Experiments

Skill trackerHours you cannot count
are hours you will not defend.

Learning has a measurement problem. Progress is real but slow, and the day-to-day signal is dominated by how well the last session went, which is mostly noise. So people abandon skills at the exact point where the plateau is normal, because there is nothing in view except a bad Tuesday.

Free, no sign-up. Saves in your browser, downloads as a PDF or a spreadsheet, and imports into EvyOS in one click.

The skills

Two or three. A fourth halves the rate of all of them.

SkillLevel nowWhat the next level can doHours so far

The practice log

What you did, not how long you sat there.

DateSkillWhat you practisedMinutes

The resources

The course, the book, the project. Finished or abandoned, both worth recording.

ResourceForStateWorth it?

The practice week

Skill is a function of frequency far more than of session length.

1234567891011121314Done0/140/140/14

Everything you type is saved in this browser only. Fill in a row or two and the download and import options will have something to work with.

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✦ How to use it

Three things that make it work.

1
Write where you actually are

Honestly and coarsely. Five levels is enough resolution to see a year of movement.

2
Define the next level

The specific thing you cannot do yet. That sentence is your practice plan.

3
Log the hours

Roughly is fine. The total is what carries you through the plateau.

A tracker fixes this by making the accumulation visible. Forty logged hours is an argument against your own impression of standing still. The level column does the same job at a coarser resolution — moving from "can follow a tutorial" to "can build without one" is a real event and easy to miss if nobody wrote down where you started.

One row per skill, with the resources you are actually working through. Two or three skills at once; more than that and none of them accumulate fast enough to feel like anything.

✦ The limit

A plan is not a record.

This page holds what you intend. It cannot tell you what you did, because nothing on it knows whether the checkpoint on the fourteenth happened, whether the habit ran for nine days or two, or which goal has quietly not moved since March. That is the honest limit of every template, printed or otherwise, and if it has never bothered you then this one is yours for free for good.

EvyOS is the same structure with the work recorded against it. Send this sheet across and the goals, checkpoints and habits arrive as real records with their dates — then progress comes from what you tick off rather than from you remembering to come back and update a slider.

Questions

Skill tracker, answered.

Two seriously, three if one is nearly maintenance. The constraint is not interest, it is frequency: a skill practised twice a week improves, and one practised every ten days mostly re-covers ground you have forgotten.
No, and precision is not the point. The total exists to argue with your impression of having made no progress, and it does that job just as well if it is approximate.
They are the Dreyfus stages, roughly: following instructions, working with support, working independently, working fluently, and teaching or extending the field. The exact boundary matters less than having written down where you were in January.
Because abandoning a course is usually information about the course rather than about you, and a year later you will not remember which of the three you tried was the one that was actually bad.
Each skill becomes a skill record with practice logged against it and the hours totalled automatically, the resources become tasks, and the practice cadence becomes habits. The log stops being something you maintain by hand.

Keep the plan.
And the record of doing it.

Goals, projects, tasks, habits and skills in one system, with the work logged against what it belonged to.

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