Status Chart: Your Personal Status Dashboard

One big problem with a unified dashboard is that not everything in your life should be monitored on the same frequency.

Here's one example: You probably need to check your email several times a day (if not, god bless you!) but checking your 401k balance several times a day is almost certainly harmful to your well-being. It probably doesn't make you happier; contemplating your money rarely does. Instead it will alternately make you worry (as every dip in the stock market causes nightmarish visions of a retirement spent in a cardboard box), or make you irrationally exuberant (as every good trading day makes you dream of buying a second home). The net effect is that it will subtly encourage you to trade, because if you don't trade your 401k is the most boring thing imaginable, and you feel the subconscious urge to tinker with it to make it do something. But trading is a disaster, because churning your investments makes other people rich at your expense, and because timing the market doesn't work, and telling yourself not to time the market usually doesn't work, either.

For much more on this topic see the work of e.g. William Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, The Investor's Manifesto) or any of the so-called Bogleheads, or try Ramit Sethi:

https://wordsofward.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-single-best...

Here's another example: The ideal amount of time to spend monitoring your weight is none, unless your weight is unhealthily large or is increasing significantly. (If you're prone to anorexia, a continuously updated dashboard showing your weight is potentially dangerous. You need to avoid playing that game.) And unless you're some sort of edge-case athlete, by no means should you monitor your weight daily: You should either weigh-in weekly, or weigh yourself daily but compute a running average (and have a deep understanding of what a running average is and why you're computing it). Otherwise day-to-day fluctuations are likely to destroy your confidence in your diet. (I'm told that, for this reason, Weight Watchers explicitly trains members to weigh-in weekly, not daily.)

A couple dangers with "track everything" apps: (A) the app may track nothing well, and (B) it may be exceedingly hard to communicate its benefits to people. On the other hand, there may be some significant benefits to a having a data hub for personal metrics: easy cross-referenced reporting, etc.

A continuously-updated Mint dashboard? If I needed to micromanage my money that closely it would be a sign of trouble. And it would certainly be stressful.

Most of the money-management advice I trust emphasizes the role of automation. If your budgeting system requires constant mindfulness it's not working well.

Seriously, this is one of the most interesting software ideas I've heard in a long time, and I don't usually get excited about productivity software. Do it.

I've spent about 2 hours buying the domain, setting up email, Twitter, Launchrock, etc. So yes the pitch and landing page are very rough right now.

My goal is to do just enough marketing to get 100 good BETA testers. Ship to Testflight. Refine the App and the pitch. Rinse, repeat.

It'll get better every week but pardon the rough edges at the moment.

You also make a good point about renewals. Because the cost of annual plans is out of mind for most of the year, it's important they allow users to disable auto-renew. I use Pandora, RescueTime and Forrst and they all have this option.

Eh, people will use anything, I've also seen 8-23. 8.23 certainly isn't a stretch.

> My point is that it is more or less insane to start inventing new date format with zero regard to formats in other countries.

You haven't been dealing with the U.S. much, have you? To be fair, most of the fun comes from their use of ancient standards rather than new ones, but they aren't exactly known for consulting with other countries. Then again, at 300 million people it's a little difficult to blame them.

They don't want to babysit you, or live your life alongside you. They don't want to understand every little thing you do. That is the very opposite of what they want. They want you to deliver something valuable with as little fanfare as necessary, to the point that they might pay extra to be able to download your work product without even speaking to you.

And they really don't want to hire someone who seems to be expecting to be micromanaged, and who is therefore more obsessed with presenting the process than presenting the results. Your todo list should not look more polished than your products.

If someone asks to know what you're up to… you tell them? Using sentences? Probably as few of them as possible, unless you're having the conversation over beer? If they don't find your claims credible… you offer them references?

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[1] Okay, there is a (considerably smaller) market for artisanal products where part of the deliverable is a lovingly detailed description of how the product was made. But those who buy artisanal products won't settle for a mere checklist. They want personality. They want lovingly described blog-style updates with coffee-table-quality photos. Or they want a minute-by-minute first-person account on Twitter.

The mentality that carefully-documented work is a substitute for results is the bane of almost all professional managers. It's crazymaking when you set out to achieve a result and receive instead a detailed log of steps that failed to produce it. That happens often enough that I might not want to signal that particular "survival skill" to a prospective manager.

I guarantee you the first sentence will get a lot more interest. It's also much more relevant-the specific technologies you used aren't really that important. Your ability to identify business problems and come up with solutions is.

I'd been theorizing that some of the baffling responses here are the result of folks are seeing the world purely through the lens of a specific type of company.