The Parva Journal
Patterns & tracking
Check-ins, personal baselines and what a pattern is evidence of — including the limits of reading your own data.
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7 articles
What makes a check-in worth the minute it takes
Most check-ins collect the wrong things. What a clinician can actually use, why free text beats a slider, and the four fields that do most of the work.
What a personal baseline is, and why a population average is not one
"Is a 5 out of 10 bad?" is unanswerable. "Is a 5 unusual for you, and when did it stop being unusual?" is the question a personal baseline exists to answer.
Tracking without making things worse
Self-monitoring can measurably worsen the symptoms it measures. The mechanisms are known, and so is the version of tracking that avoids them.
How to read your own data without fooling yourself
Five errors that make self-tracking produce confident wrong answers, and the discipline that avoids each one.
How often to check in, and when to stop
More data is not better data. What determines a useful frequency, why daily is usually wrong, and how to recognise when tracking has stopped earning its place.
Bringing a pattern to an appointment
How to turn weeks of notes into the paragraph that changes what an appointment can be — and why the raw log is not the thing to hand over.
Two things moving together is not one causing the other
The most seductive error in self-tracking. Why a clean correlation in your own data is a reason to look rather than a conclusion, and what would be needed to do better.