Who's Writing This
I'm Dave. I'm not a productivity guru, a life coach, or a morning-routine evangelist. I'm a person who has spent the better part of a decade trying to build systems for thinking, working, and living deliberately — and failing at it often enough to have developed some honest opinions about what actually works.
DaveLog is where I write those opinions down. It's a record of experiments: things I've tried, data I've collected, systems I've built and abandoned, and the occasional insight that survived long enough to be worth sharing. Everything here is self-tested. Nothing is sponsored. I have no course to sell you.
Why This Blog Exists
Most personal development content falls into one of two traps. It's either inspirational to the point of uselessness ("just believe in yourself!") or it's so systematized that it loses the human ("here's my 47-step morning protocol"). I wanted to write something in the middle: practical enough to act on, honest enough to trust, and humble enough to admit when the advice didn't work.
So that's the deal. I run experiments on myself. I track the results. I report what happened — including the parts where I quit, cheated, or was wrong. If that's useful to you, I'm glad. If it's not, there are no hard feelings.
What I Believe
Systems over goals
Goals are destinations. Systems are vehicles. A good system gets you somewhere even when the goal changes — and it always changes.
Honesty over hype
I'd rather report a failed experiment accurately than sell you a success story that didn't happen. Every article includes what didn't work.
Small over big
The habits that changed my life were all small. The dramatic overhauls all failed. I trust compounding tiny changes over betting on transformation.
Tested over theory
If I haven't tried it for at least 30 days, I won't write about it as if I know it works. Opinions are cheap. Data is harder.
How to Use This Site
If you're new, start with Experiments — those are the most data-driven pieces. If you're looking for something practical, try The One-Page Life System or Building a Morning Routine. If you want something reflective, The Stoic Evening Reflection is a good entry point.
I publish roughly weekly. If you'd like to keep up without checking back, there's a newsletter on the homepage — one email each Sunday, no spam, no urgency.
Get in Touch
If you have a question, a correction, or an experiment you'd like me to try, the contact page is the way in. I read everything, though I can't always reply quickly. I'm genuinely interested in where these methods work for other people and where they fall apart — the failures are often more instructive than the successes.