Effective Way to Track your Progress

Hey all!

I'd love to say I'm new to NoFap, but the sad truth is that I've been coming here on and off for a long time, deluding myself of the intent to recover. But anyway, that's a post for another time. Something I find very important for the recovery process is being able to properly track your progress. There are several ways to do this, common ways being diaries or streaks.

While both have their benefits, I don't particularly find both fitting for my situation and have so developed a new way to sort of merge them together. It tackles the disadvantage that streaks have by being a very vague representation of your recovery - simply a number that doesn't reveal how well you've been getting on with your urges. And it also tackles the disadvantage that journals have in not making your progress very clear - you would have to go through your entries for the month or so, and then inspect them to determine your progress.

At the same time, it includes the advantages that journals have in revealing your progress, so how well you've been coping/improving with your urges. And also includes the advantage of streaks in the sense that they give a way to measure your progress in a holistic, though not complete, sense.


So here it is:

1. It is a line graph of your streaks vs. the date.

2. For each day, you also have the option to say how you're day was in terms of urges. E.g. whether you relapsed, dealt with urges "poorly" (definition up to user), "ok", etc.

3. You can also see automatically generated summary statistics of your progress (e.g. how many relapses per week on avg., how many relapses per month on avg., how many relapses this month so far etc.). This can be customizable also.


The effective part of it is that it includes some, though perhaps not all, of the advantages for diaries and also tackles its disadvantages too. The same holds for streaks. It is also efficient in the sense that I have created an .exe file that prompts my entries for each day by asking questions such as the date, streak no., how the day was etc. And this all takes no more than 5 minutes tops, if time is something you are struggling with (though you should be careful with this as real recovery requires real time and sacrifice at the end of the day).


Here is a model of what it would look like (picture below). "Relapse 2" indicates two relapses in one day, and the black dots are individual days. The lines between dots represents how well I have coped with urges on the rightmost day. It is my progress from December up to today (yes, I am going through a rough time right now).




Let me know what you guys think of this (ideally in the poll) . If you would like to use it, then I can send instructions for how to set it up, though it might take a little bit of time if you have no experience with programming. If enough people say they like it, I may try and implement it (whether that is through a feature request or otherwise).


NOTE:

. I have still to add the summary statistics part, though that'll be very quick.

. I can also include visual ways of setting goals on the line graph - that's something I will be adding for the future.

. I am aware that there seems to be some progress tracker out there already that do similar stuff. If any do the exact same thing, let me know because there's no point in me trying to develop this! At the same time, I don't believe there's any on the NoFap site like this, so having it directly here would be very useful I think.

 

*helpful in the poll question.

 

@Trailblazer7 Thanks bro.