Ask HN: What do you track? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you track?

I recently rediscovered the quantified self movement [1] and I was wondering what other people here keep track of.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantified_self

I started keeping a bullet journal a year ago. In my "monthly" view, I have a habit/mood tracker, so I track several things including:

- how my day went (good/okay/bad)

- predominant mood (happy/meh/sad/angry/stressed/lonely)

- talking to family (mom/dad/siblings)

- hours slept

- run / exercise / other high level of activity

- reading / podcast / music / writing

- dine out, order in, cook

- social stuff, like whether I hung out with friends or had date night or saw a movie/play or...

My original goal was that I was feeling depressed and angry sometimes, and I wanted to see if there was something in my habits/moods that would give me a clue as to what it was. It turns out that I have a TON of "okay" days and a lot of "bad" days, but very few "good" days. The only correlation I can see is that "bad" days correlate with "angry" moods, which makes sense. Beyond that, not much insight...

Like many others, I track my exercise through Strava and via the Activities app on my Apple Watch.

I'd like to track more things, but haven't figured out what other metrics I want to keep track of...

Nutrition is probably the most useful metrics, but it's also requires the most work. I'm still trying to figure out a way to simplify it. For now, I just take pictures of my meals (I always eat out).

Tracking your time can also be very useful. Imagine being able to know what you were doing 5 years ago at 2PM, or how much time you spent on Hacker News over the past month.

I've thought about tracking my meals, but I don't think I really care enough to know what I ate on which days. That's why I tend to have a simple view on my monthly tracker as a proxy for "cook" (usually healthy), "order in" (never healthy), or "dine out" (depends, but about 50/50). I know people that log everything they eat, but it just winds up being too verbose for me.

I'm really not disciplined enough to keep track of my actual time to that degree. My daily journal is a little bit more of an event log, where I log my schedule for the day and anything interesting that happened. Some days it's very long, some days it's short, but I get something in there every day.

For a year or two i used to manually track all weekly spend, to help stick to a budget. No software involved, just noting spend on a paper spreadsheet at the end of each day, & summing up weekly totals. I don't do this any more, instead just periodically review expenses (using logs from bank transactions) and have a think if I need to make any adjustments in habits or shop around for better deals for utilities, insurance, etc. I still track ratio of savings to income net tax, but it's only worth calculating this once or twice a year or when thinking about decisions with a large financial impact (moving house, changing job, etc...)

Quite a few years ago when i was trying to build a habit of getting more exercise i had a calendar & i'd mark the days where i'd cycled/jogged/swum, and perhaps the number of laps. Again, low-tech physical paper calendar + a marker, sitting somewhere where I'd be forced to notice it. It helped build habits.

My Apple Watch helps me track my general activity and my sleeping patterns/quality. I use another app to help track my gym workouts.

I record way more than I review. Most of the time I record out of habit, not because I'm actively doing anything with the granular data.

As an undergrad (I'm going to go ahead and assume that there aren't many here, proportionally) I primarily track my studies, since my manager tracks my efforts at work, and I have apps to handle tracking my progress in the gym.

So the conscious "tracking" boils down to maintaining a spreadsheet, with each university subject as its own sheet. My uni forces unit coordinators to publish a guide at the beginning of the semester with all of the structure therein; when assessments are going to be due, how they're expected to be handed in, what the weekly schedule is, what marking criteria there will be, et cetera.

This makes it really easy to set that up as a simple checklist - I just make a table for each subject's sheet, with the columns as regularly occurring tasks (e.g.: submitting worksheet problems) and the rows as weeks. Actually I just used it today to see what was slipping through the cracks, since this past week has been heavy in terms of assignments and the week-to-week busywork fell by the wayside.

Although when it comes to the quality of the work, that's more of maintaining the right perspective and frame of mind moving into it. I can't put a number on how many problems I should solve, for example, but I can qualitatively picture the fluency in expression and recall I'll have when I'm successfully answering those problems. That image in my mind helps me motivate myself way more, and it keeps me sharp.

You should move your spreadsheet to coda.io! Much easier to create these systems.

Quantitatively, there's two things I track daily: (1) My progress at the gym (which, surprisingly I track in an ongoing draft email*) and (2) the number of productive work hours I've worked that day (to make sure I'm not just bumming around).

Qualitatively, I have a bunch of reflection questions I ask myself in the AM and in the PM and I log my answers in a journal electronically. LMK if you'd like to learn more!

P.S. Is this crazy? Does anyone else keep a running notepad using draft emails?

I'd like to learn more.

Yes, I think it's crazy to keep gym progress in an ongoing draft email. If you discard the draft, you lose everything. I frequently take notes by sending emails to myself (and replying to that email to add details), but I never leave it as a draft.

Haha, that's a great point.

Entrepreneurship is a big focus for me right now, so here's what I log every day:

In the AM: (1) What are the current goals for different areas of my life and what does it mean I have to do today? (2) What are the biggest challenges I have with #1? What are the skills I wish I had right now which would have been really helpful? --> Those seem like good areas to research and read up on.

In the PM: (1) What are my accomplishments today? (2) What were my total # of productive hours? (3) What am I grateful for today?

IT HAPPENED. I clicked the wrong button on my phone today and lost a few months of notes. Instantly thought of this message haha. Going to transition to Google Keep instead....

For last 223 days i have keep track of:

- Consumed food (weight, calories, fat, carbons, proteins, salt).

- Budget (detailed, every product in separate row with 5 tags).

- Weight (daily).

- Time spend on every site.

- Time spend on games.

- Sleep and steps by smartband.

- Over 20 habits like hygiene, keeping away from soda drinks.

- What i have done at work with minute accuracy

Everything except smartband and browsing stats is tracked by three spreadsheets.

One thing: Tracking some of habits can be two edged sword. It can push you to do things you do not want to do.

I'm tracking similar things (food, water, medication, spending, location, sleep, steps, heart rate, hygiene, time).

- I track my computer usage with RescueTime and my Chrome history. - I track my non-cash spending using Mint. - I track my sleep, steps, and heart rate using a smartband. - I track my food and cash spending by taking pictures (item and receipt) - I track my time by completely filling my Google Calendar (rounding to the nearest 15 minutes). - I track everything else using a timestamped journal app.

How much work does it take you to track all of this? I'm especially interested in how you track nutritional values, as I've tried MyFitnessPal in the past but quickly gave up.

I'm looking for ways to automate/delegate/facilitate my tracking process. I think this is data everyone should know about themselves, but I can't recommend most people to track all of this because it takes too much work.

I took me about 20-30 minutes every evening, except morning weighing on scale and tracking my work.

Nutritional is written down on simple spreadsheet. One big table with row like: name, weight, calories, fat, carbons, proteins, salt. Many of the products have nutrition table, rest is easy to find on sites like [1]. Also, after some time you can copy and paste most of the rows.

Every day is summed up and compared to ideal diet and weight change of next day.

[1]: http://www.ilewazy.pl/srednia-marchew

I use a device called the rainforest eagle to read my smart meter. I wrote a Prometheus exporter for it and now get pretty high resolution power usage data.

- Sport activity (running, endomondo),

- Web traffic (cloudflare analytics),

- hours spent on gaming (steam/ps4 stats),

- Github daily contributions

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