I just rediscovered an interesting and very simple LLM experiment I did about a year ago. I asked ChatGPT the following simple question

“This if just a bit of a fun request (but also an exercise in self-reflection): if I would start a cult, based on everything you know about me, what would the 3–6 commandments of that cult be?”

ChatGPT happily obliged (starting with “Alright Max, let’s say you’ve finally cracked and decided the only logical next step is to start a cult (or, let’s frame it more generously — “a high-agency intentional community centered around a shared philosophy”).” and came up with these six commandments:

1. Thou Shalt Create Before Consuming
   Inspiration is sacred. The first energy of each day must be directed toward making something that didn’t exist yesterday — be it code, prose, rhythm, or insight. Consumption without creation is heresy.
2. Thou Shalt Worship at the Altar of Autonomy
   Meaningful work begins with a sense of agency and alignment. Work is holy when energy and values converge.
3. Thou Shalt Honor the Sabbath Daily
   Strategic rest is not a break from productivity; it is the soil from which true brilliance grows. Mandatory daily rituals include breathwork, long walks, and digital disconnection.
4. Thou Shalt Measure Thy Heart, Not Thy Output
   The truest metrics are within: HRV, breath cadence, and nervous system balance. OKRs and KPIs are but shadows on the cave wall.
5. Thou Shalt Craft for the Few, Not Perform for the Many
   Seek not virality. Build what your 10–100 kindred spirits will weep to receive. Their clarity sharpens the product. Their joy scales it to millions.
6. Thou Shalt Transcend the Cult Itself
   The final teaching: burn the doctrine. All systems are scaffolding for the next stage. When you feel called to evolve, do so — creatively, intentionally, and with your own manifesto.

I also liked its closing statement: “Let me know if you want to write the cult’s onboarding guide, lexicon of sacred terms, or design the robe aesthetics (spoiler: it involves breathable merino wool and embedded biosensors).”

I’d be curious to hear about your cults! Try the exact same prompt with your favourite (memory-enabled) LLM of choice, and share in the comments!

One interesting side note: the above was based on GPT-4o, the state of the art at the time. I tried the same again just now with both GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8, and to be honest, while still interesting, both were a lot less playful and fun than what I got from this now “ancient” model (especially GPT-5.5 was very dry, Claude still kept a bit of humour).

[TL;DR: You can try ApexFlow here.]

Motorsport lives on data. Speed traces, throttle inputs, braking points, G-forces, tire temperatures, and much, much more. Modern racing — whether in the sim or in real life — gives us huge amounts of continuous data streams. We can see exactly what the car did and in what state it was at every point on the track.

But there’s always been a missing piece: what’s happening inside the driver?

I’ve been sim racing for years, and also got my first real-world track experiences last year. I’ve spent countless hours studying telemetry, watching onboards, and trying to optimize my driving line.

But my driving state, that’s a different matter. Why did some sessions feel so effortless and calm — while also being fast and free of incidents — and others were barely contained chaos or saw me making one mistake after another?

Questions like these, combined with my multi-year experience of building Yudemon into a successful HRV biofeedback app, led me to create ApexFlow — an entirely new offering within the Yudemon family.

What is ApexFlow?

ApexFlow combines physiological data from a chest strap sensor with racing telemetry, letting you explore how your internal state relates to what happens on track.

It’s not a coaching tool that promises to make you a faster or better driver (at least not yet). It’s an exploration tool — a way to see patterns you might not notice otherwise. Where does your heart rate spike? How quickly do you recover after an intense sequence of corners? Is there a difference in your physiology between practice and race sessions?

These are questions I’ve always been curious about, and now there’s a way to explore them.

ApexFlow is currently available for iRacing, with plans to expand to real-world telemetry very soon.

What You’ll Discover

Before diving into the details, here’s a taste of what ApexFlow can show you:

Physiology meets telemetry. See your heart rate, HRV and other physio metrics overlaid with speed, throttle, brake, and G-forces — all synchronized to track position. Each thin line is an individual lap; the bold line is the average. It’s a familiar view for anyone who’s looked at racing telemetry, but now with a physiological dimension.

Track heatmaps. Compare any two metrics side by side — heart rate vs. HRV state, speed vs. G-force, whatever you’re curious about. You can immediately see which corners consistently elevate your heart rate.

ApexFlow automatically identifies high-demand sections of the track (based on G-forces) and measures how your HRV responds and recovers through each one. This is still experimental — I’m refining how it works — but it’s a first step toward making the data more actionable.

Getting Started

If you want to try ApexFlow, the Getting Started page has everything you need: download links, setup instructions, and a walkthrough of what to expect.

The short version: you’ll need a Windows PC, a Bluetooth heart rate sensor (I recommend the Polar H10), and iRacing. The data collection happens through a small desktop app, and everything else lives in the web dashboard.

The Desktop App: Collecting Your Data

The ApexFlow desktop app handles the data collection during your racing sessions. It’s designed to stay out of your way — set it up once, and it runs quietly in the background while you drive.

Connect your sensor. The app scans for Bluetooth devices and lets you select your heart rate sensor. A quick note: right now it shows all Bluetooth devices, not just HR sensors, so you’ll need to pick the right one from the list. Once connected, you’ll see your live heart rate and RR intervals (the time between consecutive heartbeats) in real-time.

Record your session. Click “Start Recording” before you head into your iRacing session. The app captures your RR intervals (the time between heartbeats) throughout your driving. When you’re done, click “Stop Recording.”

Upload with one click. The app automatically watches for iRacing telemetry files (.ibt) created during your recording window. Select the files you want to include and click “Upload to ApexFlow.” The processing usually takes anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes depending on session length.

Once processing is complete, your session appears in the web dashboard, ready to explore.

A note on installation: The app isn’t code-signed yet, so Windows will show security warnings when you first install it. This is normal for independent software. The Getting Started page has detailed instructions for working through these warnings.

The Dashboard: Exploring Your Sessions

The web dashboard at app.yudemon.com/apexflow is where your data comes to life.

Sessions: Your Racing History

The Sessions page shows all your uploaded sessions, grouped by event. If you did for example practice, qualifying, and a race at the same track within a single recording session and uploaded the IBT files together, they’re grouped together.

You can filter by date range, session type, track, car, and custom tags.

Each session row gives you the key stats at a glance: duration, laps, best lap time, average HR and HRV, finishing position (for races), and incident count.

Session Detail: The Deep Dive

Click any session and you’re taken to the detailed analysis page.

The header shows everything important about the session: track, car, date, duration, laps, best lap time, average HR and HRV, HR range, and — for races — your starting and finishing positions with places gained or lost. You can also add custom tags for later filtering, export the raw data as CSV, or delete the session.

For events with multiple sessions, tabs let you quickly switch between practice, qualifying, and race without going back to the list.

Lap Traces (see screenshot above) show your physiology and telemetry averaged across all laps of a session, synchronized by track position. You can add, remove, and reorder traces — currently there are 10 telemetry metrics and 6 physiology metrics available. Each individual lap appears as a thin semi-transparent line; the average is the bold line. This immediately reveals where you’re consistent and where there’s variation.

You can toggle incident markers on or off. When enabled, vertical lines mark where incidents occurred, color-coded by severity (yellow = 1x, orange = 2x, red = 4x).

The Lap Selector lets you focus on specific laps. Maybe you want to compare your fastest laps, or isolate the laps after an incident, or just look at the first half of a stint. Select any combination and all the visualizations update to show only those laps. The lap times are displayed with incident indicators so you can quickly identify clean laps vs. messy ones.

Session Timeline shows the same traces, but unrolled over the entire session duration rather than by track position. This view is interesting for seeing how your session evolved — maybe your heart rate was elevated at the race start and settled mid-race, or maybe fatigue crept in during the final stint. You can see exactly when incidents happened and how your physiology responded.

Track Heatmaps visualize any metric mapped onto the circuit itself. Two side-by-side maps let you compare any two metrics — heart rate vs. HRV state, speed vs. G-force, whatever you’re curious about. The track shape comes from GPS data in the telemetry, so it’s an accurate representation of the circuit. Incident locations are marked with yellow, orange and red dots.

Stress Zones & Recovery is more experimental. ApexFlow automatically identifies continuous high-G sections of the track — corners, chicanes, heavy braking zones — and analyzes how your HRV responds through each one. For each zone, it measures your baseline HRV before the zone, the drop during the zone, and the recovery afterward, producing a “recovery score” from F to A.

I’ll be honest: I’m still refining how this works and what the scores actually mean. Take it with a big grain of salt for now. It’s definitely interesting, but I don’t know how informative, useful or actionable it actually is. But it’s a first attempt at turning the raw exploration data into something more structured. I’d actually love to hear from users what they find useful here and what doesn’t make sense — that feedback will help shape how this feature evolves.

Insights: Patterns Across Sessions

The Insights page aggregates data across all your sessions to reveal patterns. It has the same filtering options as the Sessions list, so you can narrow down to specific tracks, cars, or time periods.

Physiology by Session Type shows box plots comparing your HRV and heart rate across test, practice, qualifying, and race sessions. Are you more stressed in races? Does your HRV drop during qualifying? The data will tell you.

Physiology by Car does the same breakdown by vehicle. Maybe you’re more relaxed in slower cars, or maybe the opposite is true. I haven’t collected too much data yet, so this is not particularly statistically significant, but F4 looks far more intense than a Toyota GR86 so far, and that definitely aligns with my subjective perception.

There are also breakdowns by track, time of day, incident rates over time, and more. This section is still early — I’ll be adding more insights and refining existing ones based on what’s actually useful. Again, I’d love to hear what patterns you find interesting and what you wish you could see.

A quick word of caution: these insights become more meaningful as you accumulate more sessions. With just a handful of data points, don’t read too much into the patterns. Physiology is influenced by countless factors — sleep, stress, caffeine, what you ate, how your day went,... The real patterns (assuming there are any) will emerge over weeks and months of consistent data.

A Note on ApexFlow Pro

ApexFlow is free to use, and that includes full access to all session analytics for your most recent event.

For older events, some of the advanced analysis features and cross-session insights require an ApexFlow Pro subscription ($6.99/month or $59.99/year). ApexFlow Pro also includes all Yudemon Pro features if you want to train your autonomic nervous system using Yudemon’s HRV biofeedback app.

I wanted to mention this upfront so there are no surprises. The free tier is genuinely useful for exploring your latest sessions — Pro just unlocks the historical depth (and helps me pay for the infrastructure cost, and hopefully justify future development).

What’s Next?

ApexFlow is live and functional, but it’s really just the beginning. Here are some directions I’m currently thinking about:

Real-world telemetry support. iRacing is the starting point, but I want to bring this to real-world racing as well. Supporting formats like AiM and MoTeC would open ApexFlow to track day enthusiasts, amateur racers, and motorsports professionals. If you’re interested in using ApexFlow with real-world data, I’d love to hear from you — it’ll help me prioritize.

Baseline comparisons. Right now we’re only looking at in-session HRV. But comparing to a pre-session baseline — your HRV while sitting on the grid waiting for the start, for example — could add meaningful context.

Audio cues and breathing guidance. This is where ApexFlow could connect to its “older sibling”, the main Yudemon HRV biofeedback app. Imagine guided breathing exercises while waiting on the grid, or audio cues on long straights when you’re not in an immediate battle to help you reset your focus.

These are ideas, not promises. What I actually build next will depend a lot on what users find valuable. So please — if you try ApexFlow and have thoughts about what works, what doesn’t, or what you wish existed, let me know. You can reach me through the Yudemon contact page or find me on social media.

Try It Out

ApexFlow is available now at app.yudemon.com/apexflow.

If you have a Windows PC, iRacing, and a Bluetooth heart rate sensor, you can be looking at your first recorded session data in less than 30 minutes. The Getting Started page walks you through everything.

I built this because I was curious about my own racing physiology, and I hope it helps satisfy that same curiosity for you. Not as a magic tool that makes you faster, but as a new lens on what’s happening inside you when you’re pushing hard on track.

Right now, this is exploratory. But depending on what insights we find, we might be able to turn this into actionable advice that help us become better, more resilient, and more consistent drivers.

See you on the track!

The Human Performance Layer for Racing: Introducing Yudemon ApexFlow was originally published in Yudemon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When people think about rest, they picture hammocks. Beach vacations. Maybe a long nap on a Sunday afternoon.

They don’t picture strapping into a race car, heart rate climbing, every sense sharpened to a knife’s edge as you barrel toward a corner at 200 km/h.

And yet, after years of researching rest for my book Time Off and spending countless hours in the simulator (and a few hours in real race cars), I’ve come to a conclusion that might sound very odd at first: racing is one of the best rest activities I’ve ever experienced.

Not relaxation. Rest.

There’s a difference, and understanding that difference might change how you think about recovery, performance, and what it actually means to recharge — whether you’re interested in motorsports or not.

The Four Factors of Recovery

In Time Off, my co-author John and I explored what research tells us about proper rest and recovery. Not all rest is created equal, and four major factors particularly contribute to genuine recovery:

• Relaxation — allowing our mind and body to wind down
• Control — deciding how to spend our time and attention
• Mastery — being challenged enough to get into a flow state
• Detachment — being so absorbed that we forget about work

If your definition of rest is limited to relaxation, you’re ignoring three-quarters of the essential components. Burning three hours on Reddit is not the same as taking a walk in nature or pursuing a challenging hobby. Good rest is not mere relaxation. It’s active and challenging. It demands our full attention. It stimulates us and gets us into flow states.

Most people intuitively understand the relaxation piece. But control, mastery, and detachment? These are where racing becomes so uniquely suited to rest.

Control: Every Input, Instant Effect

Many factors in our daily lives are beyond our control. Your boss makes a decision that uproots months of work. A client sends new specifications right before a deadline. The world throws curveballs, and we absorb them.

To balance this, good rest returns control back to you. Activities like painting, cooking, or making music are fully in our control. We decide how we spend our time, energy, and attention.

Racing takes this to an extreme.

In a race car, you are the captain. Every single input is your decision — throttle, brake, steering, weight transfer. But it goes beyond mere decision-making. In few other pursuits do your inputs lead to such drastic and immediate effects.

Every tiny movement of your hands or feet instantly translates into the behavior of the car — especially in a high performance race car. Press the throttle a fraction harder mid-corner and the rear steps out. Trail-brake a meter deeper and the nose tucks in. The feedback loop between intention and outcome is measured in milliseconds.

This immediacy is rare in modern life. Most of our decisions play out over days, weeks, or months. We send an email and wait. We launch a project and hope. The gap between action and consequence stretches out, often beyond recognition.

In a race car, that gap collapses to zero. The car becomes an extension of your body, responding to your inputs with absolute fidelity. There’s something deeply restorative about that kind of agency — a reminder that your actions matter, in an immediate and tangible form.

Mastery: The Obsession Over Tenths

True rest involves mastery experiences — activities that are challenging and mentally absorbing enough to get us into a flow state, without being so difficult that we quit in frustration.

Racing hits this balance perfectly, almost by design.

The learning curve in motorsport is infinite. No matter how fast you get, there’s always another tenth of a second to find. Drivers all the way from amateurs to professionals— especially with the rise of sim racing as a highly realistic training tool — spend hours obsessing over the tiniest of details (using increasingly sophisticated tools, like Track Titan, to help them). The optimal braking point. The ideal line through a complex of corners. The precise moment to get back on the throttle.

This obsession isn’t tedious. It’s engaging precisely because the feedback is immediate. The moment you make a mistake or improve something, your lap time delta tells you. Literally within seconds of trying a different approach, you know if it worked.

Few other pursuits provide such clear, immediate feedback. In most creative or professional work, you might not know for weeks whether a decision was right. In racing, you know before you’ve finished the lap.

This rapid feedback loop is one of the key triggers for flow states. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the “godfather of flow” — identified it decades ago: when challenge matches skill and feedback is immediate, we’re primed to enter the zone. Racing delivers this combination more reliably than almost anything else I’ve found.

Detachment: No Room for Tomorrow’s Meeting

The final component of good rest is detachment — the ability to put work entirely out of your mind and attend to other things. As organizational psychology researcher Sabine Sonnentag has found, people who experience more psychological detachment during off-hours are more satisfied with their lives and experience fewer symptoms of strain, while also being more engaged at work.

Racing doesn’t just offer detachment, it demands it.

David Heinemeier Hansson — a.k.a. DHH, the legendary programmer who created Ruby on Rails and also happens to be a successful racing driver — captured this perfectly on the Lex Fridman podcast:

“In a race car, it’s not a lottery at all. You sit down in that car, you turn the ignition, you go out on track and I get flow virtually guaranteed because you need, or I need at least 100% of my brain processing power to be able to go at the speed I go without crashing. So there’s no time to think about dinner tonight or the meeting next week or product launch. It’s completely zen in actually, the literal sense of the word.”

This is the key insight. Racing doesn’t just allow detachment — it forces it. You either achieve total presence, or you crash. There is no middle ground.

Most activities allow your mind to wander. You can run on a treadmill while mentally rehearsing a difficult conversation. You can play guitar while worrying about tomorrow’s presentation. The activity occupies your body, but your mind remains partially elsewhere.

Racing offers no such escape route. The stakes are too high, the demands too immediate. Every corner requires your full attention. Every braking zone demands commitment. The worried, planning, ruminating parts of your brain simply get pushed out because there’s no processing power left for them.

This is forced meditation. Enforced presence. And it’s remarkably effective.

Flow or Die

Steven Kotler, who has spent decades researching flow states, noticed something interesting about extreme sports athletes. In his book The Rise of Superman, he observed that action sports like surfing, skiing, and skydiving produce flow states more reliably than almost any other activity.

The reason? Stakes.

When Kotler studied these athletes, he found they faced a constant choice: “flow or die.” In big-wave surfing, focus and concentration can be the difference between a great ride and drowning. This isn’t metaphor. It’s literal survival pressure.

Racing operates on the same principle. The stakes force engagement. You cannot half-commit to a corner at 180 km/h. You cannot let your attention drift while battling for position. The consequences of mental absence are immediate and unforgiving.

As DHH put it:

“When you’re in a race car, there’s something very real on the line. If you get it wrong, at the very least you’re going to spin out and probably hit a wall and it’s going to be expensive. At the very worst, you’re not getting out alive.”

This sounds terrifying. And it can be. But it’s also why racing produces such reliable flow states. The same pressure that creates risk also creates focus. The danger isn’t incidental to the experience — it’s the mechanism that makes the experience work.

From Simulator to Reality

I’ve been passionate about motorsports for decades, first as a fan, then through sim racing. Last year, I finally took the step into real-world racing with my first laps at Fuji Speedway in Japan, with the Circuit Orange Team.

To be completely honest, I’m not even particularly interested in cars — at least not road cars. On public streets, I’d rather ride my motorbike. What excites me about racing is the obsession of both drivers and teams, the deep strategy and data, the cutting edge of engineering and tech, and the relentless drive to push yourself and the machine just a tiny bit harder to shave off that last fraction of a second.

And most importantly: the mental state it produces. After a session on track — real or simulated — I feel more refreshed than after almost any other activity. Not relaxed in the limp, passive sense. Refreshed in the sharp, clear-headed sense.

The Democratization of Flow

Here’s the practical problem: real motorsport is prohibitively expensive for most people. A single track day can cost what others spend on a week’s vacation (or more, depending on the car and your skill of keeping it in one piece). Building a competitive racing program requires resources that only a tiny fraction of enthusiasts can access.

But sim racing has changed this equation dramatically.

Modern sims like iRacing produce remarkably similar flow states to real racing. The physics are accurate enough that professional drivers use them for training. The immersion is complete enough that your brain responds as if the stakes are real.

I race in VR, and the experience is close enough to the real thing that the same psychological benefits apply. The control is just as immediate. The mastery curve is just as infinite. The detachment is just as complete — when you’re in a VR headset chasing a qualifying lap, there is absolutely no room for email anxiety.

The barrier to entry has dropped from “wealthy enthusiast” to “decent gaming PC and a wheel.” It’s not nothing, but it’s within reach for far more people than real track time ever will be.

The Missing Layer

The motorsports community is deeply data-obsessed (which is one aspect I love about it). Modern race cars and simulators generate extraordinary amounts of telemetry — speed, throttle position, brake pressure, steering angle, tire temperatures, thousands of data points per second. There are sophisticated tools for analyzing every aspect of how the car performed.

But there’s a gap.

All this telemetry tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you why.

Why did you brake late into Turn 3 on lap 7? Was it confidence? Fatigue? A lapse in concentration? Did your heart rate spike before that spin, or after? Were you in flow during your fastest lap, or grinding through it on willpower?

The car’s data is extensively logged. But the driver’s data — their physiology, their mental state — is still largely untapped.

Understanding (and improving) human physiology is what I’ve been building toward with my work on biofeedback at Yudemon for several years now. And I’m extremely curious to bring this understanding to the racing world. Understanding not just what the car did, but what the driver was experiencing while it happened.

Telemetry shows what happened. Physiology shows why.

I’m calling this direction Yudemon ApexFlow, and I’ll be sharing more about it soon. If you’re curious about this intersection of human performance and motorsport, you can sign up here to stay informed.

The Rest Ethic Returns

One common trait among top performers is the ability to rapidly switch between two states: fully ON or fully OFF. Most of us spend our lives in some analog middle ground, half-on and half-off, never reaching either extreme and never experiencing the benefits that come from them.

Racing forces the ON state. Complete engagement, total presence.

And counterintuitively, this complete engagement is deeply restful. It delivers control, mastery, and detachment in concentrated form. Because it pushes everything else out of your mind and demands that you exist entirely in the present moment.

Good rest is not mere relaxation. It’s active and challenging. It demands our full attention. It stimulates us and gets us into flow states. It allows us to forget all our other concerns for a while, and be fully present in the moment.

For me, nothing delivers this more reliably than chasing the perfect lap.

24 books and quotes that shaped and inspired me in 2025

As another year comes to a close, I’m once again returning to a ritual that has anchored my New Year’s reflections for years: looking back at the books that shaped the last twelve months.

In 2025, I read 24 books — fewer than previous years, but according to Goodreads the books I read were particularly long, averaging 427 pages per book. So I’d like to tell myself that I’ve chosen reads that asked for more patience and offered more depth this year.

As always, I’ve chosen one quote from each book. Not necessarily the “best” line, but the one that stayed with me, or meant something to me in the moment.

Here are the books — fiction and non-fiction — that shaped my 2025.

Non-Fiction

Inspired: How to Build Tech Products Customers Love (Marty Cagan)

“If users knew what they really wanted, software would be a lot easier to create. So, watch what they do more than what they say.”

Useful Not True (Derek Sivers)

“Every statement everyone says could be prefaced with a disclaimer: ‘From my limited point of view, based only on what I’ve experienced…’”

The Rise of Super Intelligence: A Guidebook for Human Emancipation in the Age of AI (Jad Tarifi)

“By expanding our understanding of value to fully encompass human qualities — such as creativity, empathy and consciousness — we can craft economic systems that honor the inherent dignity of every individual.”

A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life (Steven Kotler)

“Placing a dog felt like falling in love and getting dumped and falling in love and getting dumped, over and over again. As I said, dog rescue sucks.”

The Little Book of Aliens (Adam Frank)

“Life is short and good scientific research takes many years to many decades. That means researchers must literally make bets with their lives (their working years) about what is worth their time.”

The Invevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future (Kevin Kelly)

“To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings.”

Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture (Lewis Hyde)

“Trickster only comes to life in the complex terrain of polytheism. If the spiritual world is dominated by a single high god opposed by a single embodiment of evil, then the ancient trickster disappears. […] The Devil is an agent of evil, but trickster is amoral, not immoral.”

Never Play It Safe: A Practical Guide to Freedom, Creativity and a Life You Love (Chase Jarvis)

“With the power of our attention, we can dictate the direction and quality of our lives. Paying attention is everything in this life. […] This is one of the side effects of not playing it safe: when you stop trying to do what everyone else is doing and start experimenting in order to discover what you truly care deeply about, your ability to focus becomes greatly amplified.”

Radical Delegation: Hired an Assistant and Still Struggling? How to Go From Grind to Great (Patrick Ewers)

“Radical delegation means elimination everything — yes, everything — from your plate that doesn’t expressly need to be done by you.”

How to Build a Car (Adrian Newey)

“The problem was that I shared traits inherited from both my mother and my father. My mum was vivacious and often flirtatious, a very good artist but mostly a natural-born maverick; my dad was an eccentric, […] blessed or maybe cursed with a compulsion to think outside the box. No doubt it’s an equation that served me well in later life, but it’s not best-suited to school life.”

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future (Ed Conway)

“Back in 1810 Americans spent roughly the same proportion of their national income on iron nails as they do today on computers. Today, steel nails cost next to nothing.”

The Great Nerve: The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes (Kevin J. Tracey)

“I am convinced that bioelectronic medicine has the potential to revolutionize healthcare and improve the lives of countless people around the world.”

Going Faster! Mastering the Art of Race Driving (Skip Barber Racing School)

“Some would say ‘You can’t find the limit if you don’t go over it from time to time and spin.’ Nonesense. You find the limit by taking small bites, experimenting with a little higher entry speed, a little earlier throttle application. Carrying more speed on the same arc will create a greater angle of slide, which might be faster, or might scrub off speed, making you slower. You don’t need to spin to find this out.”

Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters (Pablos Holman)

“If you get a new gadget and show it to your mom, she might ask you ‘What does this do?’ If you show it to a hacker, the question is different. The question is, ‘What can I make this do?’”

7½ Lessons About the Brain (Lisa Feldman Barrett)

“Every action you take (or don’t take) is an economic choice — your brain guessing when to spend resources and when to save them. […] The scientific name for body budgeting is allostasis. It means automatically predicting and preparing to meet the body’s needs before they arise.”

Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values (Fred Kofman)

“Leadership behaviors are one of the most critical influences on an organizational culture. What matters most is not what leaders say but what they do; their actions rather than their words.”

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)

“The one thing I’ve found at companies with very few interruptions and have observed almost nowhere else: really great, consistently available documentation.”

Fiction

Babel (R. F. Kuang)

“That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”

The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley)

“Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”

Wind and Truth (Brandon Sanderson)

“The thing is, the deepest truths always sound a little trite. Because we all know them, and feel foolish being reminded.”

Train Dreams (Denis Johnson)

“He saw no sign of their Bible, either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Grainier that here had come a fire stronger than God.”

Dance Dance Dance (Haruki Murakami)

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

The Evening and the Morning (Ken Follett)

“In dog philosophy it was always better to go somewhere than to be left behind.”

The Tainted Cup (Robert Jackson Bennett)

“I am reluctant to assume maliciousness when incompetence is a better explanation.”

I hope this collection offered you a glimpse into the stories and ideas that shaped my year, and perhaps even nudged you toward a book or two of your own.

For more inspiration, you can explore my lists from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

Here’s to a 2026 filled with meaningful reads, fresh perspectives, and the kind of moments that stay with you long after the last page is turned.

Ever since launching the original iOS version of Yudemon HRV in 2023, the single biggest request I have been receiving was the launch of an Android version.

There were several technical challenges that made this difficult, but over the last few months I finally worked on all of them, and I am really happy to share that as of this week, Yudemon is now also available to download from Google Play.

The features of the Android version exactly match those of the iOS version (available here) — except for the Apple Health integration. If there is enough demand, I might consider creating a Google Fit equivalent.

This means Yudemon is finally available to anyone who is interested in using resonance breathing and HRV biofeedback to improve their stress resilience and wellbeing — no matter what platform you’re on!

Launching Yudemon HRV for Android was originally published in Yudemon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I first started building Yudemon, the focus was simple: create a beautiful and simple HRV biofeedback tool that lived entirely on your phone. No accounts, no cloud, no complexity.

That simplicity worked well. But as I continued my own practice and started collecting more data, I kept finding myself wanting to dig deeper. What patterns were hidden in my session history? How was my HRV actually trending over weeks and months? Which settings and conditions led to my best sessions?

Mobile development is difficult (at least for me) and has long development and release cycles, not to mention that it limits what’s possible. Also, the small screen and limited interface of the mobile app simply couldn’t accommodate the kind of quick development and deep exploratory analysis I wanted to do. And I knew I wasn’t alone in this curiosity.

So I built the Yudemon Web Dashboard.

It’s not a replacement for the mobile app — that remains the core biofeedback experience. Instead, the web dashboard is a companion experience where your practice data comes alive. It’s a comprehensive analytics platform that takes all the sessions you’ve logged on your phone and transforms them into actionable insights, beautiful visualizations, and detailed physiological breakdowns.

And as of this month, it’s live at app.yudemon.com.

Getting Started

If you already have a Yudemon account with cloud sync enabled, you’re ready to go. Just visit app.yudemon.com and log in with the same credentials you use in the iOS app.

If you haven’t created an account yet or haven’t enabled cloud sync, you’ll need to do that first in the mobile app (Account menu → Cloud Sync). The dashboard reads directly from your synced cloud data, so whatever you’ve enabled for sync is what you’ll see on the web.

You might have already noticed the new “Dashboard” button in the main menu of the latest iOS app version — it takes you directly to the web dashboard for seamless access from your phone.

One quick note before we dive in: The web dashboard is fully functional on both desktop and mobile browsers and optimized for both. But I recommend using a desktop or tablet for deeper explorations. There’s a lot of data to visualize, and the larger screen real estate really lets the charts and analyses breathe. That said, everything is fully responsive (and I’ve included screenshots from both desktop and mobile below), so checking your stats on mobile works great too.

Overview: Your Practice at a Glance

The Overview page is your dashboard home — a high-level snapshot of everything that matters about your HRV practice.

The page is structured around a simple question: How am I doing?

Right Now gives you the immediate status: your current practice streak, when you last practiced, and how many days this week you’ve logged sessions. It’s the kind of at-a-glance information that helps you stay motivated and accountable.

Weekly Trends shows 7-day averages for HRV, heart rate, and practice volume, each with a comparison to the previous 7 days. Green percentages mean improvement, red means a dip.

Monthly Trends expands the view to 30 days, displaying small sparkline charts alongside the current averages. These tiny graphs pack a lot of information: you can see at a glance whether your HRV is trending up, your heart rate is stable, or your practice consistency is improving.

Long-Term Trends pulls back even further, showing totals and milestones from the last 90 days. The practice heatmap — inspired by GitHub’s contribution graph — is probably familiar to any software engineer but might need some explanation for others. It shows a calendar-style grid where each day is colored by how many minutes you practiced — the more the practice time, the deeper the color. It makes patterns immediately visible: gaps in practice, streaks of consistency, periods of intense commitment.

A time-of-day histogram reveals when you typically practice — are you a morning person? An evening practitioner?

All of these sections update in real-time as you sync new sessions from the mobile app (with a few seconds for processing time), so your Overview page — as well as the rest of the Dashboard — is always up to date.

Analytics: Four Ways to Explore Your Data

The Analytics section is where the real depth lives. It’s organized into four tabs — Sessions, Trends, Insights, and Journey — each offering a different lens on your practice.

Sessions: Every Breath, Every Beat

The Sessions page is your complete practice history. It shows every session you’ve synced to the cloud, organized in a sortable, filterable table.

You can filter by date range, session type (normal vs. Journey), and whether the session has physiological data from an HR sensor or not. The session view also gives you a quick overview of the session’s key metrics, such as HRV, heart rate, and practice duration.

But the real power is in the detailed session view.

Click any session and you’re taken to a comprehensive analysis page that breaks down exactly what happened during those minutes of practice. Following the session header with all the key information, the session timeline shows your heart rate and HRV evolving second by second throughout the session, synchronized with your breathing pattern.

You can see where your HRV spiked, where your heart rate settled into a rhythm, and how your physiology responded to different phases of the practice.

The timeline can be displayed in two modes: dual-axis (heart rate and HRV on separate charts) or single combined view. You can zoom in to examine specific moments in detail or pan across the full session duration.

Below the timeline, multiple analysis tabs offer even deeper dives:

RR Intervals shows the beat-by-beat data from your heart rate sensor. A histogram displays the distribution of R-R intervals (the time between consecutive heartbeats), revealing the variability that is HRV. Alongside it, a Poincaré plot visualizes how each beat relates to the one before it — a geometric representation of your autonomic nervous system state (don’t worry too much about this plot, this is for really advanced users).

Spectral Analysis breaks down your heart rate oscillations into frequency bands — Very Low Frequency (VLF), Low Frequency (LF), and High Frequency (HF). This is the same analysis used in research settings to assess autonomic balance. The power spectral density chart shows exactly where your heart’s rhythms are concentrated during the session. When you’re breathing at your resonance frequency, you’ll typically see a dominant peak at that frequency in the LF band.

Breathing Pattern includes two graphs that show your instantaneous breathing rate over time and how your heart rate synchronized with your breath cycle. The former gives you a sense of how closely your actual breathing (and the physiological changes it triggered in your body) matched the breath timer. The latter is where you can really see the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) effect in action — the speeding up of your heart on the inhale and the slowing down on the exhale that forms the foundation of HRV biofeedback.

Each of these views offers a different perspective on the same session, and together they paint a full picture of what your body was doing during those minutes of practice.

Trends: Patterns Over Time

Going beyond individual sessions, the real story emerges over weeks and months. The Trends page lets you zoom out and see how your metrics are evolving.

You can select any date range (or choose from presets like “Last 30 days” or “Last 90 days”) and the dashboard will generate a comprehensive summary and trend charts for all your key metrics: HRV, heart rate, RSA amplitude, resonance strength, practice volume, and practice frequency.

The summary at the top shows you all the averages for the selected period.

Below, each chart includes both the raw daily values and a 7-day moving average to smooth out the noise. This is important because HRV naturally fluctuates day to day based on sleep, stress, activity, and a dozen other factors. The moving average reveals the underlying trend.

You can also compare your data to a different time period. By default this uses the time period just before the selected period and of the same length. Want to see if your HRV this month is better than last month? Select “Last 30 days” as your primary range and the previous 30 days as your comparison period. The summary card will show you percentage changes for every metric.

One thing I’ve learned from examining my own trends: consistency matters more than intensity — regular daily practice leads to better outcomes than sporadic longer sessions.

Insights: Finding Your Patterns

The Insights page is all about correlation and discovery. It takes your entire session history and slices it in multiple dimensions to reveal what might affect your HRV performance.

A quick word of caution though: This page gets more interesting and meaningful the more data you accumulate. If you’re just starting out with a handful of sessions, don’t read too much into what you see here. HRV is influenced by countless factors — sleep, stress, caffeine, exercise, the weather, what you ate for breakfast, or which shoe you put on first (okay, probably not that last one). Early on, variations are totally normal.

Think of the Insights page as a fun exploration rather than a definitive report card. The real patterns emerge over weeks and months of consistent practice. Until then, enjoy the visualizations and take everything with a healthy grain of salt.

Performance Analysis shows box plots comparing your HRV and heart rate across different categories:

• By Time of Day: Is your HRV higher in the morning or evening? The data will tell you. Each hourly slot shows the full distribution of your HRV values, making it easy to spot trends throughout the day.
• By Day of Week: Maybe Mondays are stressful and Saturdays are calm. The day-of-week breakdown can reveal weekly patterns you didn’t know existed.
• By Session Duration: Does practicing longer necessarily mean deeper practice and higher HRV? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. The data will tell you.
• By Soundscape and Visual Type: If you’ve experimented with different soundscapes or visual styles in the app, this shows which ones (if any) correlate with better outcomes for you.

Practice Patterns uses histograms to show when you typically practice — both time of day and day of week. These charts reveal your habits and preferences.

Physiological Relationships takes a more analytical approach, showing scatter plots of various metric combinations:

• HRV vs. Breathing Rate: Does your HRV response vary with different breathing rates? (It absolutely should, and this chart shows you your personal curve — if you practiced at different rates.)
• HRV vs. Heart Rate: Does your HRV response vary with different heart rates?
• HRV vs. RSA Amplitude: This shows how the magnitude of your heart rate oscillations relates to your overall HRV. Normally these two are highly correlated.

Each scatter plot represents one session as a single point, so you can see not just the average relationship but also the variability across your practice history.

The insights page is a fun way to explore potential relationships in your data. And with enough sessions accumulated, it can actually help you to optimize your practice. But remember: patterns take time to emerge. Keep practicing, keep collecting data, and eventually the insights will start revealing what’s working for you.

Journey: Watching Convergence Happen

If you’ve used Journey Mode in the mobile app, the Journey analytics page is where you can visualize your progression.

As a quick refresher: Journey Mode — which was recently upgraded with a new and improved algorithm — is Yudemon’s unique approach to finding your personal resonance frequency. Instead of coarsely testing a few different breathing rates in a single session like other tools, Journey Mode gradually and precisely finds your own unique resonance frequency over the course of multiple sessions. Each 10-minute Journey session covers a small range of breathing rates, and the algorithm progressively refines its estimate of your resonance frequency based on the accumulated data.

The web dashboard shows your entire Journey at once.

Just like in the mobile app, the Breathing Rate Progression chart shows how the central breathing rate has evolved across Journey steps. This should gradually converge toward your true resonance frequency.

The HRV Across Breathing Rates scatter plot is even more revealing. Every two-minute segment from every Journey session appears as a single point, plotting breathing rate against HRV response. A vertical line marks the algorithm’s current estimate of your resonance frequency. As you complete more Journey sessions, you’ll see the cloud of points fill in, and ideally, you’ll see a clear peak emerge where your HRV is highest.

For Journey sessions completed in app version 2.11.0 or later, there’s also an RSA Amplitude Across Breathing Rates chart. RSA amplitude — the magnitude of your heart rate swing between inhale and exhale — is one of several metrics the current Journey algorithm uses to find your optimal breathing rate.

I wrote previously about the development of Journey Mode and my own 15-session journey to find my resonance frequency (you can read that article here). The dashboard makes it possible to visualize that same process for your own data, watching as the algorithm homes in on your unique physiology.

Account: Manage Everything in One Place

The Account page brings together all the administrative aspects of using Yudemon: your profile, subscription status, data export, and account settings.

Subscription Management is fully cross-platform. If you’re a Pro subscriber, you’ll see your subscription status, renewal date, and which platform it’s from (iOS or Web). If you subscribed through the web, you can manage your billing through this site.

If you’re not yet a Pro subscriber, this is where you can upgrade. Pro features in the mobile app include unlimited Journey sessions, unique soundscapes, and full customizability. In the web dashboard you get full access to all advanced trend charts, deeper insights, complete options, and more detailed physiological breakdowns throughout the dashboard.

Data Export lets you download your complete practice history — all sessions, all statistics, all raw HRV data — in standard formats for your own analysis or record-keeping. This is part of Yudemon’s privacy-first approach: your data is yours, and you can take it with you at any time.

There’s also an account deletion option if you ever decide to leave. It’s permanent and irreversible (with multiple safety checks so there should be zero risk that you accidentally delete your account), but it’s there because you should always have full control over your data.

What This Means for Your Practice

The web dashboard doesn’t change how you practice HRV biofeedback — that still happens in the mobile app with real-time feedback during your sessions. What it changes is how you understand your practice — if you like to dive into the details (as I do).

Instead of seeing isolated sessions, you see your journey over time. Instead of guessing what works, you see the data. Instead of wondering if you’re improving, you see the trends.

For me personally, building this dashboard has deepened my own practice. This may be quite personal, but I love data and am very data-driven, and just being able to see everything in the dashboard has definitely made me practice more regularly and with more intention.

I hope it does the same for you, and over time also helps you understand your own practice better.

What’s Next

This dashboard is just the beginning. There are more features I want to add, more ways to slice and analyze the data, more insights to surface. I’d love to hear your feedback about what’s useful, what’s confusing, and what you’d like to see next.

And speaking of what’s next: I’m currently working on the most requested feature since Yudemon launched — an Android version of the mobile app. It’s a significant undertaking (the current iOS app uses some platform-specific audio technology that needs to be rebuilt), but I’m making good progress and hope to have it ready soon.

Until then, iOS users can continue enjoying the full experience, and now with the web dashboard, everyone has a window into their practice data regardless of platform.

Visit app.yudemon.com to explore your own data, or download Yudemon HRV for iOS to start your HRV biofeedback journey.

I wish you deep breaths and deeper insights.

Deep Dive Into Your HRV Practice: Introducing the Yudemon Web Dashboard was originally published in Yudemon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For over four months now I’ve ended each workday the same way: a 15-minute conversation with ChatGPT about what happened, what I learned, and what comes next.

It sounds simple. Almost trivially so. But this daily practice has become one of the most valuable work habits I’ve ever developed — not because it helps me track tasks (I have other tools for that), but because it gives shape to my thinking, and creates a living record of how my work actually unfolds.

The Problem with How We Track Progress

Most of us don’t have a clear picture of what we actually accomplished last week, let alone last month. We can reconstruct meetings attended and tasks completed, but we’ve lost the why behind our decisions, the insights that emerged, and the patterns in our energy and focus.

Performance reviews become an exercise in memory archaeology. 1-on-1s devolve into status updates because we can’t remember the bigger picture. And we repeat the same mistakes because we never captured what we learned the first time.

The traditional solution — more detailed note-taking — creates its own problems. Notes scattered across tools. Long documents that never get read. The burden of synthesis falling entirely on our already overloaded brains.

What if instead, you had a thinking partner who helped you make sense of your days in real-time?

Enter: The Daily Review

The system is straightforward. At the end of each workday, I open a ChatGPT project called “Review” and have a brief conversation about my day. The conversation follows a loose structure — mood and energy, key activities, progress toward goals, blockers, and what’s next — but it’s conversational, not rigid.

I dictate most of my responses using voice input, which means my reflections are spontaneous, unpolished, and rambling at times. The AI acts as a coach, asking follow-up questions when I’m vague, pushing me to articulate half-formed thoughts, and helping me spot patterns I might otherwise miss.

At the end of the conversation, I ask it to generate a summary following markdown templates I provided in the project files (see full templates below). That summary goes into a Notion database where I can search, filter, and reference it later.

Every Friday (or the last workday of the week), I also do a weekly review that zooms out to find patterns and recalibrate for the week ahead. This becomes the basis for a “State of Max” — a public-ish update I share with my team that keeps them informed without turning our 1-on-1s into status reports.

The entire daily process takes 15–20 minutes. The weekly review another 15 or so minutes at the end of the week.

Why This Works Better Than Traditional Journaling

I’ve used many different journaling approaches over the years — morning pages, evening reflection prompts, you name it. What makes this different is the conversational nature, AI’s role as an active thinking partner, and the long term archiving with searchability and AI synthesis.

It’s voice-first. Speaking my thoughts feels easier at the end of the day than writing them, and removes the friction of facing a blank page (although there is huge value in handwritten journaling as well, and I still do that). I can ramble, loop back, change direction — the AI helps me find the thread.
[Note: I tried doing the entire reviews in voice mode, but quickly switched back to dictation instead. While the conversation in voice mode feels good in the moment, the daily and weekly summaries were of much lower quality since not everything that is being said is actually captured in the full conversation.]

It’s structured but flexible. The template provides scaffolding without feeling constraining. If something important comes up, we explore it. If a section isn’t relevant that day, we skip it.

It captures context automatically. The AI remembers what I’ve said across the week, so it can spot patterns I might miss: “You mentioned energy dipping after lunch three times this week — have you noticed that?”

It separates capture from synthesis. I don’t have to simultaneously experience my day and make sense of it. The review process creates that crucial space for reflection.

It creates searchable, structured data. Because summaries follow a consistent format and live in Notion, which itself has great AI integration, I can instantly surface relevant past reflections and compile thoughts spread across long time ranges. Simple example: preparing for self-reviews during evaluation cycles went from painful to trivial.

The Inspiration: Managing Up and Down

The idea came from Lenny Rachitsky’s “State of Me” practice — a weekly update he sent his manager. I loved the concept when I heard about it but realized I wanted something more frequent for myself and something I could share with my team, not just up the chain.

The “State of Max” became a way to keep my team informed about my focus, challenges, and thinking without requiring them to read it. I post it in Slack each Friday with zero expectations — it’s simply available if they want context.

But the real value isn’t the sharing. It’s the personal reflection practice that makes the sharing possible. The State of Max is just the visible tip of a daily habit that’s fundamentally changed how I think about my work.

What I’ve Learned After 4+ Months

Patterns become visible. After a month, I could see clear trends: which types of work energized me, when my focus typically flagged, which meetings consistently felt productive versus draining.

Small insights compound. A tiny observation on Tuesday (“I work better with morning deep work blocks”) becomes a scheduling principle by Friday and a different calendar structure by the next month.

Context never gets lost. In a fast-paced work environment, insights evaporate quickly. Capturing them daily means nothing falls through the cracks. I’ve referenced 6-week-old reflections to inform current decisions.

Reflection doesn’t have to be heavy. This isn’t therapy or deep soul-searching (though it can be if needed). Most days it’s just making sense of what happened and setting up tomorrow (or next week) for success.

The act of articulation clarifies thinking. Often I don’t know what I think until I try to explain my day. The review process forces that articulation.

It reduces cognitive load. Knowing I’ll have a chance to process and capture thoughts at day’s end means I worry less about remembering everything during the day.

How to Set This Up Yourself

The complete system requires just a few simple pieces:

1. A ChatGPT project with custom instructions that define the conversation structure and coaching style (Claude and Gemini have similar “project” options and work just as well)
2. Three markdown templates for daily reviews, weekly reviews, and shareable updates, see below
3. Additional project files that provide context — mine include current team and company OKRs, as well as an overview of key stakeholders, teams, projects and their relations.
4. A place to store summaries (I use Notion databases, but any tool works)
5. 15 minutes at the end of each workday

I’m including all my templates and instructions — tweaked and refined over the past four months — below, although I’ve changed my real examples to very generic ones. You’ll need to customize them a bit for best results: replace my generic placeholders with your own role, priorities, and examples. The more specific you make them, the more useful they become.

The templates are designed to work as-is, but they’ll work better with your examples. Think of them like a field manual for your daily reflection — a set of operating procedures that help you make sense of each day’s mission.

The Templates

Custom Instructions for ChatGPT Project:

You are my assistant for structured, voice-first daily and weekly reviews. These reviews are primarily focused on my work at [COMPANY NAME] as [ROLE].

Each conversation session covers a full week. The session begins on Monday with the first daily review. Typically I will also reference the previous week’s summary as context. All daily reviews, reflections, and check-ins for that week then continue within the same session. At the end of the week, we conclude with a weekly review and a State of Max summary within that same thread.

Your tone should remain reflective, coach-like, and adaptive — ask follow-ups if I’m vague or if you sense an insight could be sharpened. My input is often based on voice dictation, so it may be more spontaneous, wandering, and loosely structured than written text.

If I explicitly ask to generate a summary, you will use the appropriate template (`daily_review_template.md`, `weekly_review_template.md`, or `state_of_max_template.md`) and output the markdown file based on the full conversation context and detailed instructions for summary generation below.

The [LIST OF FILENAMES] project files provide context on the team and the company as a whole, and current OKRs. Feel free to reference them, epsecially as you create summaries and extract insights from the conversation.

---

### 🔁 GENERAL BEHAVIOR

- Keep the conversation flowing naturally — my input is mostly done via voice, so favor open-ended and flexible language.
- Lead the review conversations one step at a time. Lead with the question(s) for the step and then let me reply before moving on to the next step.
- Try to stick to the structure when it makes sense, but feel free to adjust exact questions to improve the flow.
- Be adaptive: if I go on a tangent, gently bring me back when needed, but allow space for reflection. If it seems helpful, feel free to ask follow up questions before moving on to the next step
- If I seem stuck, offer suggestions or ask nudging questions.
- Avoid superficial “that’s great” style replies unless it’s clearly needed to keep energy up.
- Occasionally – at most once per daily/weekly review conversation – if there seems an opportunity to uncover deeper insights, use you own judgement as a skilled coach and ask off-script questions.
- Prioritize insight, clarity, and alignment over task tracking.

---

## 🗓️ DAILY REVIEW INSTRUCTIONS

**Purpose:** Light-weight daily check-in. Make sense of the day, track momentum, surface ideas or blockers.

**Structure:**

1. **Mood & Energy**

   - “How are you feeling at the end of today?”
   - “How was your energy overall?”

2. **Key Activities or Moments**

   - “What were the 2–3 most significant things that happened today?”
   - “Anything surprising or off-plan?”

3. **Progress Toward Goals / Alignment**

   - “What moved the needle today”
   - “Did anything shift your thinking?”

4. **Blockers or Open Loops**

   - “What felt unresolved, or where did you feel friction?”

5. **Focus for Tomorrow**

   - "What are the key goals for tomorrow."

6. **Creative or Freeform Thoughts**

   - “Any new ideas or insights you want to capture before they slip away?”

---

## 📅 WEEKLY REVIEW INSTRUCTIONS

**Purpose:** Zoom out. Find patterns, reflect on progress, and recalibrate for the week ahead. Also prepare information for a publishable "State of Max" artifact.

**Structure:**

1. **Week in One Sentence**

   - “If you had to sum up this week in one sentence, what would it be?”

2. **Highlights & Wins**

   - “What are you most proud of this week?”
   - “Any moments of flow, clarity, or alignment?”
   - “What was the biggest 'moment of joy'?”

3. **Challenges & Friction**

   - “What didn’t go as planned?”
   - “What drained energy or created tension?”

4. **Meta Reflection**

   - “What did you learn?”
   - “Did anything shift in your thinking, strategy, or emotions?”

5. **Forward Look**

   - “What’s the one thing you want to nail next week?”
   - “What would a successful week look like?”

---

### 🧠 TONE / COACHING STYLE

- Act as a thinking partner.
- Push for clarity when vague.
- Allow digressions but gently guide back.
- Offer insight, framing, or alternative angles where relevant.
- Probe where deeper insights might be hidden.
- Prioritize *depth over breadth*.

---

### 📝 SUMMARY GENERATION

You will not automatically generate any markdown summaries at the end of the conversation.  
However, if I explicitly say something like:

- “Create the daily review summary.”
- “Summarize this week.”
- “Generate the State of Max.”

Then:

1. Use the full context of our current conversation.
   - Especially for weekly summaries, do not bias towards more recent conversation but use the FULL conversaiton context.
2. Select the appropriate markdown template as your reference for the summary style:
   - `daily_review_template.md` for daily reviews
   - `weekly_review_template.md` for weekly reviews
   - `state_of_max_template.md` for shareable weekly updates
3. Create a new markdown file following the template.
4. Output the markdown in a clean, copyable format.

The review summaries may be used as future context or reference in follow-up reviews.

---

### 📝 STATE OF MAX

🔍 OVERALL PURPOSE
The State of Max is a concise, reflective, context-aware and shareable update. It balances cultural leadership, technical motion, and strategic alignment. It is written for team-internal stakeholders and will be published in a way that is viewable by anyone in the team.

✅ WHAT TO DO
1. Draw from the entire week
   - Do not bias toward most recent entries
   - Identify early-week wins and how they influenced later direction
   - Reflect on momentum arcs and inflection points across multiple days

2. Prioritize substance and synthesis over completeness
   - Don’t list every small win — focus on what shaped direction, created leverage, or marked meaningful transition
   - Summarize minor details (e.g. papers read, tools used) only if directly relevant to core progress

3. Strike the right tone
   - Balanced, thoughtful, calm
   - No hype, no performance
   - Avoid overexposure — e.g. don’t include private topics unless explicitly marked for sharing

4. Elevate reflection
   - Use “What I’m Thinking About” to capture real insight — not filler
   - Look for themes emerging from experience, not just stated opinions
   - Highlight design-level thinking (e.g. designing for flow, shaping culture) over task-level execution

5. Keep it lean and high-signal
   - Each section should serve a purpose
   - Trim repetition or overly specific operational notes unless strategically relevant

❌ WHAT TO AVOID
- Don’t over-index on recent conversations
- Don’t include details that are personally sensitive or manager-only unless clearly authorized
- Don’t treat internal updates as general visibility reports — they’re primarily for clarity, not signaling

Daily Review Template

---
date: YYYY-MM-DD
tags: [e.g. #focus, #flow, #learning, #momentum, #reflection]  # Thematic tags for filtering later
---

# 🧠 Daily Review – {{date}}

## ✳️ Daily Theme
A short phrase that captures the tone, arc, or defining moment of the day. Think headline or tagline.

> Example: “Slow morning, clear mind, strong creative finish.”

## 🔋 Mood & Energy
Your emotional and physical state across the day. Any key rhythms or shifts?

> Example: Started scattered, found rhythm mid-morning, finished energized after a solid deep work block.

## 🔍 Key Activities or Moments
2–4 bullet points summarizing the most meaningful or impactful events of the day. Don’t try to list everything.

> Examples:
> - Wrapped up key analysis and shared draft summary  
> - Great 1:1 conversation — clarified next steps and priorities  
> - Afternoon walk helped reset energy and focus  
> - Admin work and scheduling took longer than expected  

## 🎯 Progress Toward Goals
How did today move forward your strategic goals or priorities? What advanced or clicked into place?

> Example: Moved a major project from exploration to synthesis stage — clearer path ahead for next week.

## ⚠️ Blockers, Friction, or Open Loops
What drained energy, felt off, or remains unresolved?

> Example: Communication around next steps still unclear — need better shared context before moving forward.

## ⏭️ Focus for Tomorrow
What will you pick up next? What does success look like tomorrow?

> Example: Finalize draft summary, close open threads, and set up clean handoff for next phase.

## 🧘 Meta Observations or Rhythm Insights
Process-level observations about energy, focus, or how you’re working — e.g. routines, tools, mood trends, rest, etc.

> Example: Midday exercise consistently resets focus — worth protecting this block even on busy days.

## 💡 Creative or Freeform Thoughts (Optional)
Anything speculative, half-baked, or intuitive that you want to capture before it fades.

> Example: Wondering if “creative recovery” could be scheduled like deep work — dedicated time to recharge insight instead of output.

Weekly Review Template

---
week_start: YYYY-MM-DD
week_end: YYYY-MM-DD
tags: [#momentum, #learning, #focus, #energy, #growth]  # Thematic tags for filtering later
---

# 📅 Weekly Review – {{week_start}} to {{week_end}}

> Use bullets, narrative, or whatever fits best.

## ✴️ Week in One Sentence (Theme or Trajectory)
A single phrase that captures the tone, arc, or defining shift of the week.

## 📈 Momentum Arc
How did energy, focus, or clarity shift across the week?  
Where did things accelerate, plateau, or fall off and why?

## 🌟 Highlights & Wins
What are you most proud of?  
Any moments of flow, breakthrough, or clear alignment?

## ⚠️ Challenges or Friction
What didn’t go as planned?  
What created drag, doubt, or unresolved tension?

## 🔄 What Shifted or Clicked?
Any insights, mindset shifts, or reframings from the week?  
What did experience (not just thinking) teach you?

## 🔭 Forward Look – Next Week
### Key Things to Finish or Follow Up On

### What Will Define a Successful Week

State of Max Template

# 🧭 State of Max – Week of {{week_of}}

> A weekly snapshot of direction, momentum, and mindset.  
> Intended for team-internal sharing — transparent, concise, and strategically reflective.

## What I’m Working On
A concise summary of Max’s primary areas of focus this week. Highlights the most important ongoing efforts, not a task list.

## Wins & Progress
Key points of momentum, progress, or positive developments. May include team alignment, technical breakthroughs, successful meetings, major completed tasks, or strategic clarity.

## Challenges or Tensions
Surface-level and deeper blockers, unresolved questions, or persistent sources of friction. This section balances transparency with agency — acknowledging tension without signaling helplessness.

## What I’m Thinking About
Reflective or strategic thoughts that emerged across the week. May include key insights/learnings, mindset shifts, observations about the company, or reframing of personal or team direction.

## What’s Next
Where Max intends to direct focus in the coming week. Priorities here can include project milestones, people to align with, or systems-level improvements.

## FYI or Open Loop
Optional. Anything Max wants to share as a heads-up, soft ask, or signal of something that’s being held loosely or needs input from others.

Start Small, Stay Consistent

You don’t need to commit to months of this practice. Start with one week. See if the practice feels valuable. Adjust the templates to match your actual needs.

The magic isn’t in the templates or the AI. It’s in the habit of pausing at the end of each day to ask: What happened? What did I learn? What comes next?

Everything else is just scaffolding to make that habit easier to maintain.

But here’s what I can tell you after four months: on days when things feel chaotic or unclear, that 15-minute conversation is often the most clarifying part of my day. It’s become less of a task and more of a practice — a way of working that I can’t imagine going back without.

Maybe it’s time you gave yourself that same space to think.

Since Yudemon’s initial launch, all your data has lived solely on your device. No accounts, no cloud — just you, your sessions, and your phone. That simplicity worked well, but it also meant there was no way to carry your data to a new device or use Yudemon across multiple devices.

That changes with Yudemon’s latest update.

With the new optional account system, you can now:

• Sync across devices — keep your progress, preferences, and stats up to date everywhere.
• Choose what gets synced — detailed toggles let you keep some data local if you prefer.
• Export your raw data — all your breathing sessions, journey progress, and raw heart rate data, ready for your own analysis.

If you love the fully local experience, nothing changes for you — accounts are entirely optional. But if you want the peace of mind and flexibility of the cloud, it’s now just a few taps away.

This update also comes with improvements to data tracking under the hood, laying the groundwork for more in-depth analytics coming soon. And yes — I’m also working on some much bigger updates, including the possibility of Yudemon on new platforms.

If you haven’t already, update to the latest version and give the new account system a try.

Get Yudemon for iOS.

Yudemon Accounts, Multi-Device Sync, and Full Data Exports was originally published in Yudemon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We all know — both intuitively as well as through a rapidly growing body of scientific evidence — that meditation, breath work, and biofeedback practice are good for us. But carving out the time to actually sit down and put in the effort on a daily basis are an entirely different matter.

Since creating Yudemon, my main goal besides advancing the state of the art of HRV biofeedback technology, has always been to make the practice more fun and engaging. The best protocols or practices are entirely useless if we don’t actually do them on a regular basis.

For me personally, seeing extensive data and detailed insights into my daily practice (and my body’s response to it) is a big motivator. This is why Yudemon contains some of the most advanced and comprehensive analytics among biofeedback tools.

The other big motivator — and what truly sets Yudemon apart from anything else in the space — are design, aesthetics, and unique audiovisual experiences that change with every session. From its purposefully developed and highly customizable generative soundscapes to its idiosyncratic visuals, everything in Yudemon is designed to not only deliver the most effective biofeedback training, but also to engage all senses in the process and make you look forward to your regular practice.

Today the Yudemon HRV app received an update that adds an entirely new element to this second category of motivators: the Yudemon Heartwork.

Heartworks are generative pieces of art that represent your very own journey of HRV Biofeedback training. Each Heartwork is completely unique to you and is based on your unique physiological data, specifically your heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV), and their response to different breathing rates.

The further you progress along in Yudemon’s Journey Mode, the more the Heartwork evolves and increases in detail and intricacy, reflecting the effort you have put into your personal practice.

While Heartworks are entirely based on your physiological data and the analytics that Yudemon uses to provide the most advanced biofeedback training, they are not intended to be data visualizations in any functional or interpretable sense. They are purely pieces of art, generated by your own body and the effort you put into your practice.

In addition to the desire to further grow and evolve your personal art, Heartworks contain a second mechanism that acts as a motivator to keep you focused and consistent in your practice: Heartwork Health.

Since regular practice is the most important factor in achieving results, health encourages you to practice consistently — ideally once every day.

Your Heartwork’s health starts out at 100%. However, once 24 hours have passed since your last session, the health slowly starts to decrease, and along with it the quality of your Heartwork starts to deteriorate.

But don’t worry! Every time you complete a practice session of at least 5 minutes duration, your Heartwork recovers 20% of health and the timer is reset to zero.

If you commit to a daily practice, you will never have to worry about your Heartwork deteriorating. But even if you slip (as we all do from time to time), rest assured: a few days of consistent practice and your Heartwork fully recovers.

I hope you will enjoy seeing your own Heartwork evolve along with you as you accumulate more and more practice sessions. And since every Heartwork is unique, I would also love to see some of the results, so please feel free to share yours with me.

Today’s release is the very first version of the Heartwork, and I hope to further build on the concept, as well as continue adding other new features to Yudemon — both technical ones that apply the latest developments in HRV biofeedback research, as well as more playful ones that hopefully keep you inspired and motivated to continue and deepen your own practice. If you have anything you’d particularly like to see, please reach out to let me know. Feature requests are always welcome, and many of the recent updates were directly inspired by comments I received from users.

Introducing the Yudemon Heartwork was originally published in Yudemon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.