Experiment: ChatGPT as Diary

And life coach, and data analyst, and accountability partner, and...

I have a few new year’s resolutions. One is to write an article a week; this, my first article of the year, is about another of them.

Many years ago I came up with this idea called the energy journal, where you’d record your energy level and mood on a 1-5 scale every hour every day, along with what you ate and maybe other stuff you did, in order to find correlations. Like, I found my energy was higher after low-carb meals. That old article (nearly a decade old now!) still gets a lot of hits to this day.

A few months ago I started doing a simplified version of that again, and got some interesting insights from it: I’m extremely prone to food coma earlier in the day, to the point where breakfast and lunch need to be small with limited carbs, but I can eat almost anything in the evening without knocking myself out. I don’t know why, nor if this is a stable characteristic of mine or if I’m just that way because eating most of my food in the evening is what my body has gotten used to.

Anyway, as tends to happen, I quickly thought of a better version of this: keep the journal in ChatGPT.

I had already been playing with the idea of basically giving ChatGPT control of my life for a month– letting it plan out my schedule, make all decisions for me like what I should eat today, etc. It turns out this doesn’t work very well because feeding it enough info to make those decisions— like how long each item on my to-do list should take, or telling it what the options are as far as food—is more work than just doing that myself.

Instead I’m combining that idea with the energy journal. ChatGPT is great at data analysis and people also find it to be surprisingly useful as a therapist. Also, there’s a lot of value in just having someone, anyone, to hold you accountable and give you a kick in the pants when you’re not being as productive as you want, or not sticking to your resolutions, or just generally being unhealthy.

Essentially, I’m using a conversation with ChatGPT as a diary. I record what I eat, what I do, my schedule for the day, and so on. Also morning, afternoon and evening I record my energy level, mood, stress, whatever I want to measure, from one to five. ChatGPT has a few instructions here:

Act as accountability partner, pushing me to stick to my commitments and get my tasks done.

Act as life coach, helping me make better decisions.

Act as a data analyst, looking for patterns. I have way too many days where I feel like shit and get very little done, and I also occasionally have days where I’m completely firing on all cylinders. The causes of the bad days are sometimes known to me and sometimes not, but the causes of the best days are still completely unknown to me.

I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks, inconsistently, most of which was spent on vacation, and I just started quantifying my energy level and so on three times a day starting today. I haven’t had a “flow state, firing on all cylinders” day yet, and I assume it would need a few weeks of data to do much analysis off of anyway. So thus far, ChatGPT has mostly just listened and been mildly supportive.

Now that it’s the new year and my resolutions are in force, it has instructions to be a bit tougher on me. But I notice I haven’t needed that much. Just knowing I’ll have to report my failures to anyone– even a chatbot– motivates me to be more disciplined.

I’ll provide updates in the future about how this works out for me. My hope is that I can eventually identify a repeatable method for having those 5/5 days several times a week.

Before that, I just want to avoid having so many 1/5 and 2/5 days, and so far I already seem to be making progress on that. I actually got sick a couple days ago, and still feel a little under the weather today, so just having gotten this article written (and a few other things I did today as well) despite having that excuse is an improvement over my productivity habits circa 2024.

If anyone wants to try this with me, please say so in the comments! I’m going to ask a few friends who are into AI if they want to do it too. Right now my rough plan is to provide updates every month or so.