Record
The smallest instrument worth keeping.
Reading changes nothing by itself. Four items, once a day, sixty seconds. Anything longer stops being filled in, and a protocol you will actually run beats a validated one you will not.
| Item | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Hours slept | Affect regulation and next-day cognition. Almost every other reading is contaminated without it. |
| Valence, -2 to +2 | Core affect, the ingredient Barrett's account says emotions are built from. |
| Load, 0 to 10 | How much of the day was demanded by someone else. The autonomy term in self-determination theory. |
| One line: what you did that you would do again | Categorical desire, in Williams's sense: the part of the day you would repeat if you could. |
Rules
No streaks. No scores. No weekly average shown as a grade. Missing a day is data about the protocol, not about you. Once a month, read the four columns together and write one sentence: what changed. That sentence is the only output.
Why four and not forty
Sleep, affect, autonomy and repetition are the four variables that the rest of this corpus keeps returning to: James on what you attend to, Barrett on what affect is made of, Frankfurt on what you want to want, Wolf on engagement with something worth engaging. A forty-item inventory measures the author's theory. Four items measure whether you are living the week you think you are.
A seven-day sheet
Copy this into whatever you keep, or print it. This page has no script and no storage, so the sheet lives wherever you put it and nothing about it reaches this server.
| Day | Hours slept | Valence -2..+2 | Load 0..10 | One line: what you would do again |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||
| 2 | ||||
| 3 | ||||
| 4 | ||||
| 5 | ||||
| 6 | ||||
| 7 |
At the end of the seven days, read the four columns together and write one sentence: what changed. If the sheet is empty, that is the finding. The protocol did not survive a week, and that is information about the protocol rather than about you.
Where it goes
This page has no form and stores nothing. The instrument belongs in your own record, on your own plane, not on a public page. Keep it wherever you keep private notes.