The Bug Book 🪲
On studying yourself to learn what you need
Hello, friends! I’m thinking today about the purpose of observation and recording, writing down your notes regularly. You might call it journaling. You might call it a diary. You might call it Morning Pages. Why do we do it? What does it help?
The Day One app (a nifty, simple app) surveyed its users recently to ask this very question: “Why do you journal?”
They answered:
41% – capture memories, preservation
26% - emotional regulation, stress relief
14% - organization
13% - creative expression
5% - other
I found this fascinating. The main reason is the classic purpose of journals and diaries: Record history. Preserve the Day. Save the Memories.
But the second cited reason is more interesting to me because it focuses on our health. We all have a human, physical need to process experiences and emotions (as emotions are bodily experiences) and to clear out the jumble of rushing thoughts.
This is why I do Morning Pages, three-ish pages of rambling words: Because I noticed how clear my brain feels after this seemingly pointless spillage of thoughts through little black serif letters. It wasn’t pointless, after all: It was a tidying of my mind to ready for the day ahead.
Illustrator and creative ponderer Adam Ming asked this question recently, too, in his newsletter:
If you journal or do Morning Pages or any kind-of-daily processing or recording of your day, why do you do it?
You’ll see I added another option here, one missing from the Day One survey: To learn about yourself.
That notion came from author and business thinker Jim Collins (you may have heard of his Good to Great series?), who explained a quirky tool on the Tim Ferriss podcast that I wanted to share with you.
As one point, early in his career, Jim was trying to figure out what to do with his life (like, well, all of us, at all stages!).
So he decided to observe himself, daily, in a detached way, as if he was observing a bug.
A bug named Jim.
He explained:
“I used to have a little book called the Bug Book, where I’m the bug and I’m studying the bug called Jim. That’s how I figured out where I was going to go in life.”
He would simply notice that he really enjoyed doing.
One day, he had to give a presentation about how network computers worked, which involved a deep dive into understanding them and creating a way to explain it well.
He realized:
Wow, that was really fun, to figure it out, to figure out how to conceptualize it, to figure out how to put it in concepts everybody could understand, to share it with everyone, to teaching it. My Bug Book — what I’m then writing: “The bug Jim really loves making sense of something difficult, breaking it down into understandable pieces, and teaching it to others.” It was an observation in the journal. The other thing might be something like, “The bug Jim would really languish if he had to spend a lot of time in senseless meetings. This is not good.”
From his Bug Book observations, Jim eventually came around to deciding to go back to a university to teach, which set him on the path to studying why companies succeed or fail, which turned into his life’s work.
I wonder what would happen if we started observing ourselves in this way?
Detached, curious, non-judgmental.
Just noticing.
The Bug Brianne enjoyed meeting a new person for coffee today. She had a dozen ideas around how they could raise money for the school library. Her happiness levels were also higher the rest of the day.
Or
The Bug Brianne can be grumpy when she is tired.
Or
The Bug Brianne misses lunch if she doesn’t have something already prepared and ready to go.
There is research around what happens when we think of ourselves in the third person. Our brain we orients. It’s like we are considering ourselves as a friend, someone we can perhaps see more clearly and with more compassion.
Apart with his Bug Book observations from decades ago, Jim Collins now uses a different daily tool. At the end of each day, he opens a spreadsheet with three cells for the day.
In the first cell, he writes a short description of the day.
“… actually the very best days don’t have much in it at all. They are: ‘Got up early, two hours of really great creative work, breakfast with [wife] Joanne, five hours creative work, work out, nap, three hours of creative work, enjoyed dinner with Joanne, bed.’ That’s like a great day. But other days are full of lots of other choppy things. And so what I tend to do is try to capture a bit of what happened this week, what happened with the main tasks of the day. If there were some really interesting conversations that happened or something that hit in those. I’ll notes those. They’re markers so that I can always go back and I’ll just share with you how I use those in a minute because I actually do these correlations with all of that.”
In the second cell, he records the number of creative hours in that day. His goal is to hit more than 1,000 in any 365 days.
In the third cell, he evaluates the day. A great day gets +2, a good day +1, a not-so-good day -1, a bad day -2.
This is interesting because it begins to capture how we feel in real time, rather than perhaps skewed view of our lives.
Jim explained:
“… all of us have dark times, difficult times. All of us have good times, right? But here’s an interesting thing I noticed, which is that if you’re kind of going through a funk, it colors your whole life. And you tend to think your whole life is a funk because you’re looking through that lens.
And so I thought, ‘But actually I feel like my life is really pretty good.’ But when you’re in that other place, it doesn’t feel that way, right? And so what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is plus two, plus one, zero minus one, minus two. And the other thing I put in — and the key on all this, by the way, is you have to do it every day in real time. You can’t five days later look back and say, ‘How did I feel that day?’ And what this is, is a totally subjective ‘How quality was the day?’ A plus two is a super positive day.
… It might’ve been a day of a really hard rock climb. It might’ve been a day of really hard writing. But it felt really good, right? It might’ve been a day of an intense conversation, but really meaningful with a friend or something. But what it adds up to is a plus two. Plus one is another positive day. Zero is meh. Minus one is kind of a net tone negative. And minus two is, those are bad days, right? And you put it in before you go to bed because if you try to remember, if I were to ask you Tim, right now, 17 days ago, or even five days ago to give the score, you’re going to be distorted by how you’re feeling today.”
Listen to the full interview or read the full transcript between Jim and Tim.
All of this makes me think:
What clues are there waiting around for us to pick up?
What patterns and signs do we have sitting around waiting for us to notice?
The first step of any change is awareness — noticing what is, what could be better, what might help.
As you might have guessed, I’ve started a Bug Book. Maybe you might, too?
To our journeys,
Brianne