: What exactly are you trying to solve? (e.g., "Will this new morning routine make me more productive?")

If you want to move beyond "tinkering" and into true experimentation, experts like those at Quantified Self suggest a simple but effective framework:

Participants often try to be "good subjects" by guessing what the researcher wants to hear. This is why, as noted on The Hardest Science , rigorous experiments often use "blinding" to keep both the researcher and the participant in the dark about who is in the control group. Why You Should Start Experimenting Today

You don't need a PhD or a white lab coat to be an experimenter. You just need curiosity and a willingness to be wrong. As self-experimenter A.J. Jacobs has shown through his quests to follow every rule in the Bible or become the healthiest person alive, the best insights often come from the most "ill-advised" experiments.

: Use a clear metric, like a scale of 1-10 or a simple yes/no.