflection journeys work.

We saw incredible growth first two quarters of the year. Unfortunately I got busy with other projects and the project lost some momentum for a range of reasons. Though I and other users continued to use the product, I hardly worked on Stay Reflective. As some of my professional work load decreased, I thought about what I cared about and re-ignited my passion (with a bit of journaling) to keep moving forward with my mindfulness app.

Starting in October, I carved out consistent time. I was also able to launch some fresh marketing efforts and we started to get new users through paid acquisition channels along with our facilitators and partners. I ended the year with a strong product development push and, in spite of the challenges, we completed and launched both an iOS and Android versions. We ended the year with over a thousand completed reflections!

I dreamed up and designed Stay Stay Reflective to improve how I reflect, write and think easier, better and more empowering over time. Whether you are a student, working professional or somewhere else in-between, Stay Reflective provides reflection journeys and invites you to questions, moments of introspection and AI-empowered follow-ups. Check it out on the app stores or try it for free at StayReflective.com.

Journaling, Reviews, Learning, and Personal Growth

As someone building a product to empower reflection, weekly reviews, and goal setting, I strive to embody the practices I advocate for. In 2024, my time allocation reflects my on-going interest and commitment to personal growth, learning, and introspection, all of which have shaped my productivity and creativity. I no longer seek superficial productive or effiency alone. Instead, by reflecting and reviewing regularly, my time usage and productivity become better aligned and more impactful.

Let’s look at this in a few buckets.

Journaling and Reflective Practices

📓Journaling:

I dedicated 41 hours and 48 minutes to journaling this year. This time allowed me to document ideas, reflect on experiences, and explore creative directions, forming the cornerstone of my reflective practices.

🧘🏻‍♀️Weekly and Monthly Reviews:

Weekly Reviews: I spent 24 hours and 7 minutes on my data-driven weekly reviews, a practice I started severl years ago and continues to help me maintain alignment with my goals and priorities and navigate different challenges.
Monthly Reviews: With an additional 3 hours and 32 minutes, my monthly reviews provided a broader perspective, helping me assess long-term progress and recalibrate objectives.

Learning and Studies

In 2024, I spent 83 hours on structured learning and studies. Along with reading nearly 70 books in 2024, I dove into a range of topics that have fueled my personal and professional development. Here are a few highlights:

Music Synthesis Studies: ~4 hrs
Longevity and Health Research inc Cancer Research (2.5 hrs) and Immune System Studies: (2.4 hrs)
Notebook LLM and Smart Notes: ~4 hours 48 minutes combined, exploring how AI tools and smart note-taking techniques can enhance my knowledge retention and creative output.

I also spent considerable professional development time learning and coding in Flutter and Rust as well as data analysis and building on Firebase.

Conclusion

My 2024 Year in Time - Notable Observations, Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

Now that we’ve looked at various slices of my time allotment throughout the year, what are some key observations and opportunities/challenges for year ahead in terms of my time usage?

⚖️ Balanced Time Allocation: My time distribution reflects a relatively balanced approach, with half my time going to professional work and the remaining divided between personal and startup projects. While I’ve been navigating this dance between paid professional work and creative pursuit, it’s still a struggle and one I regularly reflect and consider. You can’t do it all. It’s often feels “easy” and “correct” to prioritize your client or paid work, because you want to fulfill others’ needs and asks. But in order to advance your own creative pursuits, you have make trade-off’s and sacrifices, including accepting limited efforts and availability for certain things, at least part of the time.

💻 Stable Screen Time with Increased Computer Usage: I was able to trim back time on my phone and tablet while increasing my computer time. This aligns with decreasing my consumption and entertainment time and increasing my time on work and creative projects.

⏳ Stick to my core productive and reflection practice: While in the past I dedicated many hours and weeks to finding habits, productivity techniques and tools, I no longer feel the need since my tools and approach seems effective and flexible for my needs. I just need to continue to track my time, review my weeks and months and seek regular aligment between my time-bound action and my goals. When I get stuck, have to navigate a hard challenge or am struggling emotionally, I just need to keep reminding myself that it’s ok, take a break, reflect or just go outside and exercise.

⏰ Make Time & Prioritize My Projects Even More:

🎶 Same / Less Music Time: Even though I’m quite happy with my music time and output, I am starting to wonder about how music time fit in my current priorities mix. I want to continue to tap into my music hobby and push out a few releases per year but I’m not sure if music is my top creative time priority (at least not right now in the short-time).
✍️ More Writing & Blog Publishing - How can I make writing a more consistent habit? How can I make time to write? And, in turn, publish more? For example, it would be amazing if I managed to publish a few blog posts every month and ultimately a couple dozen this year? The short answer is I need to make more time for writing, both as a routine and as a time allocation. Assuming each blog posts take 5-6 hours on average, then to hit my writing output goals I should aim to put in at least 5 hours every week or two and ideally at least 10-30 hours every month.
🚀 More Product & Growth Work for Stay Reflective - I am passionate about and am excited to help advance my paid professional work and recognize the start of the year requires that take precedence. In spite of this, I really deeply care about finding and making time for Stay Reflective. My top two goals in the next couple months are continued growth, more outreach and designing and launch v2 of the product. If I continue to invest my time and some development budget, I foresee continued goal progress. I should try and equal or surpass last year’s time, which I can easily do by finding a few dedicated days or weeks per month and get a few helpers and collaborators.

🧘🏻‍♀️ Mindful Media Habits:

📺 Less YouTube: Compared to last 3 years, this last year saw the largest amount spent on Youtube. Even though I do sometimes use it for education, especially music production, I don’t think I’m primarily using YouTube to learn. I should strive to cut back on Youtube, because if I cut this out, I’ll have more time for more meaningful work and creative pursuits.
📰 Less News? - According to RescueTime, I spent 34.25 hrs on General News & Opinion. I don’t necessarily feel like this is problematic use of my time if it helps me feel informed and take occassional breaks during my workday. But as I look for more minor optimizations it does seem like could or spend a bit less time checking the news.
📚 A bit less reading (for now) - In view of my many goals and interests, I think I should accept a bit less time for reading in the coming weeks. I sometimes spend full evenings just reading books, and, while in general this is a great activity, it can also prevent from digging in and working on my personal projects and outputs, like blog posts, product enhancements and music.

🏋 More Workouts and Daily Exercise🏃:

Even though I did more strava workouts last year and had a higher amount of activity level, I think I can do better. Exercise has a myrid number of benefits. For me exercise is an almost immediate mood booster and gives me a cognitive enhancement too. I’m also curious how increase exercise (especially weight training) might improve my biological age and longevity. In short, how might I do a workout close to every day, instead of every other day? What would it take to start a yearly streak?

[Stretch Time Goals]:

Making Videos: I spent about 34.5 hrs on video programs in 2024 yet I hardly released any video content. I currently have got several long-form diving videos and great nature shots as well as a bunch of Stellar Mammals music. How might I spend more time making and editing videos? What can I do to improve my video editing skills with DaVinci?
Graphic Design: I spent 49.5 hrs on graphic design programs last year, which is great. I’d love to double down on this trend and continue to make visual designs and improve those skill. I have my own blog content, an app to design and plenty of professional work that would benefit from regular design time, especially time in Figma. How might I up my graphic design time and skills in ways that contribute to my professional work and creative hobbies?

Final Thoughts: Finding Alignment and Making Time

At the start of this reflection, I asked: What am I spending time on, and what do I truly want to make time for?

Through this year’s time data logs, I’ve gained a powerful self-awareness tool and uncovered valuable lessons about my priorities and choices. Here are a few of my key takeaways:

Exercise Improvements: I made consistent progress in my workout routines and movement time, reflecting greater intentionality in physical health.
Creative Shifts: My music production increasingly leaned toward collaboration, reworking, and new songwriting, showing a shift in how I approach creativity.
Startup Milestones: I hit key goals for Stay Reflective by focusing on actionable product and growth milestones.
Room for Improvement: While I made progress, I also noticed areas to improve, like reducing time spent on YouTube and prioritizing more writing sessions.

If you want to move forward on your goals, you have to put in the time. Work smart, prioritize the right actions, and align your time with your desired outcomes. For me, that meant allocating time for creative reworking and collaboration in music, staying on track with milestones for Stay Reflective, and recognizing that achieving my writing goals is going to requires more deliberate focus and realistic time input. With both music and blog writing, I now have pretty clear measurable expectations on how much time I need in order to make and release a song or research and publish a blog post.

What if you don’t know your goals yet, or you feel uncertain about your path? What if you’re stuck in a rut or unsure about what’s next?

Personally, I’ve found two powerful and reinforcing practices:

Reflect Regularly: Take time to reflect on what matters most—your values, goals, and projects. If you feel off course, journaling or using a reflection starter from Stay Reflective can help. Sometimes decision are hard and you have to make trade-off. Strive to be intentional. Do check-in’s and iterate.
Make Time for What You Care About: Explore and stay curiosity until you find what brings you joy and purpose. Then, prioritize it. Protect that thing you are passionate about. Be willing to sacrifice for what matters, because if you spend all your time on others’ priorities or endless work, you risk losing sight of yourself and moving forward with what defines you.

Your time is your life. Reflect. Adjust. And make time for what truly matters to you. In the end, it doesn’t matter how fast you are moving if the path you’re on doesn’t lead to where you want to go.

Best of luck and happy tracking!

Got a comment? Send me an email. Check out other posts, data visualizations and infographics from my year in data.

Appendix & Additional Data

Links to Previous Year-in-Time Posts

Along with time tracking itself, I’ve been reflecting on my time publicly for a few years. Check out my past time logs and time reflections for:

For a philosophical perspective, see: Time Management as Life Philosophy: Book Notes on Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.

How I Track My Time

If you are interested in how I track my time, read my Ultimate Guide to How to Track Your Time and Life where I show what tools I use and share a step-by-step method for getting started

I currently use the follwoing apps to track my time and monitor my behavior:

RescueTime
Toggl
Apple’s Screentime for iPhone and iPad
Oura ring for sleep
Strava for workouts

For more on self-tracking and my other year in data art/reflection/tech work, check out my “Track Everything” blog post series.

Year-on-Year Project Time Changes: Evolving Priorities and Focuses

Time allocated across my workspaces increased steadily from 2013 to a peak in 2018, after which there were fluctuations. 2024 shows a rise in total time nearing the levels of 2022, with a balanced distribution across all three areas.
Time spent on my client work / sofware development (blue) saw early growth until 2016 but decreased in later years, stabilizing in last 3 years and representing a steady amount of professional work.
Startup projects (Green) began to take on a percentage of my time post-2016 and have maintained a steady share of time allocation. This reflects a growing investment in entrepreneurial endeavors alongside my other work commitments.

Year-on-Year Computer Usage Breakdown: Productive vs. Distracting Time

What remains to be tracked? Total Captured vs Unknown Time

While I have come to accept that a certain percentage of my time should be left untracked (largely due to the burden of manual tracking certain activities), I’ll admit that I would prefer to track as much as my time as possible.

If a single week has 168 hours, here is how much of my time is captured and known vs. what is unknown:

Currently, in terms of screentime, here are my two gaps:

Kindle book reading - How much time do I spend reading per year?
Netflix, Streatming, TV and Movie Watching - How much time do I spend watching movies or TV? Even though I don’t own a TV and don’t watch media every day, I still do my fair share of media consumption per year, and I’d love to be able to pull out a snapshot of my weekly Netflix time.

I would also love to better track and now how much time I spend on:

All bodily movement activities including walking
Transportation including by car, airplane or even boat.
Cleaning & Housework
Cooking & Eating
Socializing

I believe some of this might be pulled from Oura or Apple Watch, especially with increasingly more accurate automatic activity detection.

I would love to know how much time I spent with others and socializing. This is believed to be a big part of health and longevity. I suspect that our phones could be used as a proxy for tracking socializing. In the future, one might use some sort of device pings/handshakes, heard voices detection, logged simultaneous connection to home Wifi or something else.

Typical Days & Daily Patterns

How do I spend a typical day? What are some of my daily patterns?

Legend: Design/Comp. | Software Dev | Comm/Schedule | Business

Creative work is a cornerstone of your daily routine, and it is good to see this reflected in my data. In view of my multiple projects and goals, I generally try to compartmentalize my days with clear boundaries for certain tasks and projects. This structured approach helps me maintain focus and manage competing priorities effectively. In these the data charts I see a strong bias towards prioritizing Design/Composition and Software Development, while also ensuring time for Communication/Scheduling and Business which are also crucial for my operational, strategic and executive responsibilities.

A Year in Book Reading: 2024

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Book reading feels like an act of cognitive rebellion in an American society driven by social media and pointess fear-based news. By reading books you are actively engaging the magical act of imagining, world creating and perspective-taking.

Personally, I often feel more relaxed and rested after reading. Book reading is one of my daily nonnegotiables (like exercise, a bit of social time and ideally a good night of sleep). By ensuring I do these key enablers each and every day I can attack my biggest challenges even when they seem pretty overwhelming.

While you can find good ideas and learning anywhere, books are one of the most concentrated forms of knowledge available. If you want to get the full arguments and deepest dive, read a book on that topic. Furthermore, intentional book reading can be key enabler if you want to keep learning and growing as well as a way to explore new ideas and cultures differently.

2024 was another amazing year of book reading for me. According to my reading logs, I read a total of 69 books entailing over 22,937 pages read. This past year the average length of a book I read was about 332 pages. Interestingly for comparison, I read more books in 2023 (79 books) but about the same number of total pages, since my average pages per book was higher. Assuming 300 words per page, that’s nearly 6.9 million words read!

Several years ago, I estimated my general reading speed at around 300 words per minute, even though in reality it varies significantly between page-turning fiction and knowledge-gleaning nonfiction. Regardless, assuming these estimates, I would guesstimate that I spent about 382 hours book reading in 2024 or roughly an hour per day.

Do wanna read more books? My Tip: Read 30 minutes to an hour everyday. How? First, ditch the social media, quit YouTube, and block off your worst phone habits. Then, give yourself the gift of book reading about as often as you want and can. Find a time ideally everyday in the evenings and regularly during the day, perhaps even at lunch.

In this post as part of my year in data, I’d like to review and share a bit about my favorite books from the last year as well as look at a few data visualizations. Hopefully you can find a few inspiring books to read yourself!

FYI – If you are interested in more detailed data logging and tracking practices, I log my reading with Goodreads, Kindle and Instapaper. Data collection and visualization powered by QS Ledger. This post and a few related ones are part of my Year in Data project.

69 books Books Read. 22,937 pages read.

Average book length in 2024: 332 pages

Book Reading Highlights: 3,056 total book highlights

So what were my most commonly highlighted words in 2024?

Top Numbers:

254.7 monthly average
404 most in a month
147 least in a month

Top Highlighted Books:

📊 37.3 average number of highlights per book

249 in The Gifts of Athena
167 in Outlive
144 in Mind Is Flat
136 in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
119 in Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Posthumanities)
102 in True Age
100 in Both/And Thinking
99 in A Brief History of Japan
94 in Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You
92 in The Death of Death
90 in The Courage to Be Disliked
87 in Empire of the Summer Moon
85 in Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs
81 in The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self
80 in Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility
76 in A Little History of Music
71 in Hagakure
67 in How Big Things Get Done
65 in Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya

My 2024 Book Recommendations:

Check out Goodreads for a list of all of the books I read in 2024. Below are a few recommendations on my favorite books and a brief note, quote or thought on each.

(If you are interested in more book recommendations, check out my Recommended Books page.)

Favorite “Made Me Think” Nonfiction Book: The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater

Mind is Flat by Nick Chater argues that we do not possess a mind with hidden depths nor do we possess profound beliefs, desires, and emotions. As he puts it, “There are no mental depths to plumb.” Instead, he posits that our minds and selves are “constructed on the fly” manifesting moment by moment as improvisations influenced by past experiences and the present context. He labels this alternative view as a “flat” model of the mind and posits our brains are dynamic improvisors.

📚 This was a thought-provoking book end-to-end and I wrote up an in-depth book review and books notes you can find here.

Here is one more great quote:

“Conscious experience is therefore the sequence of outputs of a cycle of thought, locking onto, and imposing meaning on, aspects of the sensory world. That is, we consciously experience the meaningful interpretations of the world that our brain creates, seeing words, objects and faces, and hearing voices, tunes or sirens. But we are never conscious either of the inputs to each mental step or each step’s internal workings.” (p 12)

Favorite Novel or Fiction: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

“Books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

Spanning four main plotlines and characters spanning fifteenth-century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and a twenty-second-century intergenerational starship, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antony Doeer is part work of historical fiction and part future, sci-fi imagining. Whether it’s a war, aging, climate change or just finding your place, each of the characters must navigate their own survival and life mission.

The title of the novel and central object linking the storylines and characters is a rediscovered Ancient Greek codex entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land. The fragmentary codex tells the quest of Aethon, who aspires to visit the fabled paradise in the sky. Through a series of misadventures, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow. This final form finally allows him to reach to the gates of the mythical bird city in the clouds.

Each of the main characters offered a unique life story as they overcame challenges and found connection and meaning in the codex through its discovery or re-discoveries and translations. I particularly resonated with Zeno who loses his family and is a POW during the Korean War but finds meaning and connection all the same. I also really enjoyed the perspective of Konstance who is the main character in the future and whose mysterious situation and survival offers a unique surprise at several points.

Like the last book I read by Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See), this book is wonderfully written, offers beautiful details and feels quite immersive, even as it challenges the reader.

2nd Favorite “Made Me Think” Nonfiction Book: Courage to Be Disliked

“Think of life as a series of dots” - Alfred Adler

Based on individual psychology of Alfred Adler, Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga is a dialogue between a youth and an older philosopher on many of life’s most important questions.

Through a series of illustrative exchanges, the book’s characters examine many of Adler’s key concepts as well as laying out a philosophy of self-acceptance, courage to lead one’s own life and an ethical orientation based on contibuting to others. One might even argue it fits in well with Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity.

The Adlerian concept/question of “Whose task is this?” is a central idea. “All interpersonal relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own tasks intruded on.” It is about clarifying boundaries and responsibilities in relationships and can be an empowering ideal for pursuing authenticity and emotional freedom from others.

“There is a simple way to tell whose task it is. Think, ‘Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?’“

While its final messages are simple ones like “living earnestly here and now” and having the “courage to change what we can change,” Adler does not want us to simply accept these ideas without critical inquiry or self-examination. In fact, he is quite skeptical of advice-giving as such and instead encourages each of us attempt to work through these challenging ideas from our own point of view and personal experience and to strive to incorporate the key lessons authentically and fully. Along with “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor E Frankl, I think this book and its underlying philsophy are worth remembering and returning to, especially when depressed, feeling nihilistic or uncertain on purpose

Favorite Sci-Fi Book: Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang

The only source of infinite mental energy is the organ of cognition of a sentient being—that is why we call the energy of gryons mental energy, for consciousness is its greatest generator—and so, an individual of extraordinary mental strength can, by entangling universes with their own mind, jump across universes.”

Imagine a precarious future Earth divided between two factions, an Asia-Pacific League and North American/European Group. Tensions are high with global shattering weapons and spaceships on earth and in orbit. Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang and translated from Chinese by Ken Liu takes this as its opening situation and throws in a mysterious third party that has been influencing Earth’s history, culture and technology for thousands of years.

Centered on a series of mysteries and puzzles, three scientific minds both sides of Earth’s major geopolitical divide navigate a real page turner of modern Chinese sci-fi. While the writing can be a bit tedious at a few points, the core plot is intriguing and offers a fresh take on an alien universe based in Chinese myth and legends. Protagonists must navigate riddles and puzzles rooted within human antiquity as they seek out truths of the universe and avoid impending disasters on their world and galaxies away. They must confront that Earth at its stage of civilization is about to make contact with another at a fair more advanced and potentially deadly stage.

Honorable Mention Sci-Fi Favs

It was tough picking my single favorite so here are a few more sci-fi picks from this year:

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki - Set in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley, this light-hearted read offers transgender main character, explores a strange “Faustian” bargain involving violins and some mysterious new owners at a local donut shop. Super fun and enjoyable.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin - This book involves a lone human emissary to a planet called Winter whose inhabitants pass most of the year genderless and periodically become either male or female. Amazing premise and beautifully written with a core nail-bitting central challenge and plot.
Plum Rain by Andromeda Romano-Lax - Based in Tokyo, the central narrative involves a Filipina elderly care nurse, an intensely private woman about to turn 100 years old and a robot/AI. Intimate and probing looking at what it means to be human, care and what might be ahead for all of us.
The Golden Age by John C. Wright - Set thousands of years in the future in our solar system, humans are immortal and society is an interplanetary utopia. But Phaethon, our main character, is haunted by a crime he committed but whose memory has been erased.
A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe by Alex White - Swashbuckling narrative involving a treasure-seeking space crew. Playful. Easy read.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson - With a dramatic opening scene centered on a very imaginable climate disater, this near future sci-fi book is centered on a new international goverment agency tasks with avoid global calamity. The characters felt a bit flat but the ideas were important ones and made me think of our current near-future of climate crisis differently.

Favorite Historical Fiction: Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

Set in World War II France and based on a Belgian woman named Andrée de Jongh, Nightingale follows two sisters navigating, surviving and resisting German occupation. Set in a provincial town of Carriveau, each sister charts her own path as the war and Nazi occupiers upends French society. The older sister, Vianne, is a more passive resister and survivor, at least initially and become focused on protecting her young daughter and her students at the school she teaches at. Isabelle is the younger and more fightsy woman and decided to take an active role in resisting the occupation.

Beautifully written, Kristin Hannah presents World War II from a female perspective. Characters feel very much alive and real as they face difficult, even impossible, choices during their evolving emotional and moral journeys. Highly recommended!

Fantasy Favorite: Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros is the second book in the The Empyrean Series. The initial story arch covers a first-year student at a fantasy military institute whose chief goal is to train dragon riders. The female protagonist was originally slated to attend the scribe school but her mom, an important military general, forces her to follow in family tradition and her siblings. The book is rather violent and seems like a lot of pointless death at times.

I read both of the first two books this year. I really enjoyed the first book, Fourth Wing, but I felt like it was too similar to other fantasy, school-based novels. Instead, I preferred the second book, which presents more contrast and more tension as society assumptions fall apart and the build up to key battle grows. Some of the additional characters and plot drivers added to the suspense and drama. I quite enjoyed the world building and magic system especially, even though at times the main female character bored me and would have preferred a bit less romance.

Definitely a page-turner and engaging plot and understandably one of the more popular reads this year. Excited to follow this up with the third book coming out soon.

Honorable Mention: Thunderhead - What if AI could solve all problems…

Favorite on Art and Creativity:

In today’s culture, it often feels like we need to first do a bunch of life stuff (like work, answer emails, chores, plan for our next trip, spend family time, etc.) before pursuing the things we truly care about. The book Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratasky challenges this mindset. They cleverly call this the “Busy Bandwagon,” which along with this warn against “Infinity Pools” like social media and endless news feeds that hijack your attention.

The book argues for slowing down and being intentional about what matters most to you and making time for that thing, whatever it is. As Cesare Pavese said, “We do not remember days, we remember moments.” The book offers tons of techniques and a useful overall framework but personally I think the most important component is simply asking yourself: “What’s going to be the highlight of my day?” and then building your day around whatever that is.

As the authors say, “You only waste time if you’re not intentional about how you spend it.”

Honorable Mention: Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You by Ali Abdaal

Favorite Startup/Business/Economics Book: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner

How can we avoid the projects we work on going overtime, overbudget or even failing to be completed?

Only 0.5% of the megaprojects in their (Oxford University) database were completed within budget, within schedule, and with committed benefits

According to How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner, only 0.5% of the megaprojects are completed within budget, within schedule, and with committed benefits. Most megaprojects, including software projects, tend to go “over,” in time, money, resource, etc. This book analyzes many of the reasons why including a bias towards action over thinking.

They offer a different approach based on their own experience. Specifically, they believe small and megaprojects would benefit from better and more detailed planning. For example, “Developing a clear, informed understanding of what the goal is and why—and never losing sight of it from beginning to end—is the foundation of a successful project.” Additionally, they show how important it is to find a good achor or benchmark, because without a good benchmark it becomes difficult to appropriately scope, forecast, and follow a plan:

“See your project as one in a class of similar projects already done, as “one of those.” Use data from that class—about cost, time, benefits, or whatever else you want to forecast—as your anchor. Then adjust up or down, if necessary, to reflect how your specific project differs from the mean in the class. That’s it. It couldn’t be simpler.

Finally, they posit that successful projects benefit from simulation. They specifically look at using architecture software as an aid towards construction but this idea can apply towards most forms of engineering. If you can simulate the project in software, then you have create a high fidelity plan, derisk much of the unknowns and can merely follow the plan acccordingly.

Honorable Mention: The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy by Joel Mokyr

Favorite Philosophy Book: Both/And Thinking by Wendy K. Smith & Marianne Lewis

How do I keep my approach to thinking and decision-making fresh, adaptive and opportunitistc? How can I deal with paradox problems? How do I avoid a local maximum, getting in a rut, etc?

We often attempt to all solve problems using Either/Or thinking. Unfortunately this approach limits our options and some problems especially paradoxes can’t be solved in this way. In Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, Wendy K. Smith & Marianne Lewis offer an alternative approach to think and problem solving that challenges us to navigate certain problems and paradox with curiosity and openness and with the goal of embracing creative tensions.

The book looks at several types of paradoxes but two types reonated with me:

Knotted Paradoxes: These are situations where multiple conflicting forces or tensions are intertwined and reinforce one another, making the paradox more complex and harder to unravel. Think of it like a knot, where pulling on one strand tightens the others.
Nested Paradoxes: These occur when similar types of tensions or contradictions are present across different levels or layers of a system. It’s like a set of nested dolls, where the same pattern of tension repeats at each level, from the individual to the collective, or the micro to the macro.

These kinds of situations can lead to Vicious Cycles, which refers to patterns of thought and behavior that reinforce negative outcomes. These cycles are self-perpetuating, as the strict adherence to a binary mindset (either this or that) leads to decisions and actions that entrench an individual or group in unproductive, harmful, or limiting situations.

While the writing, examples and style can be a bit tedious and academic at moments, the authors argue that part of the problem in previously successful companies and individuals who fail is their inability to operate in two realms at the same time. You may not see it on the horizon but your current strategy or approach to life and business might be entering a plateau or even a dip. “Ruts” often feel like bound by and stuck in either/or thinking. The book offers some interesting mental models and frameworks for overcoming and embracing creative tensions as necessary ingredients towards innovation. In short, not all problems can be solve with one solution over another and demand embracing paradoxal thinking.

Honorable Mention: Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing by Ian Bogost - Is our “human” getting in the way of seeing and knowing certain others as other? How might we formulate an objective oriented phenomenology?

Favorite History Book: Jungle of Stone

“Yet for all its jumbled desolation, the remains left by the natural force of the jungle still displayed delicate tracings and intricate sculptured heads and figures, artistry carved into stone and frozen in time. Set in the overpowering forest, it was bewildering devastation and mystery, too much to grasp in a single take. The two men stumbled through the jungle after José in a state of disbelief. Yet Stephens realized almost immediately that they were in the presence of something extraordinary, something with the potential to change the understanding of history.” (p 67)

Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya by William Carlsen is a lively adventure story about a journey through Central America and re-discovery of one of humanity’s most advanced and now lost civilizations, the Maya.

Part travelogue and part serious biography, the book follows two of archaeology’s most exciting pioneers, American diplomat and amateur archeologist John L. Stephens and British artist and illustrator Frederick Catherwood. They stumble around Guatamala and Honduras in 1839 during the fall of the Central American republic and civil war in Guatamala. Over the next three years, the explorers traveled by mule using local guides and limited clues through the jungles of Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, discovering more than 40 sites filled with ruins. Both got deathly sick and faced much hardship.

“They had come to the end. Tuloom was their last great ghost city, haunted with wonders no less astonishing than those of their first, Copán. Both places were victims of nature, lost to time, and, as with so much of what they had witnessed between, provocative and mystifying.” (p 336)

Upon returning, Stephens crafted the story and Catherwood created the illustrations for what would become one of the best selling books of their era. Their work revealed that the so-called New World also had reached an advanced state of civilization beyond what was previously known to most Americans and Europeans.

I heartly enjoyed reading this book that felt like a real-life Indian Jones, especially since it mapped well with my recent trips to Maya sites in Guatamala, Belize and Mexico (Yucatan).

Favorite Health Science Book: Immune by Philipp Dettmer

Second only in complexity to the human brain and nervous system, the immune system is incredible multi-level defense system. Immune: a Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer takes a deep and informative dive into the all of the cellular systems that protect us from different threats. The book has incredible illustrations and great descriptions to make the key cellular systems understandable and memorable. I especially like the look at both B and T Cells.

Honorable mentions:

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self - Rather than seeking comfort and ease, maybe happiness comes from doing hard things especially in nature?
Vitamin Discoveries and Disasters: History, Science, and Controversies by Frances R. Frankenburg - While the discovery of germ theory is most touted and remember, equaly important were the biochemical and medical discover of essential vitamins and minerals. This book was a fun and weird history on how nutrition has been evolved over centuries and continues to be a key part of modern medicine, research and longevity.

Conclusion and Reflection

One of the central lessons in my favorite “thinking” book of the year, The Mind is Flat, is that we often overestimate how well we understand something. The author calls this the illusion of explanatory depth. Reading, attempting to understand books and different concepts and integrating different pieces of knowledge are one way to avoid this cognitive bias.

I’ll admit that I often finish a book and think I really learned something. Unfortunately when pushed to state what I learned, liked or even what it was about, I draw a blank. By writing either publically or on our own through note-taking and journaling we can overcome this illusion of competence and illusion of actual deep understanding.

I hope these summaries and quotes inspired you to dig deeper, read more and go beyond.

What was your favorite recent read? Or what’s another book I should read based on the ones here?

Got a comment? Send me an email.

There are no mental depths to plumb: Book Notes on The Mind Is Flat by Nick Chater

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nick Chater’s Mind Is Flat challenges several core common-sense notions and beliefs about the nature of our minds and even who we are as cognitive beings. Specifically, the book argues against the idea of a deep subconscious (like an inner self or ego) and presents a novel view of how the mind works.

Chater’s central critique is that we do not possess a mind with hidden depths nor do we possess profound beliefs, desires, and emotions. Instead, he posits that our minds and selves are ‘constructed on the fly,’ manifesting moment by moment as improvisations influenced by past experiences and the present context. Our brains are dynamic improvisors. He labels this alternative view as a “flat” model of the mind.

Chater encapsulates this concept succinctly:

“In this book, I want to convince you that the mind is flat: that the very idea of mental depth is an illusion. The mind is, instead, a consummate improviser, inventing actions, and beliefs and desires to explain those actions, with wonderful fluidity. But these momentary inventions are flimsy, fragmented and self-contradictory; they are like a film set, seeming solid when viewed through the camera, but constructed from cardboard.” (p 9)

This book is profoundly important for anyone who seeks greater self-understanding and believes our brains plays tricks on us worth knowing a bit more about.

Here are my key takeaways and lessons as well as a selection of book notes.

My Quick Take Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? Definitely, I’d recommend this book to science-minded folks seeking an alternative, brain-centered perspective on how we are and how we experience the world.
Would I read it again? Unlikely, though I’ll definitely re-look at parts of this book again as I continue readings on the brain and the self.

What I got out of this book?

Chater leverages research from various fields like psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to critique the idea of hidden mental depths and demonstrate how our brains create meaning sequentially and how our perception of the world is far less rich than we believe.

Among the key lessons I took from the book are the following insights:

Illusion of Depth: “There are no mental depths to plumb.”

What if the surface is all that there is and we merely use our imagine to conjure depth?

One of the most important and initially counterintuitive ideas found in the book is called the “illusion of explanatory depth.” This refers to the phenomenon where people feel they deeply understand something (“I know this deep down”) but struggle to provide coherent explanations when asked.

This phenomenon is especially common in how people overestimate their understanding of complex systems, like how a product experience or business model work. We often assume and justify a deeper understanding based on certain simplified data or generalizations.

“The sense that behaviour is merely the surface of a vast sea, immeasurably deep and teeming with inner motives, beliefs and desires whose power we can barely sense is a conjuring trick played by our own minds. The truth is not that the depths are empty, or even shallow, but that the surface is all there is.” (p 8)

Popular culture, psychoanalysis, etc all imagine that we and our minds possess hidden depths of belief, motive, and subconscious thought. We might even go so far as to label this as a belief in an intangible and everlasting “soul.” To quote:

“No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives’, not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find. It is not hard to plumb our mental depths because they are so deep and so murky, but because there are no mental depths to plumb.”

Chater argues that instead our cognitive activity functions as a flat, improvisational system. According to him, the sense of mental depth is an illusion—a “conjuring trick” of the brain. Rather than plumbing an inner world of pre-existing truths, we generate interpretations and justifications in the moment, much like creating a fictional narrative.

Kuleshov Effect and Contextual Perception

Is what you are seeing, feeling, or thinking tied to a recent event or context?

Named after Russian director Lev Kuleshov, the Kuleshov effect is a cinematic technique that demonstrates how the interpretation of an ambiguous facial expression can be dramatically altered by the context in which it is presented.

Using the same shot of a relatively impassive face of Russian silent film star Ivan Mozzhukhin, Kuleshov intercut the scene with three different images: a dead child in an open coffin, a bowl of soup, and a glamorous young woman reclining on a divan.

Curiously, audiences were impressed by what they perceived as Mozzhukhin’s subtle acting, interpreting his expression as grief when shown with the coffin, hunger with the soup, and lust with the reclining woman. However, the shot of his face remained the same; it was the context of the other images that changed the meaning. This demonstrates that viewers project their own interpretations of emotion onto the face, based on the context provided.

Outside of film, another study used a photo of a US senator at a campaign rally that could either look angry and frustrated when the context of the rally is removed or happy and triumphant within the context of the rally. In this case, the background of a still photograph can also dramatically alter how we “read” a face emotionally.

The Kuleshov effect provides evidence that our emotions are not inherent or pre-existing states within us, but rather are constructed through interpretation. The meaning we derive from expressions or situations is dependent on context. It is similar to how the brain interprets an ambiguous image, like the duck-rabbit, based on its surroundings.

In short, the brain is always looking for the most meaningful interpretation of the available information and that process is heavily influenced by the surrounding context. Likely this “flaw” extends to the limitation in our self-interpretation of our mind’s emotions too.

Just as viewers project meaning onto a character’s expression, we construct interpretations of our own physiological states—like a racing heart or adrenaline surge—based on situational cues, reinforcing the mind’s improvisational nature.

[Summary] Book’s Big Ideas: The Mind is Flat

The mind as an improviser: The mind is not a container of pre-existing beliefs and desires, but a “consummate improviser” that invents actions, beliefs, and desires to explain those actions. This improvisation is fluid, but the inventions are often flimsy, fragmented, and self-contradictory. The mind is constantly interpreting, justifying, and making sense of behavior in the moment.
The “interpreter”: The language-processing system in the left hemisphere of the brain is called the “interpreter” and it “invents” stories about why we do what we do. It is a master of speculation and can have no insight into the origin of choices but invents explanations anyway.
The mind as an impossible object: The mind only has the superficial appearance of solidity. Like impossible objects created by artists, our minds have contradictions and gaps.

[Model/Schematic] Cycle of Thought

How does the mind transform fragmentary sensory input into coherent interpretations and meaning?

Chater describes the brain’s continuous engagement in making sense of sensory input through what he terms the cycle of thought. Consciousness, and thought, appear to be guided sequentially through a narrow bottleneck, with deep, sub-cortical structures searching for patterns in sensory input, memory, and motor output, one at a time. It is during a cycle of thought where the brain creates a meaningful organization of sensory input (or meaningful from disparate thoughts and ideas).

Schemetic/Model

“Our brains are, then, relentless and compelling improvisers, creating the mind, moment by moment.” p 217

Chater provides the following schematic:

Consciousness operates as a sequence of momentary interpretations of sensory input. This diagram illustrates how the mind shifts between sensory inputs from environment (or even your own memories) and creating interpretations and conscious experience.

On Left: Sensory Input (unconscious, unaware)
Upper Arrow: Sense-making / Interpration / Locking Onto Meaning - “The brain locks onto and organizes a fragment of the visual stimulus; we are conscious of, and can report, this organization.”
On Right: Conscious Experience (processed and interpreted input) - We experience only the results of brain computations, not the computations themselves. Our awareness is limited to the “shaded box” (momentary conscious experience). We do not have access to the raw sensory data (on left) or the underlying interpretative processes (upper arrow) that create our experience.
Bottom Arrow: Shifting Attention: The brain struggles to disengage from its current organization and find a new one, allowing for dynamic reinterpretation (lower arrow). This constant movement gives rise to the illusion of a rich, detailed awareness of the world.

To quote: “This cycle is so rapid and fluent that we can have the sense of awareness of a complex object – or even an entire scene, in full detail and colour. Our stream of consciousness is of successive sensory organizations – consciousness is entirely confined to the shaded box. We have no conscious access to the information being picked up by our senses (the left- hand side of the figure) or how that information is interpreted (the curved arrows); or how our brain shifts to lock onto different information, e.g. by shifting our attention (with or without moving our eyes).”

Several key insights follow:

Consciousness is superficial. To quote: “Each cycle of thought delivers a consciously experienced interpretation, but no explanation of where that interpretation comes from” (p 13). There is nothing more to the mind than the fleeting contents of our stream of consciousness. The only thoughts, emotions, and feelings are those that flow through our stream of consciousness. Consciousness is surprisingly sparse and is defined by the interpretations through which we organize sensory experience.
The brain operates by precedents, not principles: Each new cycle of thought makes sense of information by reworking and transforming remnants of past related thoughts. The brain relies on past experiences rather than fixed principles.
“These imaginative jumps are, I believe, at the very core of human intelligence. The ability to select, recombine and modify past precedents to deal with present experience is what allows us to be able to cope with an open-ended world we scarcely understand. The cycle of thought does not merely refer passively to past precedents – we imaginatively create the present using the raw materials of the past.” (p 203)

This cycle explains how our conscious awareness arises moment by moment, through the brain’s ability to organize sensory input into meaningful patterns while seamlessly transitioning to new interpretations.

Critical Questions and Areas for Further Exploration

Personally, I felt the book missed several key biological and mental health considerations:

Question 1: How does “nature” constrain change?

While Chater’s model leans heavily on nurture, it doesn’t adequately address the constraints of biology. For instance, how do epigenetics, genetics, and early environmental influences shape the mental “precedents” we can form? How does our “bounded rationality” interact with our “bounded biology” in shaping who we can become? While the book is optimistic about change, it leaves unanswered questions about the limits imposed by our biological inheritance.

Question 2: How does culture impact cycles of thought?

I appreciated Chater’s description of how perception and interpretation emerge, but the book misses an opportunity to examine the cultural and societal framing of thoughts, ideas, and language. Our thoughts don’t arise in isolation; they are deeply embedded in our cultural and social milieu. If we want to reshape our minds, how does our culture—shaped by the minds of others—support or constrain this process? Moreover, how does culture itself evolve through cycles of collective thought and reinterpretation?

Question 3: Evidence for the neural bottleneck in sensory processing and consciousness.

Nike Chater claims, “Consciousness, and indeed the entire activity of thought, appears to be guided, sequentially, through the narrow bottleneck: deep, sub-cortical structures search for, and coordinate, patterns in sensory input, memory and motor output, one at a time.” This suggests that consciousness and thought are constrained by the brain’s inherent processing limits, with deep brain structures playing a pivotal role in coordinating sensory inputs and outputs. For instance, sensory information is processed through specific pathways like the thalamus and cortical areas, while the prefrontal cortex integrates and prioritizes this information.

Research and subjective experience indicate that the brain operates under significant bandwidth constraints, particularly in conscious awareness. Our ability to consciously and attentionally multi-task is limited. Various attentional studies reveal that humans can only focus on a limited number of stimuli at once, suggesting a natural bottleneck in sensory processing.

Chater’s claim about the neural bottleneck provides a compelling framework for understanding the limits of conscious awareness, particularly the idea that deep sub-cortical structures prioritize and filter sensory input. However, while this model aligns with many findings in neuroscience (an area I’ll need to read more about), the evidence to support this seemed indirect and area I’d like to see more studies on.

Concluding Thoughts

“Yet if the mind is an engine of precedent, continually reshaping past thoughts and actions to deal with the present, then each of us is not just a bundle of character traits, but a rich store of distinctive past experience: we are like corals layered, polyp by polyp, into infinitely diverse forms.” (p 198)

The Mind Is Flat by Nick Chater is one of the more striking books I’ve read in recent years and my top “made-me-think” book of 2024. As an atheist and strict materialist, I’ve long believed we do not possess some inner self or soul. But I’ve struggled to articulate or explain some of the “magic” and “mystery” in our human cognitive experience. A strict reductionist view of the mind feels limited framework to formulate how our minds evolve and how the culture and our collective minds change.

This book challenges the very notion of what we often believe it means to be a self or human, and those critiques can be off-putting to us an individuals. It often feels easier to explain away our poor behavior or negative moods as “just the way we are” and avoid changing. Similarly the search for authenticity is often culturally framed as a quest for finding and following your “true self.” But if we accept Chater’s view of the mind as “flat,” we must reframe our understanding of selfhood and personal growth.

Chater’s metaphor of the mind as an “engine of precedent” offers a powerful alternative. Transformation isn’t about uncovering some hidden inner truth or self but about slowly remodeling the mind through new precedents. This is an idea that aligns with many of personal growth and self-evolution. Chater uses a vivid metaphor to illustrate self-transformation and creation of new thoughts and actions that get laid down layer by layer, like corals building their structure polyp by polyp. This metaphor resonates because it acknowledges our history while emphasizing the possibility for growth and change.

Ultimately, Mind Is Flat is an extraordinary read that challenges its audience to rethink their assumptions about the mind and to take a more active role in shaping the person and brain they wish to become.

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References:

Chater, Nick. (2019). Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain. United Kingdom, Yale University Press.