Amount / trend

Find out how much, how often, how fast, and in what direction something is moving.

In a moment of guilt you realize you can't remember when you last called your sister. It feels like a few weeks. She'd probably say months. You're both estimating from vibes, and the vibe depends mostly on who's feeling neglected that day. Meanwhile the actual number sits in your call log, unconsulted.

Amount / trend is the evidence job of finding out how much, how often, how long, how fast, and in what direction something is moving. Feelings compress quantities badly: rare-but-vivid events feel frequent, and slow drifts are invisible from inside. The cue is any dispute or decision hinging on a quantity nobody has counted, marked by words like "always," "never," "lately," and "all the time." The operation: define the unit (calls longer than five minutes), pick the window (the past six months), and pull the actual record, here 90 seconds of scrolling the call log. Then look at direction, not just level: monthly calls falling from four to one is the real story. What changes is that "I should call more" becomes a concrete pattern you can act on, like a standing Sunday call. Counting isn't worth it for quantities with no decision attached; measure what you might change.