Ask HN: Does anyone record data about their lifestyle? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone record data about their lifestyle?

2 pointsbjackman6 comments

Reading Samuel Pepys' diary got me thinking about recording your own life. One of the ideas this happened to bring to mind is that I'd love to be able to record a diary with additional rich metadata. This could be interesting for a variety of reasons, from practicality to curiosity or perhaps even artistry.

For example;

- I don't have a car but travel a lot. I'd like to record all the journeys I take (TBH this is mostly automatable by parsing my Google calendar) and see if/how much I save compared to driving.

- I usually use shampoo once every few weeks; I think the last time was in November but can't remember. Would be curious to see the trend over time.

- Would like to see how much sleep I get over time (also likely automatable via other methods) and correlate with other behaviours e.g. how much alcohol I drink, how much sex I have, how often I call my mum, whether I keep up with bicycle maintenance chores.

Does anyone do something like this? What tools do you use? I wonder if it could be made frictionless enough that it's easy to stick to?

You probably can record quite a lot of that with your smartphone: GPS logging, sleep tracking apps, call/messaging logs. Even a basic calendar app can record specific mentionable events, but there are dedicated apps for that as well. (I don't do this myself, but know people who do this with varying intensity)

I've always thought it would be a cool idea but never knew how to implement it in anyway, you would have to manually record a lot of it. Reminds me of the stats collected in video games like GTA, you can see how far you drove/ran/bullets fired/etc.

Re odd video game stats: I've always wondered if you added up all the rotation of your body in your life, would you find that on aggregate you have rotated clockwise or anticlockwise, or neither (give or take a few thousand degrees)? Would this differ for left/right handed people? People who drive on the right/left? People who sleep on the right/left of the bed?

> I usually use shampoo once every few weeks; I think the last time was in November but can't remember. Would be curious to see the trend over time.

You don't wash your hair with shampoo?

Yeah I stopped when I cut it very short then never started again when it grew back. My hair doesn't get greasy any more but after a while my scalp feels dirty (like if you don't wash behind your ears) so I use shampoo then. Would recommend it, shampoo seems so wasteful now.

You could probably leverage a lot of existing technology coming out of the Quantified Life movement,

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