Apple is probably the best version of this. I guess data collection and syncing is tricky. But now with more AI at our hands, perhaps this is becoming more viable.
Curious if anyone is using something or working on a solution for this?
HN search will also pull up several prior discussions.
- A countdown to various events in the future (end of the quarter, next birthday, age 50, etc.) as a kind of "memento mori"
- Tracking money spent, food consumed, etc.
- A custom system that displays random items that I add to Anki every day. I explained this more in a comment from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35211448
The data collection is pretty basic and just uses a form plugin to input and display data. I use other tools for to-dos, but I'm looking into a to-do plugin to replicate something similar.
I've focused more on metrics, behavior, and achievement, with a rules engine for automatically completing habits and goals off those.
As you identified, the biggest obstacle for users has been the friction and overhead of tracking at scale. Integrations and automations have decreased that a lot. Transforming unstructured input through AI is super promising, and probably will make it more accessible to people who are less of the power-user/productivity-junkie persona type.
https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#5-life-engine
I never got into the quantified self but I did want a portal (such as similar to the Yahoo! and Excite.com days) in the early 2000s. of personal facts that I can take actions on.
Then a few years later I wrote about "life situational awareness apps"
I want my phone and desktop computer system tray to have widgets for "accommodation", "travel", "food". I didn't want to have to open a website or app to order food, stay in a hotel or travel, just select what I'm eating/sleeping/travelling from a slideout menu and all the details are worked out by the computer.
https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3#59-life-indicators---sit...
(It was related to my lifestyle subscriptions idea that you can pay for a week or month of travel, acommodation or food) and you receive it seamlessly https://lifestyle-subscriptions.com
I did write a question generator feed dashboard written in Electron that let you snap in data collectors that would let you save records of stock purchases and facts about yourself such as your salary. The idea is that you could get advice based on what you answer.
https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents
https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents-library (the app repository)
Unfortunately it's probably not buildable and I forgot to take screenshots or videos.
here's me provisoning questions in the database:
https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents/blob/master/pr...
I haven't looked into Org mode, but this might include all you (we) need.
Example: Download a PDF of a book. Read it. Notes derive from that. Those notes can concern a diary, quote for some other work, inspiration for art, language learning, etc. The book itself can contain text, data entries, tabular, photo, etc.
There is a multitude of possibilities to find categories for every aspect of this 'idea'. The goal is to find a (not 'the') abstraction to handle data so it is possible to work with it. As someone already mentioned, even if such a system can be found, it is unclear if this would make it easier to work with all it contains, than how we do it conventionally.
Addit: DevonThink comes closest to what I described.
How does this differ from other note taking apps like Obsidian?
What this leads to ('what I imagine'), is a modular system. Very bare bone in its core form. Data is processed with editors for each data type. Editors come in the form of addons to the system. Data (and meta, params, etc) would always have to remain human readable - comparable to MarkDown or something. As you must've figured by now, I don't have a definitive picture in my head. All of this must sound very delusional or dreamy ... :)