Guide/Trials

09Trials

A habit is something you’ve already decided to keep doing.

A lot of the time, you haven’t decided yet. Should the magnesium stay? Does no coffee after noon change your evenings? Is a morning walk in the sun worth getting up for? The honest answer is: try it for a while and see.

So let’s make that a first-class thing too: a trial. A trial has a name, optional details (4 tbsp/day), an optional hypothesis (better regularity), a start day — and, eventually, a verdict: Adopted, Dropped, or Inconclusive.

Start one in App Menu→Extras→Trials:

Assume adhered. The obvious design for a trial is a daily checkbox: did you do it today? We went the other way. A trial assumes you kept it up every day, unless you say otherwise. You only act on the exceptions: mark a day missed, from Day End or from the trial itself.

A daily checkbox turns an experiment into a chore. And a skipped checkbox is ambiguous — did you skip the psyllium, or just skip opening the app? With assume-adhered, the record says what you meant: it ran, except on the days you said it didn’t.

When you’ve seen enough, pick a verdict. The trial ends and moves to Past as history. Change your mind later, and you can restart it as a new run under the same name.

A trial is a span of days, not a moment, so it doesn’t belong on a time-of-day chart. Instead it gets a row in the Metrics grid — green while it runs, a red ✕ on the days you missed — right next to your sleep, energy, and whatever else you’re watching:

We won’t tell you whether it worked — that’s yours to judge. What TriLog does is keep an honest record of when the trial ran, on the same timeline as everything else you logged, so you can look at what else changed while it did.

And, like everything else, a trial is a line of text:

→ BACK TO THE GUIDE — NEXT: DAY END

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