In last week's video,
we talked about the concept of biological prime time,
which basically explains how there's a time of the day
when your energy levels and your ability
to focus and manage your attention
are at their absolute peak, and if you can figure out
what your biological prime time is,
and it is different for everyone,
we all vary in that regard,
then you can start to manage your schedule
a little bit differently, and you can try to schedule
your most intellectually demanding and challenging work
to coincide with your biological prime time,
so hopefully you're bringing your A game
when you get it done.
But that begs the question, how do you figure out
when your biological prime time is
if it changes for everyone?
This was a really common question
that I got in the comments from last week's video,
and one method that you can employ to figure it out
is to do an experiment where, for maybe a week or two weeks,
you track your energy levels for every waking hour.
And when I went out looking for a system to build this,
I figured there'd be an app or something
that someone had already set up, but there really wasn't.
So I had to build it myself,
and in this video I'm gonna teach you how you can build
your own, easy to use energy tracker system.
There's a little bit of setup involved,
but I think I've done a lot of the heavy lifting for you,
and once it's set up, you're basically gonna get something
where you can open your smartphone,
open a link to a Google form,
basically just hit one button to tell it your energy,
and that is going to feed data
into a graph that will, in real time,
start to average your energy levels.
And after a week or two weeks,
you're gonna be able to see your average energy level
at each hour of the day,
and you can use that to start making decisions.
So if you're on board and you wanna try this,
let's dive in and build it.
All right, so the first thing you're gonna wanna do
is go over to my spreadsheet template,
which you'll find linked down in the description
or in the companion blog post for this video,
and you're gonna go to "File" and make a copy
so you have your own copy of this spreadsheet
which you can edit.
So now this copy of the spreadsheet
will be on your Google Drive.
You'll see it's called "Copy of Hourly Energy Tracker."
You can rename that to whatever you want,
but the most important thing you wanna do right now
is to create a new version of Results Sample,
which is where you're going to have
your actual energy data recorded.
So we'll just click here and go to "Duplicate."
And now you'll have a copy of Results Sample.
I'm just gonna go ahead and rename this to "Results."
And this will be mine.
Now, right now it's filled with sample data,
which is taken from Responses Sample,
and this is just a bunch of completely random data,
it's not actually accurate,
but eventually you're going to get rid of this
and it's gonna start filling in with your own data over time
as you track your energy.
So, now let's go over to Google.com/forms
We're gonna click this "Go to Google Forms" button.
And then we're going to create a blank new form.
Let's call this form "Energy Tracker,"
and the one question on it will be
"What's your current energy level?"
And this is built so you can enter data as fast as possible.
Now for the options, you can really name them
whatever you want, but you wanna make sure
the first character is a number.
And I'm gonna go ahead and use a one to four scale,
because I think one to 10 is a bit too much
for tracking your energy levels.
Once you've got your options entered in,
let's go ahead and make this question required,
and then let's head over to the "Responses" tab
where we're going to link this up to our spreadsheet copy.
So click this green button here, and then we'll select
an existing spreadsheet, and we're gonna use
Copy of Hourly Energy Tracker right here.
And now you're gonna see a new tab
added to that spreadsheet,
which is gonna be called Form Responses 2 at this point.
Now here's where it gets a little bit technical,
but if you follow along it should be pretty easy.
You go over to your Results tab,
you're going to notice that in Cell A2,
we're using a arrayformula and value and hour
to grab the responses and track them here.
Now the reason we have to do this is because Google Forms
actually adds new rows to the spreadsheet
when responses are sent in.
It doesn't just fill in the existing rows,
so we can't put some formulas in here
and have then track the data that way.
We have to actually have a different sheet over here
using arrayformula to watch the Responses sheet
and copy the data over, and then we can do operations on it,
like get the averages and graph it.
So let's go over here to this new Form Responses 2 tab.
We're gonna rename it to "Responses."
And the last part of this is
we're going to go over to Results,
we're going to edit the arrayformula, and all we're gonna do
is change the sheet that it's referencing to Responses,
which will make everything disappear.
And the last thing we'll do
is do the exact same thing over in the B column.
And now you're gonna have a bunch of zeros
and a bunch of divide by zero errors here
because you don't have any data
currently in your Responses tab.
But as you enter your data through the next week or so
as you're doing the experiment,
the data is gonna be ported over here,
and you're eventually going to get a nice looking graph
that looks like this, except for it will be accurate
to your energy levels.
From there you're gonna wanna open your form on your phone
so you can save the link to it on your home screen.
So let's click "Send,"
and then we're going to click this little link icon
and shorten the URL, and then copy the URL you get,
not this one, but the one that you get,
and send it to yourself via email or via Facebook
or any way that you can use to get it on your phone.
Once you've got your form pulled up on your phone,
you're gonna wanna click this middle icon here
and then hit "Add to Home Screen"
so you can basically create an app out of this form.
And if you're on an Android phone,
I'll have a link in the description for a way to do this,
because I don't own an Android phone myself,
but it's pretty simple.
And from there, the only thing left to do
is to set up some sort of system
to remind you to enter your energy data
every single hour.
Now I actually looked into this,
and there are not a whole lot of apps on the iPhone
that can tell you to do something every single hour
without a lot of setup, so I ended up
going with a very simple app called EveryHour,
which will simply make your phone
beep or vibrate every single hour,
and you can actually set a bounded time period
so it only happens between, say, six and 10pm.
And if you're on Android, you can use the Blip Blip app,
and there's a lot of other apps out there,
but this is the one I found,
and since I don't have an Android phone,
it gets my tentative recommendation.
So to give you a quick demonstration of how this works,
I'm gonna go ahead and enter some data into the form here,
and let's just go with a four and submit it.
And if we check out our spreadsheet here,
we can see we've got a time stamp and a response,
and if we check out our Results tab
we're gonna see that data has been ported over,
it's starting to be averaged,
and we have a single point of data,
which, as you enter more, will turn into a graph.
And that's all there is to it.
So once you've got the system built
and then you've entered data in
for maybe a week or two weeks,
at that point you're gonna have a really good idea
of when your individual biological prime time is,
and from there you can start
making changes to your schedule so that
your most intellectually challenging and difficult work
is done right at those highest energy time periods,
and hopefully as a result, your work output will be better
and you'll be happier while you do that work.
Once again, you can find that link
to my spreadsheet template down in the description,
and there's a couple of other things
you're gonna find down there as well.
Number one, you'll find a link to the companion article
for this video, which has step by step instructions
for the whole process.
So check that out if you need
some clarification on anything.
And number two, there's gonna be a link to a thread
in the College Info Geek community over on Reddit,
where I would love to hear
either improvements to this system
or maybe different approaches you might have,
and I would also love to hear your results
from doing this experiment if you choose to.
With that being said, I'm gonna go ahead
and close this video out.
Hopefully you found it helpful, and if you did,
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