I started collecting data for my first Graph of Life towards the end of 2009. Back then, consistency was nowhere near the top of my agenda. I just wanted to understand which aspects of my life had the biggest positive or negative impacts. 

The main findings from almost 10 years of data are as follows (more details can be found here): 

• Healthy eating and exercise really are as important as everyone says. Healthy eating habits affected my life more than any other factor. 
• Productivity was not far behind. It was particularly interesting how strongly the number of items I ticked off on my to-do list correlated with the overall quality of my day. 
• My stress levels and my stuttering problem both had surprisingly small influences on the quality of my day. This was a great relief.
• I tended to have multi-day or even multi-week good or bad spells. Yesterday is a good predictor of what today will look like. 

The last point is particularly important. Positive or negative streaks have disproportionately large impacts. And these streaks can be controlled through things like diet, exercise and to-do listing.

It certainly took me long enough, but this data finally made me appreciate the power of consistency.

My consistency obsession is still less than a year old, but this year’s data already shows wonderful effects. On average, I now get almost twice as much out of every day as I used to. This is a massive improvement!

It’s also the reason I started this blog. This stuff just has to be shared 🙂

The Graph of Life won’t turn every day into sunshine and roses. What it will do though is to quickly bail you out of potential tailspins and cheer you on as you embark on upwards spirals.

It really is very simple: if you spiral up much more than you spiral down, your life will be awesome. 

The Graph of Life can give you that. I really hope you let it 🙂

See you tomorrow for this weeks wrap-up!